embarking in his great railroad ventures, Vanderbilt visited
spiritualists; we have one circumstantial account of his
summoning the wraith of Jim Fiske to advise him in stock
operations. His excessive vanity led him to print his picture on
all the Lake Shore bonds; he proposed to New York City the
construction in Central Park of a large monument that would
commemorate, side by side, the names of Vanderbilt and
Washington; and he actually erected a large statue to himself in
his new Hudson River station in St. John's Park. His attitude
towards the public was shown in his remark when one of his
associates told him that "each and every one" of certain
transactions which he had just forced through "is absolutely
forbidden by the statutes of the State of New York." "My God,
John!" said the Commodore, "you don't suppose you can run a
railroad in accordance with the statutes of the State of New
York, do you?" "Law!" he once roared on a similar occasion, "What
do I care about law? Hain't I got the power?"

These things of course were the excrescences of an extremely
vital, overflowing, imaginative, energetic human being; they are
traits that not infrequently accompany genius. And the work which
Vanderbilt did remains an essential part of our economic
organization today. Before his time a trip to Chicago meant that
the passenger changed trains seventeen times, and that all
freight had to be unloaded at a similar number of places, carted
across towns, and reloaded into other trains. The magnificent
railroad highway that extends up the banks of the Hudson, through
the Mohawk Valley, and alongside the borders of Lake Erie--a
water line route nearly the entire distance--was all but useless.
It is true that not all the consolidation of these lines was