ticeships as grocery clerks, errand boys, telegraph
messengers, and newspaper gamins. For the most part they had spent their
boyhood together, had played with each other as children, had attended
the same Sunday schools, had sung in the same church choirs, and, as
young men, had quarreled with each other over their sweethearts. The
Pittsburgh group comprised about forty men, most of whom retired as
millionaires, though their names for the most part signify little to
the present-day American. Kloman, Coleman, McCandless, Shinn, Stewart,
Jones, Vandervoort--are all important men in the history of American
steel. Thomas A. Scott and J. Edgar Thompson, men associated chiefly
with the creation of the Pennsylvania Railroad, also made their
contributions. But three or four men towered so preeminently above
their associates that today when we think of the human agencies that
constructed this mighty edifice, the names that insistently come to mind
are those of Carnegie, Phipps, Frick, and Schwab.

Books have been written to discredit Carnegie's work and to picture him
as the man who has stolen success from the labor of greater men.
Yet Carnegie is the one member of a brilliant company who had
the indispensable quality of genius. He had none of the plodding,
painstaking qualities of a Rockefeller; he had the fire, the
restlessness, the keen relish for adventure, and the imagination that
leaped far in advance of his competitors which we find so conspicuous in
the older Vanderbilt. Carnegie showed these qualities from his earliest
days. Driven as a child from his Scottish home by hunger, never having
gone to school after twelve, he found himself, at the age of thirteen,
living in a miserable hut in Allegheny, earning a dollar and twenty
cents a week as bobbin-boy in a cotton mill, while his mother augmented
the family income by taking in washing. Half a dozen years later Thomas
Scott, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, made Carnegie his
private secretary. How well the young man used his opportunities in this
occupation appeared afterward when he turned his wide acquaintanceship
among railroad men to practical use in the steel business. It was this
personal adaptability, indeed, that explains Carnegie's success. In the
narrow, methodical sense he was not a business man at all; he knew and
cared nothing for its dull routine and its labyrinthine details. As
a practical steel man his position is a negligible one. Though he was
pro