of transportation which John D. Rockefeller had found extremely
profitable.

Such were the circumstances and such were the motives that gave
birth to the world's largest corporation. All one night, so the
story goes, Charles M. Schwab and John W. Gates discussed the
steel situation with J. Pierpont Morgan. There was only one
possible solution, they said--Andrew Carnegie must be bought out.
By the time the morning sun came through the windows Morgan had
been convinced. "Go and ask him what he will sell for," he said
to Schwab. In a brief period Schwab came back to Morgan with a
letter which contained the following figures--five per cent gold
bonds $303,450,000; preferred stock $98,277,100; common stock
$90,279,000--a total of over $492,000,000. Carnegie demanded no
cash; he preferred to hold a huge first mortgage on a business
whose golden opportunities he knew so well. Morgan, who had been
accustomed all his life to dictate to other men, had now met a
man who was able to dictate to him. And he capitulated. The man
who fifty-three years before had started life in a new country as
a bobbin-boy at a dollar and twenty cents a week, now at the age
of sixty-six retired from business the second richest man in the
world. With him retired a miscellaneous assortment of
millionaires whose fortunes he had made and whose subsequent
careers in the United States and in Europe have given a peculiar
significance to the name "Pittsburgh Millionaires." The United
States Steel Corporation, the combination that included not only
the Carnegie Company but seventy per cent of all the steel
concerns in the country, was really a trust made up of trusts. It
had a capitalization of a billion and a half, of which about
$700,000,000 was composed of the commodity usually known as