No one can question the energy with which he set himself to carry on the affairs of the firm.  Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn, pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the elements of a successful man of business.  His first act was to dismiss the confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both his father and grandfather in the difficult years of the firm’s growth.  But the new executive was determined to run the business his own way.  Disregarding criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his mission to spread the influence of the business to the ends of the earth.  “We must have our place in the sun,” he said; and announced himself as the divine instrument through whom this would be accomplished.  He made it perfectly plain that no man’s opposition would balk him in the management of the firm’s affairs.  One of his most famous remarks was:  “Considering myself as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions of the day, I go my way.”  The board of directors censured him for this, but he paid little heed.

The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had been seen in the world’s history.  Branch offices were opened all over the globe.  Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were seen on every ocean.  He himself with his accustomed energy travelled everywhere to advance the interests of trade.  In England, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, the Holy Land, he made personal visits to the firm’s best customers.  He sent his brother to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and other members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan.  Telegram after telegram kept the world’s cables busy as he distributed congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to foreign merchants.  His publicity department never rested.  He employed famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of his factories.  He reared six sons to carry on the business after him.

This is no place to record minutely the million activities of thirty years that made his business one of the greatest on earth.  It is all written down in history.  Suffice it to say that those years did not go by without sorrows.  He was afflicted with an incurable disease.  His temperament, like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; it had the tendency to snap under great strains, living always at fever pitch, sparing himself no fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of energy in him often showed signs of overstress.

It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those last months.  You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his line of business caused by the events of recent years.  He had lived to see his old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them the foreign representatives of his own firm, out of a job and hunted from their homes by creditors.  He had lived to realize that the commodity he and his family had been manufacturing for generations was out of date, a thing no longer needed or wanted by the modern world.  The strain which his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile and unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent to a member of his own family who ran one of the company’s branch offices but was forced to resign by bankruptcy: