, whom we have had occasion to mention before. His
father was a farmer, but died while the son was still at school, and at
the age of twenty the latter came to New York, and after looking over
the field, opened a small store on lower Broadway, with a sleeping
apartment for himself in the rear. Such was the beginning of the
greatest dry-goods business this country ever saw. It increased by leaps
and bounds, for Stewart seems to have had a sort of instinctive genius
for the business. He was continually moving to larger and larger
quarters, and in 1862, built on Broadway a store which was at that time
the largest in the world, and which, even in this day of mammoth
structures, commands attention. Its cost was nearly three millions, a
colossal sum for those days; two thousand people were employed in it and
it cost a million a year to run. But it brought a tremendous return, and
its owner soon became one of the wealthiest men in New York.

He wanted more than wealth--he hungered for political and social honors
which were never fully his. He had made a large contribution to the fund
of $100,000 presented by the merchants of New York to General Grant, and
in 1869, Grant appointed him secretary of the treasury. The senate
refused to confirm the appointment, on the ground that the law excluded
from that office anyone interested in the importation of merchandise.
Grant sent to the senate a message recommending that this law be
repealed, but the senate refused; and Stewart thereupon offered to place
his business in the hands of trustees and devote its entire profits to
charity during his term of office; but still the senate refused, and the
nomination was withdrawn. It was a bitter blow to Stewart, nor was his
fight for social prominence much more fortunate. As his last stake, as
it were, he began the erection of a great marble palace on Fifth
Avenue, designed to cost a million and to be the finest private
residence in the world, but he died before it was completed.

* * * * *

One of the great industries of the country is that of sugar refining,
and it is inseparably connected with the name of Havemeyer, for to the
Havemeyers is due its development and its formation into a so-called
trust, which practically controls the market, and which has won great
wealth for its organizers. The ancestor of the Havemeyers was a thrifty
German who came to this country in the latter part of the eighteenth
century