The other man got very red. “Why do you stand it?” he asked. “You!” “I’ll tell you why,” said Potter. “We make more with him than with any other man who ever handled our money. That’s a very good reason.” “I couldn’t help it,” I said to Galt, afterward. “All right,” he said. “He won’t do it again.” He never did. And so one by one they learned to take him as he was, to swallow their pride and submit to his moods, all for the same reason. He had the power to make them rich, richer, richest. A meeting of the board of directors became a perfunctory formality, serving only to verify and approve Galt’s acts for purposes of record. On his own responsibility he committed the company to policies, investments, vast undertakings, and informed the board later. Success was his whole justification. If once that failed him his authority would collapse instantly. In a rare moment of self-inspection, after one of his darling visions had come true, he said: “After all, Coxey, it’s the Lord makes the tide rise. We don’t control it. We only ride it.” It was an amazing tide. Never was one like it before. It floated old hulks that had been lying helpless and bankrupt on the sands for years. And when men began to say it was high enough, that it was time to prepare for the ebb, Galt said it was yet beginning. On the day Great Midwestern stock sold at one hundred dollars a share,--par!--he said to Mordecai: “That’s nothing. It will sell at two hundred. Buy me twenty thousand shares at this price.” “I belief you, Mr. Gald,” said Mordecai in an awe-struck whisper. ii Proceeds of the incessant enormous issues of new securities had been invested first in the reconstruction of the Great Midwestern itself and then in the shares of other railroads, beginning with the Orient & Pacific. That was the first of a series of transactions. We now owned outright or controlled by stock ownership no fewer than fifteen other railroad properties, besides lake and ocean steamship lines, docks, terminals, belt lines, trolley systems, forests, oil fields and coal mines. The Great Midwestern was the vertebra of an organism, ramifying east, west, north and south; it reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with antennæ to Asia and Europe. Its treasury was inexhaustible, fed by so many streams.