“I knew men better than anyone else out there. I never made a mistake in my choice. I collected a few good men at the start to help me; and through them I gathered others almost as good. In a year I had made progress; in two years I was a success; and very soon I became somebody to reckon with. And through it all, Flint, I knew practically nothing about the actual trade. That was only a tool in my hands. What I dealt in was men and men’s minds. I could gauge a man’s capacity to a hair; and I picked my managers and foremen from the very best. They were glad to come to me, somehow. They felt I understood them; and no inefficients were comfortable with me. I never had to discharge them; they simply went of their own accord. I left everything to my staff, for I knew them thoroughly and gauged their capacities to a degree. And because I knew them I found the right place for each man; so that the work went forward with perfect smoothness and efficiency. Before I had been five years there I was on the road to being a rich man.” His tone expressed no satisfaction. It was clear that I was not expected to admire his talents. “Then, suddenly, came the discovery of platinum on a large scale in the neighbourhood of my district. You know what that meant; but you must remember that in those days it was a very different matter from now. It was like the Yukon gold rush in some of its aspects. The place swarmed with prospectors, mostly men of no education, whose main object was to get as much as they could in a hurry and then go elsewhere to spend the money the platinum brought them. Meanwhile, the platinum market was convulsed, and the price swayed to and fro from day to day. You must remember that in those times the thing was in the hands of a very few men; for the supply was limited. The Canadian mines overthrew the nicely-adjusted balance of the market and everything suffered in consequence; for the uses of platinum directly or indirectly spread over a very large field of human industry.” That part of his history was more or less familiar to me, but I did not interrupt. “One day it occurred to me that here in Canada we had a case parallel to the state of affairs in the Diamond Fields before the Kimberley amalgamation. Why not repeat Cecil Rhodes’ methods? Just as he regulated the price of diamonds, I could regulate the price of platinum if I could get control of the Canadian mines, for they were by far the most important in the world.