something important and
absorbing to do, and I kept him busy until I knew the temptation had
lost its power for the time.

This is the proper place to put it on the record that he was the most
scrupulously honest man I have ever known. He dealt with the shadiest
and least scrupulous of men--those who train their consciences to be the
eager servants of their appetites; he handled hundreds of thousands of
dollars, millions, first and last, all of it money for which he could
never have been forced to account. He has had at one time as much as
half a million dollars in checks payable to bearer. I am not confiding
by nature or training, but I am confident that he kept not a penny for
himself beyond his salary and his fixed commission. I put his salary at
the outset, at ten thousand a year; afterward, at fifteen; finally, at
twenty. His commissions, perhaps, doubled it.

There are many kinds of honesty nowadays. There is "corporate honesty,"
not unlike that proverbial "honor among thieves," which secures a fair
or fairly fair division of the spoils. Then there is "personal
honesty," which subdivides into three kinds--legal, moral, and
instinctive. Legal honesty needs no definition. Moral honesty defies
definition--how untangle its intertwinings of motives of fear, pride,
insufficient temptation, sacrifice of the smaller chance in the hope of
a larger? Finally, there is instinctive honesty--the rarest, the only
bed-rock, unassailable kind. Give me the man who is honest simply
because it never occurs to him, and never could occur to him, to be
anything else. That is Woodruff.

There is, to be sure, another kind of instinctively honest man--he who
disregards loyalty as well as self-interest in his uprightness. But
there are so few of these in practical life that they may be
disregarded.

Perhaps I should say something here as to the finances of my combine,
though it was managed in the main precisely like all these
political-commercial machines that control both parties in all the
states, except a few in the South.

My assessments upon the various members of my combine were sent, for
several years, to me, afterward to Woodruff directly, in one thousand,
five thousand, and ten thousand dollar checks, sometimes by mail, and at
other times by express or messenger.

These checks were always payable to bearer; and I made through Woodruff,
for I kept to the far background in all my combine's affairs, an
arrangement with several