SAMUEL SPENCER AS A FACTOR IN NATIONAL AFFAIRS
By Ismay Dooly
In the office of the general counsel of the Southern Railroad in Washington is a frame containing a newspaper article relative to a recent railroad trial, wherein the case was one of national import.
An incident described in the article relates to that lion of financial power, Pierpont Morgan, who, after he had given sworn testimony of vital importance, was asked if he gave the facts of his own knowledge.
“No,” was the reply, “not on my own knowledge, but the information was given to me by Samuel Spencer, and I would swear to anything he stated as a fact.”
This single tribute to the accuracy of the late Samuel Spencer, president of the Southern Railway, who was one of the greatest men the South has given to the nation’s productive machinery, illustrates but one of the many qualities of a man who for the past ten years has been among the foremost in the public eye of the republic.
He was a man whose career in public and private life was the expression of an accuracy proceeding not alone from a sense of truth and justice, but from a thorough and proficient knowledge of any subject of which he was in any way the exponent.
He was the highly educated man, whose mental and almost instantaneous grasp of people and things was demonstrated in an adaptability that served him in every relation and situation.
He possessed as well a wonderful power of perspective—the power to discriminate between the worthy and the little things, and to economize and conserve his forces, to that extent when he was equal to direct action whenever the occasion demanded. Poise and balance completed his equipment for a life of great action.