ndle the sales end of our organization."

"I shouldn't be worth ten dollars a week to them. There are three kinds
of salesmen, Thatcher: one sells his concern, another sells his
customers, and the third sells his goods. A man can't belong in the
third class unless he himself believes in what he's selling. I've been
making these machines for our crowd for five years, including the
experimental period, and I know what I'm talking about. Four big plants
are now being equipped, and when they once begin running you'll see your
royalties dropping away from you like friends after a failure. The fact
that you have had a monopoly has encouraged your people to keep their
eyes on the stock-market instead of on the improvement of their
machines, and our biggest asset is the fact that every manufacturer who
is leasing from you to-day is sore over his treatment."

"That goes without saying," Thatcher admitted; "they would be sore if we
gave them the machines outright. But if you are so sure your
improvements are valuable, why go to the expense of duplicating our
selling and manufacturing equipment when we stand ready to make a fair
trade?"

"The new machines wouldn't be worth as much to you as they are to us."

"Why not?"

"Because you would never use them. The improved models would simply be
side-tracked to keep them from competing against your antiques. You
would be paying whatever it cost to get hold of them for hush money,
just as you have done a hundred times before."

"Suppose we did: what difference would it make to you, so long as you
get a good thing out of it? I don't understand that your company was
organized for philanthropic purposes."

"No; business and philanthropy usually work better when they're given
allowances for separate maintenance, but in this particular case the two
seem to be walking along hand in hand. Self-interest, Thatcher, is the
strongest motive in the world, and when you find a proposition which
offers self-interest to the buyer as well as to the seller you have an
irresistible argument."

"This is a great road-bed for a trolley-line," Thatcher remarked,
leaning over the side of the carriage. "The construction problem ought
to be a simple one."

"The proposition to have a line of cars run here is so obvious that
there must have been powerful objections to obstruct it all these
years," Cosden answered, quite content to await Thatcher's pleasure in
resuming the main topic of their conversation