We tell Abraham Lincoln where he can
borrow a book that will benefit him, and we pass by his great dust in
numbers almost like the stars in heaven. We see Phineas T. Barnum first
humbugging the people with a lemonade-stand worth all told two dollars,
and we next see him humbugging the people with the greatest show on
earth, worth a million. We lend Leland Stanford a quarter and he next
buys up three or four high-priced legislatures and defies the
Constitution of the United States to prevent him levying a tax on "his
people" of a million dollars with a stroke of his pen. We see
ULYSSES S. GRANT
working by the day in a tanyard, and then receiving the sword of a
warrior whose name will also echo far out into the "corridors of time,"
and then again accepting as the representative of America, the pent-up
admiration of the Old World for the New. We see Jay Gould investing a
thousand dollars in a country store and then in turn dictating to all
the railroads and controlling all the telegraphs in the greatest empire
that has ever existed. We watch Cornelius Vanderbilt, Sr., begin as a
poor lad, save, build, command, and die, leaving to his favorite son
EIGHTY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!
We see that son, beginning on that paltry patrimony, already the
possessor, in a few short years, of seventy millions in addition.
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