Had Mr. Kloman been a business man it would have been impossible ever to allow him to be a partner with us again after this discovery.  He was not such, however, but the ablest of practical mechanics with some business ability.  Mr. Kloman’s ambition had been to be in the office, where he was worse than useless, rather than in the mill devising and running new machinery, where he was without a peer.  We had some difficulty in placing him in his proper position and keeping him there, which may have led him to seek an outlet elsewhere.  He was perhaps flattered by men who were well known in the community; and in this case he was led by persons who knew how to reach him by extolling his wonderful business abilities in addition to his mechanical genius—­abilities which his own partners, as already suggested, but faintly recognized.

After Mr. Kloman had passed through the bankruptcy court and was again free, we offered him a ten per cent interest in our business, charging for it only the actual capital invested, with nothing whatever for good-will.  This we were to carry for him until the profits paid for it.  We were to charge interest only on the cost, and he was to assume no responsibility.  The offer was accompanied by the condition that he should not enter into any other business or endorse for others, but give his whole time and attention to the mechanical and not the business management of the mills.  Could he have been persuaded to accept this, he would have been a multimillionaire; but his pride, and more particularly that of his family, perhaps, would not permit this.  He would go into business on his own account, and, notwithstanding the most urgent appeals on my part, and that of my colleagues, he persisted in the determination to start a new rival concern with his sons as business managers.  The result was failure and premature death.

How foolish we are not to recognize what we are best fitted for and can perform, not only with ease but with pleasure, as masters of the craft.  More than one able man I have known has persisted in blundering in an office when he had great talent for the mill, and has worn himself out, oppressed with cares and anxieties, his life a continual round of misery, and the result at last failure.  I never regretted parting with any man so much as Mr. Kloman.  His was a good heart, a great mechanical brain, and had he been left to himself I believe he would have been glad to remain with us.  Offers of capital from others—­offers which failed when needed—­turned his head, and the great mechanic soon proved the poor man of affairs.[33]

[Footnote 33:  Long after the circumstances here recited, Mr. Isidor Straus called upon Mr. Henry Phipps and asked him if two statements which had been publicly made about Mr. Carnegie and his partners in the steel company were true.  Mr. Phipps replied they were not.  Then said Mr. Straus: 

“Mr. Phipps, you owe it to yourself and also to Mr. Carnegie to say so publicly.”