brute spirit enveloped all business transactions. The business man
who lost his fortune was generally looked upon without emotion or
pity, and condemned as an incapable. For self interest, business men
began to combine in corporations, but these were based purely upon
mercenary aims. Not a microscopic trace was visible of that spirit of
fellow kindness, sympathy, collective concern and brotherhood already
far developed among the organized part of the working class.

As the supereminent magnate of his day, Vanderbilt was invested with
extraordinary publicity; he was extensively interviewed and quoted;
his wars upon rival capitalists were matters of engrossing public
concern; his slightest illness was breathlessly followed by
commercialdom dom and its outcome awaited. Hosts of men, women and
children perished every year of disease contracted in factories,
mines and slums; but Vanderbilt's least ailment was given a
transcending importance, while the scourging sweep of death among the
lowly and helpless was utterly ignored.

Precisely as mercantile society bestowed no attention upon the
crushed and slain, except to advance roughshod over their stricken
bodies while throwing out a pittance in charity here and there, so
Vanderbilt embodied in himself the qualities that capitalist society
in mass practiced and glorified. "It was strong men," says Croffut,
"whom he liked and sympathized with, not weak ones; the self-reliant,
not the helpless. He felt that the solicitor of charity was always a
lazy or drunken person, trying to live by plundering the sober and
industrious." This malign distrust of fellow beings, this acrid
cynicism of motives, this extraordinary imputation of evil designs on
the part of the penniless, was characteristic of the capitalist class
as a whole. Itself practicing the lowest and most ignoble methods,