re its own interests lay. By corrupting government
officials and other unlawful methods it appropriated lands, and
there was no escape from its exactions and brigandage. Other
roads were built, and for a brief period there was held out the
hope of relief that invariably comes from honest competition. But
the railroad either absorbed its rivals or pooled interests with
them, and thereafter there were several masters instead of one.

Soon the railroads began to war among themselves, and in a mad
scramble to secure business at any price they cut each other's
rates and unlawfully entered into secret compacts with certain big
shippers, permitting the latter to enjoy lower freight rates than
their competitors. The smaller shippers were soon crushed out of
existence in this way. Competition was throttled and prices went
up, making the railroad barons richer and the people poorer. That
was the beginning of the giant Trusts, the greatest evil American
civilization has yet produced, and one which, unless checked, will
inevitably drag this country into the throes of civil strife.

From out this quagmire of corruption and rascality emerged the
Colossus, a man so stupendously rich and with such unlimited
powers for evil that the world has never looked upon his like. The
famous Croesus, whose fortune was estimated at only eight millions
in our money, was a pauper compared with John Burkett Ryder, whose
holdings no man could count, but which were approximately
estimated at a thousand millions of dollars. The railroads had
created the Trust, the ogre of corporate greed, of which Ryder was
the incarnation, and in time the Trust became master of the
railroads, which after all seemed but retributive justice.

John Burkett Ryder, the richest man in the world--the man whose
name had spread to the farthest corners of the earth because of
his wealth, and whose money, instead of being a blessing, promised
to become not only a curse to himself but a source of dire peril
to all mankind--was a genius born of the railroad age. No other
age could have brought him forth; his peculiar talents fitted
exactly the conditions of his time. Attracted early in life to the
newly discovered oil fields of Pennsylvania, he became a dealer in
the raw product and later a refiner, acquiring with capital,
laboriously saved, first one refinery, then another. The railroads
were cutting each other's throats to secure the freight business
of the oil men, and John B