"'It is not right, Beulah,' he said to me one morning after receiving a
letter from Baltimore to the effect that Seaboard stock and bonds had
advanced until his investment showed over fifty per cent, profit, 'it is
not right for us to make this money. No man in America should make over
legal rates of interest and a fair profit on an investment, that is, an
investment of capital pure and simple, particularly in a transportation
company, where every dollar of profit comes from the people who patronise
the lines. I have worked it out on every side, and it is not right; it
would not be legal if the people, who make the laws for their own
betterment, understood their affairs as they should.'

"He was always writing to the Wilsons to conduct the affairs of the
Seaboard so that there would be remaining each year only profits enough
to keep the road up and the wharves in good condition and to pay the
annual interest and a fair dividend. And when the Wilsons came to our
house to lay before him the offer of Reinhart and his fellow plunderers to
pay enormous profits for the control of the Seaboard, he was indignant and
argued with them that the offer was an insult to honest men. It was he who
advised the trusteeship control of the Seaboard stock to prevent Reinhart
from securing control. I sat in the library when he talked to the elder
Wilson and the directors.

"He appealed directly to John Wilson to make an effort to stop the growing
tendency to use the people as pawns to enslave themselves and their
children. He said some man of undoubted probity, standing, and wealth,
someone whom the people trusted, must start the fight against these New
York fiends, whose only thought is to roll up wealth. And he told John
Wilson he was the man, since he had great wealth, honestly got by his
father and grandfather; no one would accuse him of being a hypocrite,