"
"Well," he said, "what would you take?"
I said I believed that a statement recently rendered to me showed that
there were already fifty thousand dollars to my credit, and I would
take sixty thousand. Next morning when I called Mr. Morgan handed me
checks for seventy thousand dollars.
"Mr. Carnegie," he said, "you were mistaken. You sold out for ten
thousand dollars less than the statement showed to your credit. It now
shows not fifty but sixty thousand to your credit, and the additional
ten makes seventy."
The payments were in two checks, one for sixty thousand dollars and
the other for the additional ten thousand. I handed him back the
ten-thousand-dollar check, saying:
"Well, that is something worthy of you. Will you please accept these
ten thousand with my best wishes?"
"No, thank you," he said, "I cannot do that."
Such acts, showing a nice sense of honorable understanding as against
mere legal rights, are not so uncommon in business as the uninitiated
might believe. And, after that, it is not to be wondered at if I
determined that so far as lay in my power neither Morgan, father or
son, nor their house, should suffer through me. They had in me
henceforth a firm friend.
[Illustration: JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN]
A great business is seldom if ever built up, except on lines of the
strictest integrity.
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