Mr. Armour, as Father of the Packing-House Industry, was keenly sensitive to these slanders on the quality of the product and the honesty of the packers. The charges were thoroughly investigated by a board of army officers and declared by them to be without foundation.
Scandal and defamation in war-time are imminent; the literary stinkpot rivals the lyddite of the enemy; fever, envy, malice and murderous tongues strike in the dark and retreat in a miasmic fog. Here were forces that Philip Armour, as unsullied and as honorable as Sir Philip Sidney, could not fight, because he could not locate them.
About the same time came one Joseph Leiter, who tried to corner the wheat of the world. Chicago looked to Armour to punish the presumptuous one. And so Armour, already bowed with burdens, kept the Straits of Mackinaw open in midwinter, and delivered millions of bushels of real wheat for real money to meet the machinations of the bounding Leiter. Here, too, Armour was fighting for Chicago, to redeem, if possible, her good name in the eyes of the nations.
And Armour won; but it was like that last shot of Brann's, sent after he, himself, had fallen. Philip Armour slipped down into the valley and passed out into the shadow, unafraid. Like Cyrano de Bergerac he said, "I am dying, but I am not defeated, nor am I dismayed!" And so they laid his tired, overburdened body in the windowless house of rest.
JOHN J. ASTOR
The man who makes it the habit of his life to go to bed at nine o'clock, usually gets rich and is always reliable. Of course, going to bed does not make him rich—I merely mean that such a man will in all probability be up early in the morning and do a big day's work, so his weary bones put him to bed early. Rogues do their work at night. Honest men work by day. It's all a matter of habit, and good habits in America make any man rich. Wealth is largely a result of habit.
