ast-bound cars. For remember no
railroad can make money unless, after it has hauled a loaded car from
one end of the line to the other, it can find another load to put in
that same car to haul back again. Hill supplied the business and his
story is the wonderful story of the development of the Great Northwest.

* * * * *

Which brings us to the Napoleon of the railroad world, E. H. Harriman.
America has never seen another quite like him. When the panic of 1901
was at its height and the financial world seemed trembling in ruins
about his head, he refused to break the corner, as he might have done,
but sat watching the tape, cool, quiet and calculating, while men
failed, banks tottered, and his own associates begged him to yield. For
the ambition of this man knew no limitation. His kingdom must stretch
from sea to sea and from the lakes to the gulf.

His kingdom lay to the south of Hill's, for he ruled the Union Pacific,
and between the two men there was ceaseless war. Physically and mentally
they were as far apart as two men could be. Hill is a large man, with
massive head and brow, and his eyes are steady and cool and brown, his
lips full and sensitive, his whole personality bespeaking force and
decision. Quite different was Harriman; a small, ordinary looking man,
with glasses and a scraggy mustache, giving the impression of nervous
force rather than of power; an irritable man, easily angered; a fighter
clear through, but fighting sometimes when peace were wiser--that was
Harriman.

Harriman was born at Hempstead, Long Island, the son of a clergyman with
a large family and a small income. The boy was renowned chiefly for his
daily fights and for his aversion to study. At the age of fourteen, he
was put to work in a broker's office in Wall street, at eighteen he had
a partnership, at twenty-two he bought a seat on the stock exchange, and
pretty soon entered the railroad field by getting control of the
Illinois Central. He at once inaugurated a new policy. Before that time,
the prevailing idea of railroad management was to run a road as cheaply
as possible and pay big dividends. Harriman's idea was that the biggest
dividends would be secured in the end by making a good road, and he
proceeded to carry the idea out by putting his road in the very pink of
condition. And it paid.

That was the beginning. His great coup was the rebuilding of the Union
Pacific. A railroad with 7,500 miles of