March 3, 192 1] 



NATURE 



courageously and honestly avail himself of the 

 opportunities which "chance " placed to his hand. 

 Andrew Carnegie's childhood was influenced, 

 as he tells us, by his birthplace, Dumfermline, 

 the burial-place of King Robert the Bruce, 

 with its abbey-church, palace, and glen — "per- 

 haps the most radical town in the kingdom." 

 From his uncles Bailie Morrison and George 

 Lauder he learned much of Wallace, Bruce, and 

 Burns, and he avows "there was then and there 

 created in me a vein of Scottish prejudice or 

 patriotism which will cease to exist only with life." 

 He always kept Burns 's philosophy of Ufe before 

 him, and as a schoolboy, when tempted to do a 

 weak or selfish thing, would ask himself : " What 

 would Wallace have done?" and braced himself 

 to the braver course. His father's occupation as 

 a hand-weaver having been superseded by the 

 competition of large factories, the family — father, 

 mother, and two sons, Andrew, aged twelve, and 

 Thomas, aged four — emigrated to Pittsburg 

 (Allegheny City), in the United States, where 

 they had friends and hard-working relatives. 



In the autobiography now published Andrew- 

 Carnegie tells his own story, not as one posturing 

 before the public, but as in the midst of his own 

 people and friends, tried and true, to whom he 

 can speak with the utmost freedom. It is impos- 

 sible to epitomise such a narrative. Its charm 

 lies in the record of friendships and in personal 

 touches, in the statement of guiding faith and 

 principle, and of the worldly wisdom of a generous 

 and worthy spirit which accompanies the detailed 

 story of the steps by which the author rose. From 

 being a messenger boy he became a telegraph 

 operator, then a divisional superintendent of the 

 Pennsylvania Railroad. He invested his first 

 savings in the building of sleeping-cars and went on 

 to the organising of rail-making and locomotive 

 works and the formation of a company to build iron 

 bridges, for which he also started the making of 

 pig-iron. And so we come, in 1868, when Car- 

 negie was thirty-three years old, to his great con- 

 tracts in bridge-building and his negotiations with 

 the bankers of New York and London, his ready 

 command of capital, and the final concentration 

 of all his energies upon the introduction into 

 Pittsburg of the Bessemer steel process and the 

 organisation of the Carnegie Steel Co. 



In December, 1868, Carnegie wrote a memo- 

 randum which has great interest to-day. It is 

 dated from the St. Nicholas Hotel, New York. 

 He writes : 



"Thirty-three and an income of 50,000 dollars 



per annum. By this time 'two years I can so 



arrange all my business as to secure at least 



50,000 dollars per annum. Beyond this never 



NO. 2679, VOL. 107] 



earn— make no effort to increase fortune, but 

 spend the surplus each year for benevolent pur- 

 poses. Settle in Oxford and get a thorough 

 education, making the acquaintance of literar>- 

 men. . . . Settle in London. . . . Man must 

 have an idol — the amassing of wealth is one of 

 the worst species of idolatry. ... I will resign 

 business at thirty-five, but during the ensuing 

 two years I wish to spend the afternoons in 

 receiving instruction and in reading systematic- 

 ally." 



Happily (or perhaps unhappily) for him, he did 

 not carry out this programme. For another 

 thirty-two years he was the head of the great 

 business which grew and flourished marvelloush 

 in his hands. During that period he had more 

 leisure — he travelled round the world, he spent 

 summer holidays in Great Britain, and made the 

 close friendship of such men as Matthew Arnold, 

 Herbert Spencer, and many others prominent in 

 literature or politics. In 1886, when he was 

 fifty-one, both his mother and his brother died, 

 and in the following year he married Miss Whit- 

 field, of whom he writes (twenty years later) in 

 1906 : " I cannot imagine myself going through 

 these twenty years without her. Nor can I endure 

 the thought of living after her." 



Mr. Carnegie tells us in this autobiography 

 that in 1901 the profits of his firm had 

 reached forty millions of dollars per annum, 

 and that seventy millions might have been 

 earned in the year when he and his partners 

 were informed by Mr. Pierpont Morgan, 

 the banker, that if they wished to retire 

 from business he thought he could arrange it. 

 The Carnegie Steel Co. was bought by Mr. 

 Morgan at the price which both he and Carnegie 

 considered fair. We are not told in this book 

 exactly what it was, but it was probably some- 

 where about one hundred and fifty million pounds, 

 of which a smaller part went to Mr. Schwab and 

 his partners, and the rest to Carnegie. 



Andrew Carnegie had found great pleasure in 

 giving pecuniary help to various public purposes 

 during his fifty and more years of money-making. 

 He now, at the age of sixty-six, set to work 

 deliberately to give away his vast fortune (after 

 amply providing for his wife and daughter) in 

 such a way as to make it a source of betterment 

 to his fellow-men. The present writer knew him 

 at this period, and visited him at his place in ' 

 Scotland, Skibo Castle. He was a kindly and 

 unselfish host, taking a real pleasure in literature, 

 and enjoying both golf and salmon-fishing. He 

 was devoted to church music, and kept an accom- 

 plished musician to play the fine organ built in 

 the hall of Skibo. He knew nothing of pictures 



