e absolutely necessary, and to obtain these
we paid a premium of twenty-four hundred dollars in New York and had
them expressed to Pittsburgh. It was impossible to borrow money, even
upon the best collaterals; but by selling securities, which I had in
reserve, considerable sums were realized--the company undertaking to
replace them later.

It happened that some of the railway companies whose lines centered in
Pittsburgh owed us large sums for material furnished--the Fort Wayne
road being the largest debtor. I remember calling upon Mr. Thaw, the
vice-president of the Fort Wayne, and telling him we must have our
money. He replied:

"You ought to have your money, but we are not paying anything these
days that is not protestable."

"Very good," I said, "your freight bills are in that category and we
shall follow your excellent example. Now I am going to order that we
do not pay you one dollar for freight."

"Well, if you do that," he said, "we will stop your freight."

I said we would risk that. The railway company could not proceed to
that extremity. And as a matter of fact we ran for some time without
paying the freight bills. It was simply impossible for the
manufacturers of Pittsburgh to pay their accruing liabilities when
their customers stopped payment. The banks were forced to renew
maturing paper. They behaved splendidly to us, as they always have
done, and we steered safely through. But in a critical period like
this there was one thought uppermost with me, to gather more capital
and keep it in our business so that come what would we should never
again be called upon to endure such nights and days of racking
anxiety.

Speaking for myself in this great crisis, I was at first the most
excited and anxious of the partners. I could scarcely control myself.
But when I finally saw the strength of our financial position I became
philosophically cool and found myself quite prepared, if necessary, to
enter the directors' rooms of the various banks with which we dealt,
and lay our entire position before their boards. I felt that this
could result in nothing discreditable to us. No one interested in our
business had lived extravagantly. Our manner of life had been the very
reverse of this. No money had been withdrawn from the business to
build costly homes, and, above all, not one of us had made speculative
ventures upon the stock exchange, or invested in any other enterprises
than those connected with the main busines