"Yes, and more. I am going to use the Consolidated Companies as an
example, and urge immediate active enforcement of the Sherman Act
against all consolidations which aim at monopolies or the restraint of
trade. The Attorney-General said that this would mean an industrial
reign of terror. So be it. Even that is better than this gradual
strangling of the people's rights, which is now being carried on with
legislative approval. I shall at least have the satisfaction of
performing this one act in the interests of the people, even though I
must forego the continued administration of a corporation honestly
devoted to their welfare. This statement from me, and the position I
take regarding my own corporation, will go far toward defeating those
other malign interests which hope to gain by their attack upon me."

Allen's face had been a study while Mr. Gorham was speaking, and Alice
had particularly noted the varying emotions it expressed. She saw there
first the astonished incredulity at her father's determination to
dissolve the Companies; then the wonder as he heard Gorham state
conclusions which coincided with those he had arrived at earlier; and
finally the radiant joy as the realization came, not fully but in part,
that his own understanding of the situation had not been all at fault.
It needed only the words which Gorham added to make the world look
bright again. But it was to his father rather than to Allen that Gorham
addressed himself.

"And now, Stephen, as to this boy. You and I have done our best to make
him think the world is wrong side up; but I am more to blame because I
had the better opportunity to study his development, beneath my own
eyes. I taught him that imagination was an essential ingredient of a
successful business man, to enable him to grasp each situation as a
whole, and to conceive its dangers and its possibilities. Yet, when he
exercised that very quality, and came to me frankly with the results of
his efforts, I refused to recognize my own handiwork. I taught him my
altruistic creed, and then blamed him when he used it as his standard,
and was unhappy that those around him failed to measure up to it. Never
has a man been more blind than I. Never has a man settled back, so
self-satisfied, with so determined a conviction that because he willed
things to be so, then they were so. I have merged the white thread of my
new creed with the black one of the old business morals I first learned;
his pattern