"Lawson," said the master brain of the greatest and most successful commercial enterprise in the world, "you know the stock-market, but you don't know the first principle of working to advantage a great business in which you absolutely control the production. The novice assumes that consumption when it is greater than production makes the price, but this is one of the many time-worn sophistries of business. Do you suppose Standard Oil has built itself up to where it is and made the money it has simply because there were always more lamps than we had oil? If you do, you are in dense ignorance of the foundation requisite for great success. As the world goes to-day, the prices of necessities and luxuries are fixed and should be fixed by the man who controls both the selling and the producing end, for there is a greater profit to be had by supply to regulated demand and demand to regulated supply than from a charge made and regulated by supply and demand. Standard Oil gets to-day and has always since its birth got its enormous profit from its 'regulation' department. Production yields it a proper profit and by supplying legitimate demands it earns other fair profits, but its big gains come from so adjusting one to the other that there can be no such thing as competition. Do you see?" "I agree that is not my end, Mr. Rogers, though in a general way I know about railroad rebates, steamship comebacks, and such things; but I don't see how they are required in our copper business, where the demand is of such proportions that the producer sets the price and makes a profit away above what may be gained in other business enterprises. Surely no one would ask larger gains than are naturally made out of copper." "Lawson," responded Mr. Rogers with oracular emphasis, "that is where your business education is flawed. No man has done his business properly who has missed a single dollar he could have secured in the doing of it. I do not think a fair judge would find me guilty of avarice, either in business or in the manner of my living, and yet I am made fairly miserable if I discover that, in any business I do, I have not extracted every dollar possible. It is one of the first principles Mr. Rockefeller taught me; it is one he has inculcated in every 'Standard Oil' man, until to-day it is a religion with us all."