and editor on the New York Tribune for several years; and showed his enterprise in establishing and building up a successful wholesale business house, from which because of his general business acumen and sound sense - he was called by Davison to become secretary and treasurer of the Bankers' Trust Company at its founding. From there he followed Davison, through a vicepresidency of the First National Bank, to a partnership in Morgan's.

Lamont is a few years younger than Davison a man in his early forties. Like him, he is not only a keen business man, but an individual with a wide and constantly growing acquaintance with the men of importance in the business life of the country. His experience in business makes him especially valuable in the field of industrial enterprises, in which his predecessor, Perkins, was active.

The third of the new working partners, William H. Porter, is a little older a man now in his early fifties. He is a sound, hardworking, practical banker, who carries much of the burden of the daily business of the office. He is a man of extraordinary memory and knowledge of securities and commercial paper.

Of the older partners, Mr. Steele,- now somewhat worn in health,- besides being a director in many of the great enterprises of the country, is a clear-headed, cool business adviser. Temple Bowdoin, the son of the earlier partner, works out many of the details of the business, such as all the arrangements for its underwriting syndicates. William P. Hamilton, Mr. Morgan's son-in-law, and a great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, has charge of the general management of the office and its hundred and fifty employees.

These are the seven partners in the New York office of J. P. Morgan. There are three men in the Philadelphia office of the house, under the firm sign of Drexel & Co., who are really joint partners in the New York enterprise. These are E. T. Stotesbury, horseman, lavish entertainer, and shrewd business man, who has been more than a quarter of a century with the firm; and two younger men, Arthur E. Newbold and Horatio G. Lloyd, who have more recently come into the partnership. The Philadelphia house has problems of its own, and, while its partners share in the general proceeds with those in New York, their activities are generally confined to their own fields. The house has two European branches, Morgan, Grenfell & Co. of London the successor of George Peabody and J. S. Morgan & Co.- and Morgan, Harjes & Co. in Paris.

The Old Morgan Office

But the main interest in the great partnership centers in the old counting-house at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York - the famous landmark which this spring, exactly forty years after its completion, will be torn down and replaced by a more modern structure. It is an interesting old building, an architectural link between the somber, jail-like old subtreasury on one side, and the screaming classical grandeur of the new Stock Exchange upon the other - steadfastly preserving, in the shadow of the skyscrapers, the elegance and inconveniences of the early '70's.

From the street you walk half a story up the outside marble steps; then up some more steps inside; and pass into the corridor, with its ornate classic pillars and its particolored marble trimmings. On the left are the clerks and their counters. On the right, down a narrow passageway, the long mahogany-and-glass-walled room of the partners. In the first and larger compartment of this are now the desks of Messrs. Lamont, Porter, Hamilton, and Bowdoin. In a smaller back compartment, through an always open door, are the desks of Morgan, Jr., and Mr. Davison. In the rear, beyond folding doors, are larger and more private rooms, in which Mr. Steele and Pierpont Morgan, when he is there, are found, and where the most intimate conferences of the firm take place.

Outside the front offices, in a little railed inclosure in the corridor, sit the visitors, waiting for their audience. Big men, whose names show black in the headlines of the newspapers, sit here and stiffly await their turns. But nothing could be more direct and informal than their greeting when their turn comes. There is nothing of the rigidity of the new fortunes here. Inside of the dark-carpeted, comfortable office, with its dark desk and trimmings, the partners pass to and fro at their work, writing, smoking, chatting, looking out of the windows.

The Kind of Business Morgan Does

There is a lack of even elementary understanding of the business of this firm whose name is in every man's mouth throughout the country. It is believed, for example, that they are promoters, launchers of new enterprises. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This house, and other houses of the older kind, hold that it is their business to finance existing enterprises; that this is safer and more profitable than to take the chances of new ventures.

A somewhat similar condition exists as to the financing of smaller enterprises. The Morgan house is now equipped with a machinery for floating great bond issues. It costs no more to investigate and carry through the placing of ten million dollars' worth of bonds than of half a million. And, naturally, the Morgan house prefers to occupy its machinery with a larger issue. The smaller ones go to the lesser firms that make a specialty of that type of business. New clients, requiring millions, are constantly coming in. But much of the work of the Morgan house is concerned with the old corporations for which it has been bankers in the past.

For these corporate clients the house of Morgan performs the function of expert financial adviser. And to each of them Morgan & Co. generally assigns a member of its firm as special adviser to learn its coming needs, to plan the best time and style for its security issues, and where to place them, here or abroad. Each of the more active partners has a number of great corporations whose financial affairs and necessities he watches closely. But he makes no individual agreements with them for his firm. Every matter of consequence must come before the whole partnership. The firm is in general conference once every day, at least, over its business, and oftener many times.

