qualification. I state my views thus
in their extreme form lest the English reader should think that I
entertain too much respect (or too little contempt) for the purely
commercial brain. At the same time the English reader will concede that
commercial enterprises and industrial undertakings may be on such a
scale as to offer full exercise to the largest intellects.

As an illustration of this: Cecil Rhodes grew, as we know, wealthy from
the proceeds of vast undertakings; but men closely associated with him
have assured me that Rhodes was a very indifferent "business man." We
may, I think, take it for certain that if Rhodes had been condemned to
conduct a retail grocery he would have conducted it to speedy
irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a
small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English
readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a
sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development.
On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for intellectual
grasp of the largest.

The consideration which I wish to urge is that business in the United
States during the period of growth and settlement of the country has
been largely on Rhodian lines. The great enterprises by which the
country has been developed, and on which most of the large fortunes of
individual Americans are based have been of truly imperial proportions.
The flinging of railways across thousands of miles of wilderness
(England has made peers of the men who did it in Canada) with the laying
out of cities and the peopling of provinces; the building of great
fleets of boats upon the lakes; the vast mining schemes in remote and
inaccessible regions of the country; lumbering enterprises which (even
though not always honestly) dealt with virgin forests by the hundreds
of square miles; "bonanza" wheat farming and the huge systems of grain
elevators for the handling of the wheat and the conveyance of it to the
market or the mill; cattle ranching on a stupendous scale (perhaps even
the collecting of those cattle in their thousands daily for slaughter in
the packing houses); the irrigating of wide tracts of desert;--these
things and such as these are the "businesses" out of which the Americans
of the last and present generations have largely made their fortunes.
And they are enterprises, most of them, not unworthy to rank with
Chartered Companies and the construction of