Page:Americans (1922).djvu/271

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for the government. After the Civil War, by swift combinations of his forces and rapid marches into new fields he established his position at the centre of the industries on which the internal development of the country most directly depended. At the age of thirty-three, he had an annual income of fifty thousand dollars; its subsequent expansion there is not space to recite.

That the son of an impecunious weaver should, while acting as telegraph operator in Pennsylvania, have taken Lord John Russell as his model strikes one as astonishing—till one studies the portrait of this young man at sixteen. The bearing and the features—the full brow, the clear penetrating eyes, the firm but sensitive mouth, are those of a well-bred, even of a high-bred youth, quite the stuff, one should say, to develop into a Lord Rector of St. Andrews University, laird of Skibo Castle, and conspirator with Lords Morley and Bryce and Grey for the world's welfare. The record of his early life bears out the impression given by the photograph. It shows a boy grounded by family discipline in self-respect, moral purity, and intellectual ambition. It indicates that the wide beneficence of his later years was not the mere after thought and diversion of a satiated money-getter, but the object towards which his efforts tended from the start.

As a messenger boy he was reading Macaulay, Bancroft, and Shakespeare, and was learning the oratorios of Handel. His first note to the press,