A Quarter of a Billion a Year

Every year the firm of Morgan distributes to investors about a quarter of a billion dollars of securities, principally bonds. For doing this it must have the most remarkable machinery in the world.

It is, in the first place, a private bank, in which there are deposits upward of $100,000,000. With this it can perform the usual functions of a financial bank, that is, it can hold great quantities of securities on their way to the investor, and still have left, for its protection in time of sudden stress, millions of resources in the most liquid form on earth-"call" loans against stock-market security, which can be turned into money in an instant.

In addition to the distributing power of its house, it has its branches in Philadelphia, London, and Paris. It is in close and friendly relations through directorships of its partners with the great security-buying and -selling agencies of this country, the financial banks and trust companies and insurance companies of New York. And, in addition, scores of smaller jobbers and retailers of bonds come into Morgan's office to take their shares of new issues.

The flotation of single issues, up to ten or one hundred or one hundred and seventy million dollars of securities at one time, seems to the average man a mysterious and almost incredible feat. It is merely a great piece of merchandising. And, when each issue is split up between jobbers and purchasers, many of whom like the New York trust companies and financial banks and insurance companies each have assets running into the hundreds of millions, it is easy to understand that no one agency need take from a security manufacturer like Morgan's house any overstock of the goods which it is its daily business to handle.

Mr. Morgan's Philosophy of Business

No one can overestimate the social and economic significance of the tremendous power centering in J. P. Morgan & Co.; and no one, not even those in closest relation to that institution, can observe its growth without wonder and at least some feeling of uneasiness. But one qualification must always be made, in any criticism or to any feeling of apprehension. The Morgan establishment is, after all, a mercantile business depending upon fundamental limitations of mercantile trade. It will hold its relative position in the security market just so long and no longer than it makes honest goods and works out the far-sighted business policies of the reputable and responsible merchant who intends to develop and perpetuate his business. Its power depends, in the last analysis, on a quality which Mr. Morgan, in his recent testimony, placed at the basis of his philosophy of business -the personal integrity of individual men.

That great changes in the curbing of individual power in private and corporate business are to come is undeniable. But it is equally undeniable that the power which has come to Mr. Morgan and his firm would never have been secured by them without the exercise of the virtues of the business period to which they belong - honesty and courage and individual enterprise.

The personal driving force of J. Pierpont Morgan has generally, and probably correctly, been known as the first reason for his unexampled success. But a fact of scarcely second importance has been his unusual policy of renewing the youth of his business every decade by the introduction of new working partners.

He has taken them at their prime, worked them to the limit, made them millionaires many times over, and then, when at last they have all but broken, he has again renewed the youth and energy of his firm by fresh blood from the next generation.

I

HAVE!" said the Honorable William Allison. And he closed his lips so tightly when he had said it, and his merry face looked so comically sorry, that Gladys Powers had no need to guess what the answer was.

"Tell me all about it!" she said promptly. She smiled back at him, but there was concern in her big dark eyes. "First of all, what did you say?"

"Me? Oh, I told him I'd like the deuce to marry you, don't you know, and all that kind of thing said you were dashed charming girl and so on, and that I thought we'd hit it off together."

“And did you say it offhandedly like that?" "Why, of course! You didn't expect me to go down on my knees to him, did you?"

She was trembling on the very verge of laughter, and drew out her handkerchief to hide it from him.

"Go on.

"That's exactly what you called yourself when you proposed to me!" "I know I did.

But I didn't mean it as literally as all that! I've got fifteen hundred a year of my own. I said that as his son-in-law I supposed I might amount to something financially some day! But he got awfully red in the face, and said he wouldn't have me for a son-in-law at any price. I asked him whether we couldn't come to some sort of terms. He said no! So I reminded him that as a business man which he seemed so infernally proud of calling himself he must realize that there's a way of compromising everything. He thought a little after that. Then he said suddenly that if I'd prove to him that I'm not a bonehead, he'd consider it. By the way, what the deuce is a bonehead?" "A fool. Go on what then?"

"

"No," she bubbled. he say?" "Said he'd no time for hereditary boneheads - dashed if I know what a bonehead is, exactly, but I'll bet it's something rude and that he wouldn't let his daughter marry one on any terms! Said there were boneheads enough in the States, without coming across the water to find one! He added a lot of tommy-nonsense about the idea of an aristocracy being all wrong anyhow. So I asked him whether he'd have liked me any better if I'd been a brick-layer!" The dimples began to dance again. She loved this lean, clean-looking Englishman very dearly; but love had not killed her sense of humor.

