I once argued with Mr. Roosevelt that we on _McClure’s_ were concerned only with facts, not with stirring up revolt. “I don’t object to the facts,” he cried, “but you and Baker”—Baker at that time was carrying on an able series of articles on the manipulations of the railroads—“but you and Baker are not _practical_.” I felt at the time Mr. Roosevelt had a good deal of the usual conviction of the powerful man in public life that correction should be left to him, a little resentment that a profession outside his own should be stealing his thunder. This classification of muckraker, which I did not like, helped fix my resolution to have done for good and all with the subject which had brought it on me. But events were stronger than I. All the radical reforming element, and I numbered many friends among them, were begging me to join their movements. I soon found that most of them wanted attacks. They had little interest in balanced findings. Now I was convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the mind must be convinced. One of the most heated movements at the moment was the effort to persuade the public to refuse all gifts which came from fortunes into the making of which it was known illegal and unfair practices had gone. “Do not touch tainted money,” men thundered from pulpit and platform, among them so able a man as Dr. Washington Gladden. The Rockefeller fortune was singled out because about this time Mr. Rockefeller made some unusually large contributions to colleges and churches and general philanthropy. “It is done,” cried the critics, “in order to silence criticism.” Frequently some one said to me, “You have opened the Rockefeller purse.” But I knew, and said in print rather to the disgust of my friends in the movement, that there was an unfairness to Mr. Rockefeller in this outcry. It did not take public criticism to open his purse. From boyhood he had been a steady giver in proportion to his income—10 per cent went to the Lord—and through all the harrowing early years in which he was trying to establish himself as a money-maker he never neglected to give the Lord the established proportion. As his fortune grew his gifts grew larger. He not only gave but saw the money given was wisely spent; and he trained his children, particularly the son who was to administer his estate, to as wise practice in public giving as we have ever had. That is, it did not take a public outcry such as came in the early years of this century against the methods of the Standard Oil Company to force Mr. Rockefeller to share his wealth. He was already sharing it. Indeed, in the fifteen years before 1904 he had given to one or another cause some thirty-five million dollars.