New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1877-01-10
GPE4T CAPITALISTS.

The excitement in all social circles which
follows the death of great capitalist like Mr..
Vanderbilt is not due to any inOrdlnatc respect
paid by our people to mere money and the
power it gives, but simply to the fact that
their own circumstances are influenced more
or less by the fate of the owner of so vast
sum. The Persian Shah or Indian Rajah,
whose fortune is carried about with him in
diamonds and rubics, dies, and nobody Is the
worse or better off, except the heir to his gilt
tering baubles; but every man in business,
down to the country farmer who had invested
his penny savings in New-YOrk Central or
Lake Shore, watched the feeble beating of this
old mans pulse for weeks with feverish inter
est.
The great capitalist in America, nowadays,
holds a lever of power such as the controllers
of their times in antiquity never grasped. MIR.
Vanderbilt owned, it Is eJimated, So5.OOO,-
900. CrGsus, who was able to bride all Rome,
was worth at the most paltry $6,OOO,O0O;
POmpey set out to conquer the western world
with twO-thirds of that sum. The Lydian,
whose name has been for ages synonymous
with riches, to whom the very rivers washed
gold was not so rich man by half as the
truckers son who was buried on Sunday.
Nor did those wOrld-famOus soldiers who con-
qucred provinces or subdued Kingdoms exer-
else as direct an influence on the individual
personal lives of tho mass of mankind as do
these few controllers of the currents of trade
now, when the slightest huctuatiOn carries
happiness and comfort, misery and ruin, into
the poorest household. When man makes
himself the pOssessor of so gigantic share of
Il L., Ill.
vdual and becomes literally power in the
State, thing to be watched and calculated
about as we do the crops or war in Europe.
Now there seems to be something unfair and
absurd in the fact that the whims or even
views of one man can thus directly influence
the world and hold as much of leverage as
great natural changes or the growth of ma
tons. We all secretly feel that it is a fOrtu-
nate thing for humanity that but half dozen
men in forty millions possess that peculiar
ability which enables them to begin with
capital of nothing and end with hundred
million, more or less; and still more fortunate,
that these mighty aggregations of wealth in
this country invariably melt away rapidly
after the death of their first owners and re-
turn in generation or two into the usual cur
this kind, too, is apt to be mistaken, especially
by young men just beginning life. Every
farm hand or shop clerk or cabin boy sees no
reason why with thrift, honesty, and zeal he
may not become Stewart or Vanderbilt it
is the golden light of these high beacOns which
draws into the cities ambitious youth and crowds
our byways and alleys with miserable, wrecked
lives. Thrift, ZEAL and honesty will
always conquer livelihood for any man, with
more certainty however in small town than
in a great thoroughfare; but it needs some
thing more than these to accumulate a vast
fortune. 1t requires certain insight akin to
prescience and as distinctive a power as the
artists eye or the musicians ear: an insight
which dictates where and how to SOW pence
and reap pounds. 1t showed Astor the un-
gathered treasures in the peltry of the North
West told Vanderbilt the income which lay
in steamboatng; foretold to Aspinwall ex-
actly where the vast tide Of emigration and
traffic would strike some day an obscure point
Oh the coast thousand miles away. Not one