We did not do so until about ten months later when Black made us a proposition on behalf of Charles M. Schwab, who was willing to exchange U. S. Steel Preferred for Fuller Preferred, on even terms. Black strongly recommended it, as he thought we might secure prompter deliveries of our steel, which at that time were very slow and unsatisfactory, if Mr. Schwab were interested in our company. Grant and I immediately disposed of the 2,500 shares that each of us had taken and it was rather amusing to have Stillman ask us in that knowing way of his whether he was justified in concluding from the observations he had made of the sales of U. S. Steel Preferred as recorded on the tape that we had disposed of all our stock. We told him we had. A few days later, at a meeting, he told us with great satisfaction that by letting us rush ours off first, he, through careful selling, secured on an average of three quarters of a point more than we had. Mr. Schwab became a member of our board, and I had never before met any one who equalled him in that extraordinary capacity of intelligently reading and conclusively analyzing a financial statement at a single glance that seemed hasty and superficial. The foregoing incidents are samples of the minor tactics on the field of battle in the vast struggle which was waging for the financial control of America. I shall now outline the major strategy of that struggle as it impressed me from my slight contact with it. The decade from 1896 to 1906 was the period of the most gigantic expansion of business in all American history, and, indeed, in all the history of the world. In that decade the slowly fertilized economic resources of the United States suddenly yielded a bewildering crop of industries. Vast railroad systems were projected and built into being with magic speed. The steel industry sprang with mushroom-like rapidity into a business employing half a million men, and yielding the profits of a Golconda. The Standard Oil Company spread its production and sales to the ends of the earth. In every field of manufacture, expanding companies were brought together into great trusts to unify their finances and to stimulate their production.