Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/131

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Chapter XI

THE year that followed was so full of complications, so full of striving energies, that George hardly lifted his head when the twelve-months' business cleaned up and he knew that they had done a total of two million dollars' worth with profits above three hundred thousand dollars; but immediately began to lay out the program for the year to come and after that for still another. Steadily they were enlarging and enlarging; new machinery was going in, with new plans for enlargement of output. And they made profits too, year by year, larger and larger profits, but year by year they put them nearly all back to make more. The second year they doubled the capital stock and declared a stock dividend of one hundred per cent. Expansion continued to be the order of the day. They made two thousand, and then three thousand, cars in a year.

In 1907 the Morris-Judson Automobile Company was set to produce three thousand five hundred cars. But the panic of that year caught them in midair. Some things of which they had boasted became now their regret—almost their shame.