"Most extraordinary thing, but the mention of bricks seemed to make him positively savage!" "He made his money building, you know. He's been fighting the brick-layers' union all his life; he says that, from first to last, they've cost him fifteen million!”

"He must be most uncommon oofy, to spend that much money fightin' a lot of brick-layers!" "Father's not exactly a pauper, you know!" "Confound him- he called me one!"

"And can you do it?" asked Gladys Powers eagerly.

"Not if I want to keep out of jail, I'm afraid! You see, I've had no business training." Gladys Powers dug the point of her umbrella into the frozen February grass, and frowned.

"I call it mean of father," she exclaimed, "to talk to you that way! He's forever preaching against what he calls 'bucking the other fellow's game,' and now he tells you to go and do it! He knows perfectly well that you're not a business man! Besides, he's bucking somebody else's game himself, and he's seen how futile it is!"

"Whose game's he buckin'?"

"Yours. He's perfectly crazy to get into

society over here, and he hasn't been able to do it.

Gladys smiled, in spite of herself. She knew that her father would either get what he wanted on his own merits and by his own efforts, or do without.

"Oh, if you could only get the better of him!" she exclaimed. "He'd think the world of you! Won't you try? Do try! It isn't that you're poor he doesn't mind that; he wants me to marry a man with brains. Beat him! Then he'll have to admit that you've got brains. Try! Won't you?"

And she said "Won't you?" in a way that went straight to the heart of the Honorable William Allison. He stood in front of her for a moment stock-still, gazing straight ahead beyond her.

"I'll have a try!" he said in a low voice. "Tell me is he really keen on this idea of gettin' into society?"

"He's crazy about it! He's crazy because he's failed! He hates failure, and he means to keep on at it until he's won!"

Bill Allison reflected again for about a minute; he was beginning to look singularly gloomy.

"I don't see how that's goin' to help much," he said, more to himself than to Gladys Powers. "Still," and he looked straight into her eyes, and she read resource there, and believed in him and took courage,-“I can but try! We'll see!"

II

An hour later the Honorable William Allison strolled into one of the most exclusive clubs, and subsided gloomily into a deep arm-chair. It was one thing to say that he would try, but quite another thing to think out a feasible plan on which to act.

"Confound the man!" he muttered savagely. "Hullo, Bill!" said a pleasant voice beside him; and he started and looked round.

"You, Galloway? Why the deuce didn't you speak before? How long have you been here? Were you here when I came in?"

"Thought I'd watch you, Bill! Dashed interestin', believe me! First time in my life that I ever saw you lookin' gloomy! Been busy wonderin' what's up! Money-lender naggin' you?"

"No. Nothin' to speak of."

"Liver out of order?"

"Never better in my life."

right. There are heaps more women, Bill, and they're all of 'em too good for you and me! Your troubles don't amount to anything - listen to my tale of woe! Trainin' stable all gone to the deuce-eight rotten gee-gees all eatin' their useless heads off three of 'em lame — two of 'em crocks that couldn't win a sellin' plate to save their lives — an' that brute Souffriere so savage that nobody can do a thing with him! He half killed an unfortunate stable-boy the day before yesterday. The boy's in hospital - at my expense! Takes a sight of the whip to induce any of the other boys to go near the brute. Pity of it is that he's entered for the Grand National- and he could win it, if only I could find a man to ride him!"

"He certainly could win it!" said Bill Allison, with an air of absolute conviction.

"I know he could, Bill! But I've got to sell him; there's nothin' else for it! My stable's been losin' me money for so long that I simply can't stave off my creditors for another week!"

"But why sell the best horse you've got? Why not keep him, and sell the rest?" "Seen the others?” "Yes, I've seen 'em." "Would you buy 'em?"

"Well, speakin' personally, no! Still"Shut up talkin' rot, then! Souffriere's got to go. I'm goin' to sell him next week.”

"Is he fit?" asked Allison. An idea seemed to have risen new-born behind his eyes, for they positively blazed as he leaned forward and looked at Galloway.

"He's fit as a fiddle now. He won't be, though, in a week's time. All he needs is gallopin', and, I tell you, I can't get a man to ride him."

Bill Allison lay back in his chair again, with his tall hat tipped forward over his eyes. His long lean leg, crossed over the other, moved up and down rhythmically, and the fingers of his right hand drummed gently on the arm of the chair.

"Tell me, Sammy." he said suddenly, "are you keen on sellin' Souffriere? D'you want to get out of the racin' game for good?" "Want to? I should say not! If I could think of any way out of quittin'

“I've thought of one!”

"Bill — you're in love!"

our respective tongues. Also, we'll have to be singularly most uncommon - careful!"