Twelve years had gone by since I tied myself, temporarily as I thought, to the McClure venture. To my surprise, the longer I was with the enterprise the more strongly I felt it was giving me the freedom I wanted, as well as a degree of that security which makes freedom so much easier a load to carry. Here was a group of people I could work with, without sacrifice or irritation. Here was a healthy growing undertaking which excited me, while it seemed to offer endless opportunity to contribute to the better thinking of the country. The future looked fair and permanent. And then without warning the apparently solid creation was shattered and I found myself sitting on its ruins. Looking back now, I know that the split in the McClure staff in 1906 was inevitable. Neither Mr. McClure nor Mr. Phillips, the two essential factors in the creation, could have done other than he did. The points at issue were fundamental. Each man acted according to an inner something which made him what he was, something he could not violate. Back of the difficulty lay the fact that at this time Mr. McClure was a sick man. The hardships of his youth and early manhood, the intense pressure he had put on himself in founding his enterprises had exhausted him. For several years he had been obliged to take long vacations, usually in Europe with his family, his staff carrying on his work in his absence. The enterprises were bringing him larger and larger returns and more and more honor; but that was not what he most wanted. He wanted to be in the thick of things, feel himself an active factor in what was doing. Above all he wanted to add to what he had already achieved, to build a bigger, a more imposing House of McClure. “What he wanted was more money,” I have heard men comment. They were wrong. I have never known a man freer from the itch for money as an end than S. S. McClure. Money for him meant power to do things, to build, to help others. On his way up he had gathered about him a horde of dependents with whom he was always ready to share his last dollar. He was reckless with money as with ideas. In these years when he was practically living in Europe, though returning regularly to the United States, his chief interest was not in what his enterprises were accomplishing, but in adding something bigger than they were or could be. Only by doing this could he prove to himself and to his colleagues that he was a stronger and more productive man than ever. Nothing else would satisfy him. His passion to build, to realize his ambitions, made him careless about laying foundations. What he did usually had the character of improvisation, frequently on a grand scale, sometimes merely gay spurts of fancy. I was myself caught in one of the latter when Mr. McClure in London suddenly ordered me in Paris to drop whatever I was doing and to hurry into Germany to collect material for an animal magazine.