y twenty-five million dollars.

The second of the great givers of recent years is John Davison
Rockefeller, whose name is synonymous with the greatest natural monopoly
of modern times, the Standard Oil Company. His rise from clerk in a
grocery store to one of the greatest capitalists in the history of the
world is an interesting one, as well as an important one in the
commercial history of America. Born at Richford, New York, in 1839, his
parents moved to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was a boy of fourteen, and
such education as he had was secured in the Cleveland public schools. He
soon left school for business, getting employment first as clerk in a
commission house, and at nineteen being junior partner in the firm of
Clark & Rockefeller, commission merchants.

At that time the petroleum fields of Pennsylvania were just beginning to
be developed, and young Rockefeller's attention was soon attracted to
them. He seems to have been one of the first to realize the vast
possibilities of the oil business, and in 1865, he and his brother
William built at Cleveland a refinery which they called the Standard Oil
Works. They had little money, but unlimited nerve, and very soon began
the work of consolidation, which culminated in the formation of the
Standard Oil Trust in 1882. They were able to kill competition largely
by securing from the railroads lower shipping rates than any competitor,
in some cases going so far as to get a rebate on all oil shipped by
competitors. That is, if a railroad charged the Standard Oil Company one
dollar to carry its oil between two points and charged a competitor a
dollar and a quarter for the same service, that extra quarter went, not
into the coffers of the railroad, but into the coffers of the Standard
Oil Company. Such methods of business have since been made illegal, and
the Standard is compelled to do business on the same basis as its
competitors, but its vast resources and occupancy of the field give it
an advantage which nothing can counteract.

The operations of the Standard Oil Company naturally piled up a great
fortune for John D. Rockefeller--how great cannot even be estimated. Not
until comparatively recent years, did he turn his attention from making
money to spending it, but when he did, it was in a royal fashion. Ten
million dollars were given to the University of Chicago, which opened
its doors in 1892, and now has an enrollment of over five thousand
students; ten million more were