alarm. At the same time Carnegie equipped a new and splendid fleet of
ore ships, his purpose being to enter a field of transportation which
John D. Rockefeller had found extremely profitable.

Such were the circumstances and such were the motives that gave birth
to the world's largest corporation. All one night, so the story goes,
Charles M. Schwab and John W. Gates discussed the steel situation
with J. Pierpont Morgan. There was only one possible solution, they
said--Andrew Carnegie must be bought out. By the time the morning sun
came through the windows Morgan had been convinced. "Go and ask him what
he will sell for," he said to Schwab. In a brief period Schwab came back
to Morgan with a letter which contained the following figures--five per
cent gold bonds $303,450,000; preferred stock $98,277,100; common stock
$90,279,000--a total of over $492,000,000. Carnegie demanded no cash;
he preferred to hold a huge first mortgage on a business whose golden
opportunities he knew so well. Morgan, who had been accustomed all his
life to dictate to other men, had now met a man who was able to dictate
to him. And he capitulated. The man who fifty-three years before had
started life in a new country as a bobbin-boy at a dollar and twenty
cents a week, now at the age of sixty-six retired from business the
second richest man in the world. With him retired a miscellaneous
assortment of millionaires whose fortunes he had made and whose
subsequent careers in the United States and in Europe have given a
peculiar significance to the name "Pittsburgh Millionaires." The United
States Steel Corporation, the combination that included not only the
Carnegie Company but seventy per cent of all the steel concerns in the
country, was really a trust made up of trusts. It had a capitalization
of a billion and a half, of which about $700,000,000 was composed of
the commodity usually known as "water"; but so greatly has its business
grown and so capably has it been managed that all this liquid material
has since been converted into more solid substance. The disappearance
of Andrew Carnegie and his coworkers and the emergence of this gigantic
enterprise completed the great business cycle in the steel trade.
The age of individual enterprise and competition had passed--that of
corporate control had arrived.

CHAPTER IV. THE TELEPHONE: "AMERICA'S MOST POETICAL ACHIEVEMENT"

A distinguished English journalist, who was visiting the United States,