However, for nineteen years I have kept to my decision. How little I have contributed to my program in these nineteen years! The chief piece of writing I planned to do I have never finished. That was bringing “The History of the Standard Oil Company” up to date. I had dropped the story in 1904, but the dissolution of the company in 1911 left me with the melancholy conviction that sooner or later I should have to estimate the trial and put down how the new set-up was working. I talked two or three times with George Wickersham, the Attorney General who brought the suit, and he always cautioned me not to hurry, to let the decision have a chance to work out. I think we decided that about ten years would do it. But the War put a different face on oil. It suddenly became a matter for government control. It was no longer a private business. It was life and death for the Allies. Oil was as necessary to them, Clemenceau wrote to Wilson, as the blood of men. Everything that rolled or sailed or flew must have it. The great struggle of the nations with navies, England at the head, to command oil at its source, followed the War. The earth was ransacked for it in a terrific predatory hunt. In this effort of the nations to command oil supplies great names arose challenging that of Rockefeller—Sir Henri Deterding, Marcus Samuel, William Knox D’Arcy. The Standard Oil Company no longer ruled the oil world. There were the Royal Dutch and the Shell making up finally the Royal Dutch Shell; there was the Anglo-Persian. All of the dramatic and frequently tragic goings-on had to settle down into something like orderly procedure before the history I had in mind could be written. The time came, along in 1922, when Mr. Wickersham said, “You had better go at it.” But it was not Mr. Wickersham’s dictum that hurried me to undertake to tell the story of what had happened since 1904. It was an entirely unexpected piratical attack on the two-volume edition of the history which had been exhausted for some time. My publisher, wisely enough, was waiting for the promised third volume before reprinting. When it became known in the trade that the book was no longer on the market a report was spread that the Standard Oil Company had bought and destroyed the plates, and the price soared. Down in Louisiana Huey Long paid one hundred dollars for a set, so I was told. As I frequently received inquiries as to where the books could be found or where a purchaser could be found for a set, I turned the correspondence over to my secretary, a canny woman, who established a trading relation with a dealer in old books; and the two of them were in a fair way to do a nice little business when their hopes were blasted by the appearance in a New York bookstore of an entirely new edition of the work—a cheap edition, selling for five or six dollars. My publishers made an immediate investigation and found that it had been printed in England, probably from German plates.