Think it over, and if any new ideas come to you run up to Chicago and see me." Arthur did indeed think it over, every moment of that afternoon; and before going home he took a long walk alone.

He saw that Charles Whitney had proposed a secret partnership, in which he was to play Whitney's game and, in exchange, was to get control of the Ranger-Whitney Company.

And what Whitney had said about the folly of board managements, about the insecurity of his own position, was undeniably true; and the sacrifice of the "smaller morality" for the "larger good" would be merely doing what the biographies of the world's men of achievement revealed them as doing again and again.

Further, once in control, once free to put into action the plans for a truly vast concern, of which he had so often dreamed, he could give Tecumseh a far larger income than it had ever hoped to have through his father's gift, and also could himself be rich and powerful.
To the men who have operated with success and worldly acclaim under the code of the "larger good," the men who have aggrandized themselves at the expense of personal honor and the rights of others and the progress of the race, the first, the crucial temptation to sacrifice "smaller morality" and "short-sighted scruples" has always come in some such form as it here presented itself to Arthur Ranger.

The Napoleons begin as defenders of rational freedom against the insane license of the mob; the Rockefellers begin as cheapeners of a necessity of life to the straitened millions of their fellow-beings.
If Arthur had been weak, he would have put aside the temptation through fear of the consequences of failure.