fice job that came his
way, earning his employer's respect for his industry, his sobriety,
and his unmistakable talents for business. Nor does this picture
inadequately visualize Rockefeller's whole after-life, and explain the
business qualities that made possible his unexampled success. It is,
indeed, the scene to which Mr. Rockefeller himself most frequently
reverts when, in his famous autobiographical discourses to his Cleveland
Sunday School, he calls our attention to the rules that inevitably lead
to industrial prosperity. "Thrift, thrift, Horatio," is the one idea
upon which the great captain of the oil business has always insisted.
Many have detected in these habits of mind only the cheese-paring
activities of a naturally narrow spirit. Rockefeller's old Cleveland
associates remember him as the greatest bargainer they had ever known,
as a man who had an eye for infinite details and an unquenchable
patience and resource in making economies. Yet Rockefeller was clearly
more than a pertinacious haggler over trifles. Certainly such a
diagnosis does not explain a man who has built up one of the world's
greatest organizations and accumulated the largest fortune which
has ever been placed at the disposal of one man. Indeed, Rockefeller
displayed unusual business ability even before he entered the oil
business. A young man who, at the age of nineteen, could start a
commission house and do a business of nearly five hundred thousand the
first year must have had commercial capacity to an extraordinary degree.

Fate had placed Rockefeller in Cleveland in the days when the oil
business had got well under way. In the early sixties a score or so of
refineries had started in this town, many of which were making large
profits. It is not surprising that Rockefeller, gazing at these black
and evil-smelling buildings from the vantage point of his commission
office, should have felt an impulse to join in the gamble. He plunged
into this new activity at the age of twenty-three. He possessed two
great advantages over most of his adventurous competitors; one was
a heavy bank account, representing his earnings in the commission
business, and the other a partner, Samuel Andrews, who was generally
regarded as a mechanical genius in the production of illuminating oil.
At the beginning, therefore, Rockefeller had the two essentials which
largely explain his subsequent career; an adequate liquid capital
and high technical resources. In the fi