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industrial organizations, but in the next three years he organized and financed three of the largest modern industrial combinations, the United States Steel Corporation, the International Harvester Corporation, and the International Mercantile Marine Company- the combination of Atlantic steamship lines, which, unlike his other undertakings, had only a partial

success.

For a number of years Mr. Morgan's principal banking associations had been with the First National Bank, but with the great development of the combination idea came the need for a wider and wider control of capital, to be flung in great masses into the uses of the industrial advance, not only in our own country, but also in South America, Central America, and Mexico, and even the Far East. It was not enough any longer to control one bank or two or three, for obviously the tendency to build corporations as big and powerful as possible argued the necessity of financial resources equally big and powerful. The leader in the development of combination among the banks was the National City Bank, upon the directorate of which were three members of the Morgan firm. The National City, First National, the Chase National, and afterward the Bank of Commerce were brought into close and friendly relations. The Mechanics and Metals National, the Phoenix National, the Chatham National, and the Liberty were added to the list of institutions whose funds are at the disposal of Mr. Morgan. No fewer than seven New York City trust companies have come under his direct control-the Astor, Bankers', Mercantile, Standard, New York, Equitable, and Guaranty. His banking power, expressed in figures, amounts to considerably more than a billion dollars; his total financial power, in which should be included the assets of all the railroads and all the industrial plants in which the Morgan influence is paramount, has been estimated at nearly ten billions. But such figures are of dubious value, for only a practical test could define the limits of Mr. Morgan's financial influence, and that test will never be made.

After the panic of 1907, in which, as is related at length in this volume, Mr. Morgan directed the entire banking power of New York, a new era began for the Morgan house; it has changed with the times; and

the secure trend of the times being less toward building new industrial creations than toward safeguarding and refining upon the possibilities of those we have, the Morgan organization is now on the road to becoming the one powerful factor in the world of banking credit, in which position its influence upon all business will be more decisive than ever. Since 1907 Morgan & Company has put off its character as a huge promotion house and has taken on the functions of a great bank. It is thus attaining a position at once removed and secure at a time of political and social readjustment which promises to be the most far-reaching the country has ever known.

It is said there are scarcely fifty men in the financial district who have a.speaking acquaintance with Mr. Morgan. Whether the number is correct or not it is certain that his acquaintance is relatively small, and that his real friendships are reserved for a very few people, chiefly the men whom he has known all his life and with whom he is very likely not associated at all in a business way. His dislike of having a meaningless fuss made over him by strangers is shown by his never appearing at public meetings and by his perennial irritation at the never-say-die reporters and camera men who unfailingly close in upon him when he is. sailing or returning from across the water. In London he insists upon not being noticed when he comes in or leaves his office, and has stopped the custom of showering him with deferential bows which was long clung to by his employees.

In June, 1910, Mr. Morgan received the degree of LL.D. from Harvard University. President Lowell presented it to him with these words: "John Pierpont Morgan, public-spirited citizen, patron of literature and art, prince among merchants; who by his skill, his wisdom, and his courage has twice in times of stress repelled a national danger and financial panic." As a description of Mr. Morgan's special place in his time the words seem inadequate, because they fail to take account of the Morgan super-quality of constructive financial genius. To complete the characterization there would need to be added something like this: "Who, in an age of enormous industrial progress, when the character of industrial units underwent a necessary change, did more than any other man to establish the new régime on a sound, permanent basis."

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By Elbert Hubbard

Mr. Hubbard offers here a new point of view on the subject of soldiers' pensions. He is a believer in gratitude, he says, but he doesn't think that it is doing a man a favor to extend him eternal pay because he once did his duty. Among other topics of general interest discussed by Mr. Hubbard this month, are the use of public school buildings as social centers and Alaska's need of railroads.

S

As to Pensions

ENATOR CARROLL S. PAGE of Vermont has a bill before the United States Senate to provide encouragement and assistance to the Little Red Schoolhouse, to the end that children shall be taught the dignity of labor and be shown the joy of earning a living, instead of aspiring to poetry, palaver, or politics.

The entire tendency of Senator Page's bill will be to make pensions not only unnecessary, but odious. A pension implies an inability to take care of yourself. It spells inefficiency.

Senator Page's educational life-saving bill calls for only three and one-half million dollars to be expended between now and 1915, and yet in Washington there has been a fine holding up of hands in horror on the subject of extravagance.

We find, however, that last year Congress voted something like one hundred and fiftysix million dollars for pensions; and recently, an addition of seventy-five million dollars a year has been added to this list.

Here we get the economy of a man who walks a mile to save street-car fare and then spends two dollars for a dinner, and smokes a twenty-five cent cigar.

When Garfield was President, thirty-one years ago, the Pension bill was twenty-nine million. And Garfield exclaimed, in apology, that the maximum had been reached. Garfield was ashamed of our pension list, and he was a soldier, too.

But the Pension bill has been walking up all the time and, strangely enough, everybody knows that the country is being "worked," but the men in Washington who oppose the demands of the Grand Army of the Republic fear being voted down at the

next election and consigned to political oblivion.

