ked by the work of Mr. Harriman and his
rivals in building up the various railroads into a few great groups, a
process that had gone so far that before his death Mr. Harriman was
ambitious to concentrate them all under his single control. High finance
under the leadership of Mr. Morgan steadily achieved the consolidation
of the greater industries into trusts or combinations and effected a
community of interests between them and a few dominant banking
organizations, with allied insurance companies and trust companies. In
New York City have been centered, as never before, the banking reserves
of the nation, and here, by the financial management of capital and
speculative promotion, there has grown up a unified control over the
nation's industrial life. Colossal private fortunes have arisen. No
longer is the per capita wealth of the nation a real index to the
prosperity of the average man. Labor on the other hand has shown an
increasing self-consciousness, is combining and increasing its demands.
In a word, the old pioneer individualism is disappearing, while the
forces of social combination are manifesting themselves as never before.
The self-made man has become, in popular speech, the coal baron, the
steel king, the oil king, the cattle king, the railroad magnate, the
master of high finance, the monarch of trusts. The world has never
before seen such huge fortunes exercising combined control over the
economic life of a people, and such luxury as has come out of the
individualistic pioneer democracy of America in the course of
competitive evolution.

At the same time the masters of industry, who control interests which
represent billions of dollars, do not admit that they have broken with
pioneer ideals. They regard themselves as pioneers under changed
conditions, carrying on the old work of developing the natural resources
of the nation, compelled by the constructive fever in their veins, even
in ill-health and old age and after the accumulation of wealth beyond
their power to enjoy, to seek new avenues of action and of power, to
chop new clearings, to find new trails, to expand the horizon of the
nation's activity, and to extend the scope of their dominion. "This
country," said the late Mr. Harriman in an interview a few years ago,
"has been developed by a wonderful people, flush with enthusiasm,
imagination and speculative bent. . . . They have been magnificent
pioneers. They saw into the future and adapted their work