ir inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a
wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining
corporations. The variety of Field's possessions and his numerous forms
of ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal
more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work.

[Illustration: MARSHALL FIELD.]

The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires
ran in somewhat parallel grooves. Field was the son of a farmer. He was
born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and
worked in a wholesale dry goods house. In 1860 he was made a partner.
During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world,
proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its contracts
at a time of distress. The Government and the public were forced to pay
the highest sums for the poorest material. It was established that
Government officials were in collusion with the contractors. This
extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the
Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent
on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of
how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and
semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their
interests.[170] In the words of one of Field's laudatory biographers,
"the firm coined money"--a phrase which for the volumes of significant
meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system.

Some of the personnel of the firm changed several times: in 1865 Field,
Leiter and Potter Palmer (who had also become a multimillionaire)
associated under the firm name of Field, Leiter & Palmer. The great fire
of 1871 destroyed the firm's buildings, but they were replaced.
Subsequently the firm became Field, Leiter & Co., and, finally in 1887,
Marshall Field & Co.[171] The firm conducted both a wholesale and retail
business on what is called in commercial slang "a cash basis:" that is,
it sold goods on immediate payment and not on credit. The volume of its
business rose to enormous proportions. In 1884 it reached an aggregate
of $30,000,000 a year; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a
year.

FOOTNOTES:

[162] Some of this land and these water grants and piers were obtained
by Peter Goelet during the corrupt administration of City Controller
Romaine. Goelet, it seems, was allowed to pa