The war between the sugar trust and the independent sugar refiners was represented by Henry O. Havemeyer and James N. Jarvie. They never sat on the same side of the table, but always facing each other--Havemeyer big, florid, and blustering--displaying in every move the consciousness of long-exercised power, and resenting that the combination of all the sugar interests should be compelled to defend its monopoly which was threatened by the intrusion of a mere coffee concern, Arbuckle Bros., in which Jarvie had infused such a vigorous, aggressive spirit--Jarvie who had no prior generations of successful men to point to, but had risen from the bottom and was then the leading spirit of his firm--a much courted man for director in leading corporations--a man who not only directed the investments and loaning out of the Arbuckle fortune, but was also a leader in all the companies with which he was connected. Possessed of all the strong and best points of a real Scotchman, caution, cumulativeness, and stick-to-it-iveness, he was like an eager bull terrier worrying at the haunches of a mastiff, and watching every instant for a chance to spring. The rivalry between the insurance companies was represented by A. D. Juilliard and James Hazen Hyde. Juilliard, the distinguished merchant, philanthropist, and patron of music, personified the Mutual Life Insurance Company, of which he was one of the directing spirits; and young Hyde, the perfumed dandy and spoiled child of quickly gotten riches, personified the Equitable Life Insurance Company and its astonishing rise to financial greatness. By a strange irony of fate, my association with these men was destined to make me one of the key figures in the life insurance investigation of 1905, which hurled young Hyde from a dazzling financial eminence and limitless possibilities and transferred him to Paris among the expatriates there, and which, by the legislation that followed the exposure of corrupt financial practices, altered the whole financial structure of America. I shall tell that story at its proper place in this chapter, but, first, I propose to give the reader a picture of the way in which some financial deals were made in “Wall Street,” and the control of corporations bandied about by a nod of the head, frequently given as a reward for a personal favour, or withheld as punishment for a personal slight. The following incidents in my own financial transactions will illustrate this system which I by no means indiscriminately condemn, as it is an essential requirement of the broader development of the commerce of the United States, but which, unfortunately, has again and again been shamefully abused, so that the reputation of the deserving had suffered almost as much as that of the evil doers. In 1901 we bought some property from a client of D. B. Ogden, the vice-president of the Lawyers’ Title Company, who mildly remonstrated with me by saying: