does this way of gaining them involve reproach, for we have much more than condoned it: we have warmly lauded its results and agreed that the men that practise it are excellent men and model citizens; and doubtless it has been viewed abroad as the one distinguishing characteristic of our financial operations.

Therefore, without prejudice and merely as illustrations of these matters and as examples of the methods by which ability therein manifests itself, I purpose here to state some of the memorable achievements in high finance of that group of gifted men that formerly centered around William C. Whitney, and of whom the colossus and master mind now appears in Thomas Fortune Ryan.

CHAPTER II

THE BEGINNINGS OF A GREAT FORTUNE

HERE is a man whose career has been the romance of success, who has climbed to the heights of wealth and almost imperial power, a king of finance, a marvel of enterprise and commercial wisdom. He began poor, he is very rich; he began obscure, he is the partner of a king and the confidant of rulers; he was a servitor at a pittance, he is the employer of millions; he was an obscure and nameless molecule in the human tide, now he dictates legislation and controls policies, he commands enormous enterprises, he is known about the world, he is to the history of commerce as a famous strategist is to the history of war.

Surely this is a wonderful story. How admirably it shows the possibilities of that "free and unhampered opportunity" of which we have just spoken! The poor boy starting upon his career with no help but his own will and his two hands,

with no advantage but the unrestricted conditions provided for him; and do but observe the fortune, estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, the endless range of profitable investments, the huge industries that are now his! With no extravagance we may think that scarcely another man in the commercial world stands in a position so commanding. His mind determines upon a certain line of action, and the next day the poor cigar dealer in Australia or the cabinet of Belgium feels the effects thereof. In Kentucky and on the Congo, in London and San Francisco, from the northern limits of civilized Canada to and beyond Mexico, men are employed by him and are subject to his will; he says to them, Do this, and they do it. On the affairs of the nation he exercises a potent and constant influence. His own attorney is Secretary of State; he has his own men in the Senate and the House of Representatives; he has his own way about Panama Canal contracts. He can sway the actions, affect the voting, and lead the thinking of many thousands of men. He selects candidates for partisan nomination; men of his choosing sit in high places in local and other governments. Until very lately he was a director or trustee in thirty-two great corporations. He owns life insurance companies, banks,

trust companies, railroads, mines, gas companies, electric light companies, traction companies; he is influential in the Tobacco Trust, he has won the control of the Seaboard Air Line. On the chessboard of finance he makes strange, secret, and astounding moves, and wins. Nothing important can now be done in that game without consulting him.

He lives most quietly in a great unpretentious house at No. 60 Fifth Avenue. In the mad rush to shower and splash the golden flood he has no interest. His life is business. He goes to his office early, he remains late; he works in his study at night. A tall, erect, powerfully built man, in the best of his strength; a very silent man, with no confidants nor close associates; a secretive man of whose plans and intentions nothing is surmised until they are recorded in events; a cool and self-mastered man that never says a word in heat nor does an act without consideration-Wall Street fears him and puzzles over him, but never understands him. He has a great square jaw and face as relentless as an axe, and yet his characteristic policy is to win by indirection. With hands and arms and skill to wield a broadsword his fancy is for the finest rapier. No man has more caution; no man

will thrust more boldly when the time comes, and for skill in extricating himself from a threatened position he has no equal in the Wall Street game.

He gives with liberal hand to church and school; his skill, tact, and measureless success are praised of all men. Newspapers pave his way with laudations. His word has boundless weight; with a sentence he stays a panic and helps to restore confidence.

Is not this success indeed?

Ah, yes; it is a marvelous story. Here was the poor boy facing the world alone, and none was poorer. The Ryans, an old family of Nelson County, Virginia, an old family of the indomitable Scotch-Irish strain, had been utterly ruined by the Civil War. The old estate swamped with debt; the wolf looking in at the window; the boy, sixteen or seventeen years old, left alone with his aged grandmother; the problem of daily bread real and uncompromising before them: all this sounds like the first chapters of an old-time romance, and yet it is but a recital of biographical facts. And there is more to come, as if culled deliberately from the roseate fiction of our youth. The poor boy, striving to battle with the depressing situation, wins his way to the great city (in this instance, Baltimore)