her of that newer American plutocracy which is
steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.
While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich
man's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an
instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not
shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to
him nevertheless much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his
forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been
called his early bad manner, he had been little more than a gambler of
genius, his hand against every man's--an infant prodigy--who brought to
the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than
any opposed to it. At St Helena it was laid down that war is une belle
occupation; and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and
complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.

Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was thirty
years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god
he served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic
adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labour in his father's
banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the
Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great
firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety, and financial weight lifted
it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust founded
on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly a
different man. How the change came about none could with authority say,
but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whom
alone he had respected and perhaps loved.

He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was
current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson
called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast
wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital,
drew together and centralized industries of continental scope, financed
with unerring judgement the large designs of state or of private
enterprise. Many a time when he 'took hold' to smash a strike, or to
federate the ownership of some great field of labour, he sent ruin upon
a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or cattlemen
defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruth