It is doubtful whether he would have sold at all had not his Wall
Street competitors begun to encroach on a field which the little
Scotsman understood quite as well as they--the production and
merchandising of steel. The newly organized combinations were
completing elaborate plans to go after Carnegie's business. Then
Carnegie, who had practically retired from active life, again
arrayed himself in his shirt-sleeves, abandoned his career of
authorship, and resumed his early trade. His first attacks
produced an immense reverberation in the House of Morgan. He
purchased a huge tract at Conneaut and began building a gigantic
plant for the manufacture of steel tubes, a business in which he
had not hitherto engaged. This was a blow aimed at one of
Morgan's pet new creations, the National Tube Company. Should
Carnegie finish his works, there was no doubt the Morgan
enterprise would be ruined, for the new plant would be far more
modern and so could manufacture the product at a much lower
price; and, with Charles M. Schwab as active manager, what
possible chance would the older corporation have? But Carnegie
struck his enemy at an even more vulnerable point. The
Pennsylvania Railroad had a practical monopoly of traffic in and
out of Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh "created" more freight business
than any other city in the world. Carnegie lent his powerful
support to George J. Gould, who was then extending his railroad
system into the preempted field and was also making surveys and
had financed a company to build an entirely new railroad from
Pittsburgh to the Atlantic Coast. As Carnegie himself controlled
the larger part of the freight that made Pittsburgh such an
essential feeder to railroads, his new enterprise caused the
greatest alarm. At the same time Carnegie equipped a new and
splendid fleet of ore ships, his purpose being to enter a field