The sun., 1919-03-30

too muck the benefit of the doubt in few thirteen
knot paragraphs. It is matter. Wait till you
read his chapter on old Salem! He brings to life
RICHARD DERBY and his supersons. Piculs of pep
per, silks, ivory and spices are spilled before you
on the wharf with profusion as fascinating as
Mr.. HErGEsHE1MER's in JauG Head, But this is
fact. Keep it in your head when you read of boys
hardly out Of their teens making tens Of thou
sands of dollars on a single passage; and when you
come to The tale Of incredible hardshps suffered at
the ends Of the earth The War of 1912 naturally
takes up considerable space in this story and the
glories Of the Salem chapter are matched in two
chapters on the packet ships of the 1S40s and the
clippers respectively. We are used to big corpo-
rate enterprises to-day; but accustomed as we may
be to the large, impersonal performance it remains
impossible to read without a thrill paragraph be-
ginning coolly:
"Seven thousand sailors signed articles in the
counting room of JOSEPH PEABODY and went to sea
in his eighty ships -
The illustrations include several portraits Of
ships as well as men; and the frontispiece is the
glorious clipper Flying Cloud.
"The Age of Big Business"
To our perhaps uncultured mind the best book Of
these Yale histories so far--the most needed, the
most interesting-is BUXTON J. HENDRIcK's The
Age of Zig Business
"Ip 1865 VANDERBnT's fortune, consisting
chiefly OF feet of steamboats,, amounted to about
$10,000,o00; he died twelve years later, in 1877,
leaving $104 000, 600, the first Of those colossal
American fortunes that were destined to astouhd
the world. . Every day Mr.. RoCKEFEIIER
could seIad from Cleveland to the seaboard train,
sixty cars long, loaded with the blue barrels con-
tanning his celebrated liquid. That was a,eonsider-
alton for which any railroad would at that time sell
its soul. And the New York Central promptly
made this sacrifice . Books have been writ
ten to disereHt CARNEGIE work and to picture him
as the man who has stolen success from the labor
of greater men. Yet CARNEGIE is the one member
of brilliant company who had the indispensable
quality d genius. . o. Chicago, with popu-
lation of ,0Ot 900, has more telephones than the
whole of France, with a population of 100000 900.
Had you dropped into the Spring Garden
Market j Philadelphia forty years ago you would
have found portly gentleman clad in white
apron and armed with cleaver, presiding over
shop decorated with the design-'PETER A. B.
WDENER, Butcher . To-day the United
States produces four-ffths of all the agricultural
used in the world In 1916,
there were nearly 100000 automobiles in the
United States-more than in all the rest of the
output Of the Ford factories
These fragments give the nature of the book,
but not wholly its fascination, part of which is
due to personal portrait here and there and part
to the lueidity and honesty of the author.
The Boss and the Machine"
SAMUEL P. 0RTH's The Boss and the Machine
shares the general merits of Mr.. HENDRICK's vol
ume but is burdened with story far less pleasing
TO tell Mr.. ORTIZ goes back to the beginnings of
the repablic to trace briefly party origins. His
main topic is city and State polities-not to say
ward politics-and whereas Mr.. HENDRIcK can d
show immense and solid gains for our country in :
the record Of inventions and industrial develop
nent Mr ORTIZ is, of course, not able to do more :
than describe the cleansing Of our political affairs
here and there, now and then. This may seem to
be saying too little it is fact that the general
character of American political affairs has slowly
risen to far higher level as the years have passed.
and Mr.. ORTIZ makes this clear. Still the fact re-
mains that he is hardly able to do than point
hopefully where Mr. HENDRIcK can point with
pride. -. Well, what is true of Mr.. ORTIZ
IN this respect is true of us all.