apers in all the cities of importance published long and minute
biographies of him, with pictorial illustrations, and day after day
characteristic anecdotes of his remarkable career. Nor was there, it
is believed, a newspaper in the United States, secular, religious,
or special, that did not comment upon his life. This was the more
remarkable in that he was not a public man in the common use of the
word: he had never interested himself in politics, or in public affairs,
municipal or State or national; he had devoted himself entirely to
building up his private fortune. If this is the duty of a citizen, he
had discharged it with singleness of purpose; but no other duty of the
citizen had he undertaken, if we except his private charities. And
yet no public man of his day excited more popular interest or was the
subject of more newspaper comment.

And these comments were nearly all respectful, and most of them kindly.
There was some justice in this, for Henderson had been doing what
everybody else was trying to do, usually without his good-fortune. If
he was more successful than others in trying to get rich, surely a great
deal of admiration was mingled with the envy of his career. To be sure,
some journals were very severe upon his methods, and some revived the
old stories of his unscrupulousness in transactions which had laid him
open to criminal prosecution, from the effects of which he was only
saved by uncommon adroitness and, some said, by legal technicalities.
His career also was denounced by some as wholly vicious in its effect
upon the youth of the republic, and as lowering the tone of public
morals. And yet it was remembered that he had been a frank, open-hearted
friend, kind to his family, and generous in contrast with some of his
close-fisted contemporaries. There was nothing mean about him; even his
rascalities, if you chose to call his transactions by that name, were
on a grand scale. To be sure, he would let nothing stand between him and
the consummation of his schemes--he was like Napoleon in that--but
those who knew him personally liked him. The building up of his colossal
fortune--which the newspapers were saying was the largest that had been
accumulated in one lifetime in America--had ruined thousands of people,
and carried disaster into many peaceful houses, and his sudden death had
been a cyclone of destruction for an hour. But it was hardly fair, one
journal pointed out, to hold Henderson responsible fo