l, discarded the
old locomotives for new and more powerful ones, built splendid new
terminals, introduced economies in a hundred directions, cut down the
hours required in a New York-Chicago trip from fifty to twenty-four,
made his highway an expeditious line for transporting freight, and
transformed railroads that had formerly been the playthings of
Wall Street and that frequently could not meet their pay-rolls into
exceedingly profitable, high dividend paying properties. In this
operation Vanderbilt typified the era that was dawning--an era of
ruthlessness, of personal selfishness, of corruption, of disregard of
private rights, of contempt for law and legislatures, and yet of vast
and beneficial achievement. The men of this time may have traveled
roughshod to their goal, but after all, they opened up, in an amazingly
short time, a mighty continent to the uses of mankind. The triumph
of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad under Vanderbilt, a
triumph which dazzled European investors as well as our own, and which
represented an entirely different business organization from anything
the nation had hitherto seen, appropriately ushered in the new business
era whose outlines will be sketched in the succeeding pages.

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN TRUST

When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877, America's first great industrial
combination had become an established fact. In that year the Standard
Oil Company of Ohio controlled at least ninety per cent of the business
of refining and marketing petroleum. A new portent had appeared in our
economic life, a phenomenon that was destined to affect not only the
social and business existence of the every-day American but even his
political and legal institutions.

It seems natural enough at the present time to refer to petroleum as an
indispensable commodity. At the beginning of the Civil War, however,
any such description would have been absurd. Though petroleum was not
unknown, millions of American households were still burning candles,
whale oil, and other illuminants. Not until 1859 did our ancestors
realize that, concealed in the rocky of western Pennsylvania, lay
apparently inexhaustible quantities of a liquid which, when refined,
would give a light exceeding in brilliancy anything they had hitherto
known. The mere existence of petroleum, it is true, had been a familiar
fact for centuries. Herodotus mentions the oil pits of Babylon, and
Pliny informs us t