Free My Story by Elizabeth J. Hauser

since public interests in contest with private rights were rarely successful; but that between private interests long contracts were foolish, since the contract never survived the mutual desires of the contracting parties; that if either side wished to terminate the contract it was always possible to find a way to do so.
    â€œThe greatest strength of private contracts,” said he, “is not expressed in words or legal phrases but is in the fact that such a contract pays.”
    In his long experience, he said, he had found private contracts profitable to one side only, usually productive of so much bad blood as to prevent favorable modifications, and not worth the paper they were written on.
    He had there a glimpse of a great truth which had come to him through observation and actual experience and not by abstract reasoning or philosophizing.
    A. V. du Pont, the elder of the du Pont brothers already referred to, with Mr. Moxham, myself and a few smaller stockholders now established at Johnstown a plant for manufacturing curves, frogs and switches out of the girder rail which the Cambria people were making for us.
    At the same time I was interested in many other enterprises. Our street railway operations were going well and making money. My inventions were paying. Some Chicago bankers, interested in street railroads in their own city, had bought our Indianapolis railroad, assuming the bonded indebtedness and giving me one check for about eight hundred thousand dollars, nearly half of which came to me as my individual profit, the rest going to my father and the other stockholders. This had enabled me to payall my debts and embark in new enterprises with a surplus.
    I was one of a group of men which purchased the Sixth street railroad in St. Louis. We were opposed by all the other street railways and our line was kept out of the center of the city for a long time. Some years later after the introduction of electricity in operating we sold this road at a handsome profit.
    Richmond, Virginia, was the first city to operate its cars with electricity and in 1889 A. V. du Pont and I went down there to investigate the practicability of this kind of operation. Firmly convinced that we should find the new power inadequate when it came to taking cars up hill, the first thing we saw was cars climbing Richmond’s steep streets as easily as they glided along the level ones. Our report to the street railway companies in which we were interested in several large cities was quite different than we had expected it would be.
    At about the time I went into the St. Louis enterprise I purchased a street railway franchise in Brooklyn which later became involved in litigation and was tied up in the courts for a long time. Eventually I got my principal and interest back but no profits. Before the litigation I had sold a lot of bonds in this enterprise to some Louisville people. When the court proceedings threatened protracted delay I bought back all these bonds at a higher price than the purchasers had paid for them. I was under no legal obligation to do this, of course; and my reasons for doing it were purely selfish. First, I couldn’t endure the thought of having persons who had invested because of their faith in me lose, and second, it was better for my future credit to retain their confidence. PerhapsI myself thought I was acting generously, so frequently are motives inspired by business interests mistaken for personal virtues.

    TOM L. JOHNSON AT THIRTY-TWO
    â€œProtected now by special grants in the highway, by the tariff and by land monopoly my training as a monopolist had gone far.”
    Once or twice in my life I have been forced to take over the management of a street railroad that didn’t pay, but in these cases I had no hand in the original acquisition of the properties. I never made an unfortunate street railroad investment.
    Our contract with the Cambria people proved so profitable that we presently decided to build