The Project Gutenberg EBook of Captains of Industry, by James Parton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Captains of Industry
or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money

Author: James Parton

Release Date: January 4, 2007 [EBook #20064]
[This file was first posted on December 9, 2006]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY ***

Produced by Stacy Brown, Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

[Illustration:

Very Truly Yours
Ichabod Washburn]

CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY

OR

MEN OF BUSINESS WHO DID SOMETHING
BESIDES MAKING MONEY

_A BOOK FOR YOUNG AMERICANS_

BY

JAMES PARTON

FIFTH THOUSAND

[Illustration]

BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1890

Copyright, 1884,
By JAMES PARTON.

_All rights reserved._

_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

PREFACE.

In this volume are presented examples of men who shed lustre upon
ordinary pursuits, either by the superior manner in which they exercised
them or by the noble use they made of the leisure which success in them
usually gives. Such men are the nobility of republics. The American
people were fortunate in having at an early period an ideal man of this
kind in Benjamin Franklin, who, at the age of forty-two, just mid-way in
his life, deliberately relinquished the most profitable business of its
kind in the colonies for the sole purpose of developing electrical
science. In this, as in other respects, his example has had great
influence with his countrymen.

A distinguished author, who lived some years at Newport, has expressed
the opinion that the men who occupy the villas of that emerald isle
exert very little power compared with that of an orator or a writer. To
be, he adds, at the head of a normal school, or to be a professor in a
college, is to have a sway over the destinies of America which reduces
to nothingness the power of successful men of business.

Being myself a member of t