their competitors. The smaller shippers were soon crushed out of
existence in this way. Competition was throttled and prices went
up, making the railroad barons richer and the people poorer. That
was the beginning of the giant Trusts, the greatest evil American
civilization has yet produced, and one which, unless checked, will
inevitably drag this country into the throes of civil strife.

From out of this quagmire of corruption and rascality emerged the
Colossus, a man so stupendously rich and with such unlimited
powers for evil that the world has never looked upon his like. The
famous Croesus, whose fortune was estimated at only eight millions
in our money, was a pauper compared with John Burkett Ryder, whose
holdings no man could count, but which were approximately
estimated at a thousand millions of dollars. The railroads had
created the Trust, the ogre of corporate greed, of which Ryder was
the incarnation, and in time the Trust became master of the
railroads, which after all seemed but retributive justice.

John Burkett Ryder, the richest man in the world--the man whose
name had spread to the farthest corners of the earth because of
his wealth, and whose money, instead of being a blessing, promised
to become not only a curse to himself but a source of dire peril
to all mankind--was a genius born of the railroad age. No other
age could have brought him forth; his peculiar talents fitted
exactly the conditions of his time. Attracted early in life to the
newly discovered oil fields of Pennsylvania, he became a dealer in
the raw product and later a refiner, acquiring with capital,
laboriously saved, first one refinery, then another. The railroads
were cutting each other's throats to secure the freight business
of the oil men, and John Burkett Ryder saw his opportunity. He