re launched,
with the usual accompaniments of "underwriting syndicates," watered
stock, and Wall Street speculation. This sort of thing made no appeal to
Andrew Carnegie. His huge enterprise had always remained essentially a
copartnership, and he had frequently expressed his abhorrence of trusts.
Yet, in spite of his wish to retire from business and in spite of his
avowed intention to die poor, Carnegie now adopted the policy of the
Sibylline leaves to all prospective purchasers. Moore and Reid would
have purchased his interest for $157,000,000; when Rockefeller came
along the price had risen to $250,000,000; when the oil man shook his
head and retired, Carnegie immediately raised his price to $500,000,000.
It is doubtful whether he would have sold at all had not his Wall Street
competitors begun to encroach on a field which the little Scotsman
understood quite as well as they--the production and merchandising of
steel. The newly organized combinations were completing elaborate plans
to go after Carnegie's business. Then Carnegie, who had practically
retired from active life, again arrayed himself in his shirt-sleeves,
abandoned his career of authorship, and resumed his early trade. His
first attacks produced an immense reverberation in the House of Morgan.
He purchased a huge tract at Conneaut and began building a gigantic
plant for the manufacture of steel tubes, a business in which he had
not hitherto engaged. This was a blow aimed at one of Morgan's pet new
creations, the National Tube Company. Should Carnegie finish his works,
there was no doubt the Morgan enterprise would be ruined, for the new
plant would be far more modern and so could manufacture the product at
a much lower price; and, with Charles M. Schwab as active manager, what
possible chance would the older corporation have? But Carnegie struck
his enemy at an even more vulnerable point. The Pennsylvania Railroad
had a practical monopoly of traffic in and out of Pittsburgh, and
Pittsburgh "created" more freight business than any other city in the
world. Carnegie lent his powerful support to George J. Gould, who was
then extending his railroad system into the preempted field and was
also making surveys and had financed a company to build an entirely
new railroad from Pittsburgh to the Atlantic Coast. As Carnegie himself
controlled the larger part of the freight that made Pittsburgh such an
essential feeder to railroads, his new enterprise caused the greatest