"Now," I said to my partners, "I am going back to New York in the afternoon. Nothing more is to be done."
A short time after my message was received by the men they asked if they could come in and see me that afternoon before I left.
I answered: "Certainly!"
They came in and I said to them:
"Gentlemen, your chairman here, Mr. Bennett, assured you that I would make my appearance and settle with you in some way or other, as I always have settled. That is true. And he told you that I would not fight, which is also true. He is a true prophet. But he told you something else in which he was slightly mistaken. He said I could not fight. Gentlemen," looking Mr. Bennett straight in the eye and closing and raising my fist, "he forgot that I was Scotch. But I will tell you something; I will never fight you. I know better than to fight labor. I will not fight, but I can beat any committee that was ever made at sitting down, and I have sat down. These works will never start until the men vote by a two-thirds majority to start them, and then, as I told you this morning, they will start on our sliding scale. I have nothing more to say."
They retired. It was about two weeks afterwards that one of the house servants came to my library in New York with a card, and I found upon it the names of two of our workmen, and also the name of a reverend gentleman. The men said they were from the works at Pittsburgh and would like to see me.
"Ask if either of these gentlemen belongs to the blast-furnace workers who banked the furnaces contrary to agreement."
The man returned and said "No." I replied: "In that case go down and tell them that I shall be pleased to have them come up."
Of course they were received with genuine warmth and cordiality and we sat and talked about New York, for some time, this being their first visit.
"Mr. Carnegie, we really came to talk about the trouble at the works," the minister said at last.