the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad under Vanderbilt,
a triumph which dazzled European investors as well as our own,
and which represented an entirely different business organization
from anything the nation had hitherto seen, appropriately ushered
in the new business era whose outlines will be sketched in the
succeeding pages.



CHAPTER II. THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN TRUST

When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877, America's first great
industrial combination had become an established fact. In that
year the Standard Oil Company of Ohio controlled at least ninety
per cent of the business of refining and marketing petroleum. A
new portent had appeared in our economic life, a phenomenon that
was destined to affect not only the social and business existence
of the every-day American but even his political and legal
institutions.

It seems natural enough at the present time to refer to petroleum
as an indispensable commodity. At the beginning of the Civil War,
however, any such description would have been absurd. Though
petroleum was not unknown, millions of American households were
still burning candles, whale oil, and other illuminants. Not
until 1859 did our ancestors realize that, concealed in the rocky
of western Pennsylvania, lay apparently inexhaustible quantities
of a liquid which, when refined, would give a light exceeding in
brilliancy anything they had hitherto known. The mere existence
of petroleum, it is true, had been a familiar fact for centuries.