of
genius, his hand against every man's, an infant prodigy who brought to
the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any
opposed to it. At St. Helena it was laid down that war is _une belle
occupation_, and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and
complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.

Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was thirty
years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he
served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labor in his father's
banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety and financial weight lifted
it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust founded
on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly a
different man. How the change came about none could with authority say,
but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whom
alone he had respected and perhaps loved.

He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson
called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast
wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital,
drew together and centralized industries of continental scope, financed
with unerring judgment the large designs of state or of private
enterprise. Many a time when he "took hold" to smash a strike, or to
federate the ownership of some great field of labor, he sent ruin upon a
multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steel-workers or cattlemen
defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless
than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends.
Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier
and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect
or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country.
Forcible, cold and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national
lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.

But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants
and certain of the associates