No one person is to blame for this-it is all a letting down of the bars-so every soldier is used as a stalking-horse by his children, his cousins, his uncles, and his aunts, and also his attorneys, to get a grab into the public Ginger Jar.

Here we have the good old soldier forced to turn hold-up man; and even the newspapers are silent for fear of getting the illwill and the opposition of the boys who once wore the blue. The boys are just like the rest of us-no worse and no better-and they should be relieved of this temptation to turn Remittance Man and live in idleness off of our Uncle.

Greece, in her dying days, pensioned every free citizen, and this meant that the end was near. A pensioner ceases to produce that is the rule-and Greece was dead when her creators and producers turned parasites.

When we are civilized, we will understand that a pension means humiliation. Very few of these old soldiers but are able to make their own living and to take care of themselves, but a pension prostitutes and paralyzes a man's energies, so when a man gets a pension he is relieved of the divine spur of necessity and quits work, to die at the top.

In every town and village of America are old soldiers-and good citizens, toowho have simply thrown up their jobs and ceased all human endeavor because they have a pension.

Gratitude is all right, but to extend eternal pay because a man once did his duty isn't a kindness. Napoleon once said to a soldier, "Your victory was splendid, but, tell me, what did you do the day after?"

Emerson has something to say on the subject of pensions. He had in mind, however, the European plan of pensioning poets, playwrights, and artists. But the principle is the same! Said Emerson: "No more corrupt system ever existed-iniquitous both to the receiver and giver-than the plan of giving pensions to men who have once done good work and are yet able to work. May America never adopt this respectable form of mendicancy that bribes and buys!"

No man is benefited when you make him a beggar. And the old time monks who went across the country with a stout cudgel, demanding their own, evolved, in time, into genuine brigands.

America supplies opportunity, and that is all that any man should ask.

No man should retire from business until death retires him. We should all be workers to the last.

To produce and create by the coöperation of head and hand means sanity, health, and length of days. To quit work and accept a bounty spells decay.

But you'll never see this in the Congressional Record!

Schools as Social Centers

ND now comes the good news that the city of Chicago has opened thirteen. of her public school buildings as neighborhood social centers.

For the first time in the history of Illinois, a Board of Education has laid down the proposition that school buildings are not for the exclusive benefit of children.

We have always fixed a limit on school education. In most states, it is fixed by law. The child must not be under six and not over twenty-one.

The credit for this new departure must be given to the city of Rochester.

And now the Chicago Board of Education has declared that the public school system is for grown-ups quite as much as for children, and that any one who needs, or thinks he needs, the help that the public school system can give is entitled to it.

To this end, night schools be car-.

shows its ability to utilize school buildings properly, the entire school plant is at the disposal of the society.

Debating clubs, literary clubs, dramatic clubs-anything that tends to amuse, instruct, and benefit the neighborhood is allowed.

And here is something that would have given our grandmothers a great shock! In various and sundry of these school buildings, under the new régime, seats of a portable kind are to be arranged, and these seats will be removed one evening in the week for the purpose of dancing and gymnastic exercises.

In Rochester, it has been found, where the school buildings were utilized evenings, that parents would come in swarms with their children and make use of the buildings as social centers.

It has always been claimed that a saloon was the Poor Man's Club; in fact, that he had no other place to go. But this excuse is to be taken away; and the argument is made that any place where a man will go with his wife and children is beautiful, right, proper, and altogether lovely.

And so this is the new education of the grown-ups, in which the public school system is to coöperate. And when the bill of Senator Page is passed and the Federal Government coöperates with the public school systems of every state, it will be one great stride toward the Celestial City of Fine Minds.

The public school system was devised by Thomas Jefferson, the world's first and only Democrat. He argued for it, pleaded for it, fought for it, and he brought it about; yet, so far, we have not caught up with Jefferson's ideals as to what it should be. But we are getting there!

The public school system cements, it does not divide. It does not break the town up into little religious cliques and social sets: it eradicates feud, jealousy, caste, and makes for true democracy-the Brotherhood of Mankind.

He Pays His Debts

SHORT time ago, in these columns, I

ried on, and lectures given with the aid of A told of an absconder who, instead of

on,

stereopticon and moving pictures.

Societies are being formed to take proper care of each school building and to conduct the exercises. As fast as a neighborhood

joining the bankers' colony in Sing Sing or Stillwater, skipped to Egypt.

There he started a system of irrigation on the American method.

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At fifty, Mr. Bean found himself bankrupt. And still we are told that the world has no place for men over forty-five! However, under these conditions, the next best thing is to make a place for yourself, and this Bean did, and he has gone ahead and accumulated a comfortable fortune between the time he was fifty and the time he was seventy-two.

Cardinal Farley in his robes of office. The lower cut shows the throng in Fifth Avenue and the streets adjacent to St. Patrick's Cathedral on the day of the Cardinal's return. The whole city seemed to have turned out to make his welcome one of the most noteworthy that has ever been given to a church dignitary in America

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