But here I was again faced with the old interest. The desire to do something about it, get down what I had seen, seized me. Was it possible to treat the story historically, to make a documented narrative? The more I talked, the more convinced I was that it could be done. But to tell the story so that people would read it was another matter. Mr. Phillips finally put it up to me to make an outline of what I thought possible. We couldn’t go ahead without Mr. McClure’s approval, and he was ill, in Europe with all his family. “Go over,” said John Phillips; “show the outline to Sam, get his decision.” And so in the fall of 1890 I went to Lausanne in Switzerland to talk it over with Mr. McClure. A week would do it, I thought; but I hadn’t reckoned with the McClure method. “Don’t worry about it,” said he. “I want to think it over. Mrs. McClure and you and I will go to Greece for the winter. You’ve never been there. We can discuss Standard Oil in Greece as well as here. If it seems a good plan you can send for your documents and work in the Pantheon.” And he chuckled at the picture. Almost before I realized it we were headed for Greece via the Italian Lakes, Milan and Venice. In Milan Mr. McClure suddenly decided that he and Mrs. McClure needed a cure before Greece and headed for the ancient watering place of Salsomaggiore. Here, in the interval of mud baths and steam soaks and watching such magnificent humans as Cecil Rhodes and his retinue recuperating from their latest South African adventure, we finally came to a decision. I was to go back to New York and see what I could make of the outline I had been expounding. Greece was to be abandoned. Leaving Mr. and Mrs. McClure to finish their cure, I headed for New York to write what, as far as title was concerned, certainly looked like a doubtful enterprise for a magazine like _McClure’s_: “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” “_McClure’s_ has courage.” How often that remark was made after our undertaking was under way! But courage implies a suspicion of danger. Nobody thought of such a thing in our office. We were undertaking what we regarded as a legitimate piece of historical work. We were neither apologists nor critics, only journalists intent on discovering what had gone into the making of this most perfect of all monopolies. What had we to be afraid of? I soon discovered, however, that, if we were not afraid, I must work in a field where numbers of men and women were afraid, believed in the all-seeing eye and the all-powerful reach of the ruler of the oil industry. They believed that anybody going ahead openly with a project in any way objectionable to the Standard Oil Company would meet with direct or indirect attack. Examination of their methods had always been objectionable to them. “Go ahead, and they will get you in the end,” I was told by more than one who had come to that conclusion either from long observation or from long suffering.