THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY 247 



builders, President Hill of the Great Northern, for example; 

 as iron and steel makers, witness Mr. Carnegie; as manufac- 

 turers, like Mr. Havemeyer of the sugar trust; as traders, like 

 Mr. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil company; and as rulers, 

 like President Roosevelt. In the methods of these various 

 masters there may be room for criticism, but in one thing 

 they agree — they are all of the Napoleonic breed. There is 

 among them a combination of mind, strong intellect, keen 

 insight, and rare patience. The imagination which sees far 

 ahead is united in them to keen grasp of the smallest details. 

 The two opposite qualities of brilliant conception and careful 

 execution are equally strong in them. They have, in short, the 

 gifts both of the ideal and the practical organizer. Some 

 eminent men have possessed one or other of these, but their 

 union in the same man is exceptional. 



In whatever other respect the great captains of industry 

 may differ, they are all hard workers. Work becomes a pas- 

 sion with them, and they stick to it day and night, either from 

 sheer love of it or absolute necessity. Their grand organiza- 

 tion, the offspring of their brain, generally swallows them up 

 in the end. It becomes so fascinating, and demands from 

 them such incessant attention, that they get little rest unless 

 they tear themselves away from it altogether. Mr. Carnegie 

 gave his whole life to his monumental works at Pittsburg 

 until he was sixty years of age and then retired altogether, 

 feeling perhaps that there was no middle course. Scores of 

 American organizers have gone through the same martyrdom 

 before. The railroad presidents, financiers, and business men 

 of all kinds who have killed themselves by overwork would fill 

 a very long list. 



A supreme organizer must necessarily be a hard worker. 

 It is one of the essential conditions of his role. The organiza- 

 tion has not only to be planned, but it has to be established — 

 to be built up day by day and year by year, to be watched 

 and tended like a child to see that nothing goes wrong with it, 

 to be modified as occasion requires, and readapted to every 

 change of condition. Only a very hard and enthusiastic 

 worker need put his hand to a plough of that sort, for there is 

 no turning back without absolute ruin. One of the reasons for 



