Page:Other People's Money - Louis Brandeis.djvu/13

 :Leading bankers in New York and Boston were heartily recommending the stock to their customers. Mr. Brandeis made his prophecy merely by analyzing the published figures. How did he win in the Pinchot-Glavis-Ballinger controversy? In various ways, no doubt; but perhaps the moat critical step was when he calculated just how long it would take a fast worker to go through the Glavis-Ballinger record and make a judgment of it; whereupon he decided that Mr. Wickersham could not have made his report at the time it was stated to have been made, and therefore it must have been predated.
 * Most of Mr. Brandeis's other contributions to current history have involved arithmetic When he succeeded in preventing a raise in freight rates, it was through an exact analysis of cost. When he got Savings Bank Insurance started in Massachusetts, it was by being able to figure what insurance ought to cost. When he made the best contract between a city and a public utility that exists in this country, a definite grasp of the gas business was necessary—combined, of course, with the wisdom and originality that make a statesman. He could not have invented the preferential shop if that new idea bad not been founded on a precise knowledge of the conditions in the garment trades. When he established before the United States Supreme Court the constitutionality of legislation affecting women only, he relied much less upon reason than upon the amount of knowledge displayed of what actually happens to women when they are overworked—which, while not arithmetic, is built on the same intellectual quality. Nearly two years before Mr. Mellen resigned from the New Haven Railroad, Mr. Brandeis wrote to the present editor of this paper a private letter in which he said:
 * "When the New Haven reduces its dividends and Mellen resigns, the 'Decline of New Haven and Fall of Mellen' will