CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY
OR
MEN OF BUSINESS WHO DID SOMETHING
BESIDES MAKING MONEY
A BOOK FOR YOUNG AMERICANS
BY
JAMES PARTON
FIFTH THOUSAND
BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1890
Copyright, 1884,
By JAMES PARTON.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
PREFACE.
In this volume are presented examples of men who shed lustre uponordinary pursuits, either by the superior manner in which they exercisedthem or by the noble use they made of the leisure which success in themusually gives. Such men are the nobility of republics. The Americanpeople were fortunate in having at an early period an ideal man of thiskind in Benjamin Franklin, who, at the age of forty-two, just mid-way inhis life, deliberately relinquished the most profitable business of itskind in the colonies for the sole purpose of developing electricalscience. In this, as in other respects, his example has had greatinfluence with his countrymen.
A distinguished author, who lived some years at Newport, has expressedthe opinion that the men who occupy the villas of that emerald isleexert very little power compared with that of an orator or a writer. Tobe, he adds, at the head of a normal school, or to be a professor in acollege, is to have a sway over the destinies of America which reducesto nothingness the power of successful men of business.
Being myself a member of the fraternity of writers, I suppose I ought toyield a joyful assent to such remarks. It is flattering to the self-loveof those who drive along Bellevue Avenue in a shabby hired vehicle to betold that they are personages of much more consequence than the heavycapitalist who swings by in a resplendent curricle, drawn by two matchedand matchless steeds, in a six-hundred dollar harness. Perhaps they are.But I advise young men who aspire to serve their generation effectivelynot to undervalue the importance of the gentleman in the curricle.
One of the individuals who has figured lately in the society of Newportis the proprietor of an important newspaper. He is not a writer, nor ateacher in a normal school, but he wields a considerable power in thiscountry. Fifty men write for the journal which he conducts, some of whomwrite to admiration, for they are animated by a humane and patrioticspirit. The late lamented Ivory Chamberlain was a writer whose leadingeditorials were of national value. But, mark: a telegram of ten wordsfrom that young man at Newport, written with perspiring hand in a pauseof the game of polo, determines without appeal the course of the paperin any crisis of business or politics.
I do not complain of this arrangement of things. I think it is just; Iknow it is unalterable.
It is then of the greatest possible importance that the men who controlduring their lifetime, and create endowments when they are dead, shouldshare the best civilization of their age and country. It is also of thegreatest importance that young men whom nature has fitted to be leade