THE LAGGING FACTORY FORTUNES.
Under the first stages of the old chaotic competitive system, in which factory warred against factory, and an intense struggle for survival and ascendency enveloped the whole tense sphere of manufacturing, no striking industrial fortunes were made.
Fortunate was that factory owner regarded who could claim $250,000 clear. All of those modern and complex factors offering such unbounded opportunities for gathering in spoils mounting into the hundreds of millions of dollars, were either unknown or in an inchoate or rudimentary state. Invention, if we may put it so, was just blossoming forth. Hand labor was largely prevalent. Huge combinations were undreamed of; paper capitalization as embodied in the fictitious issues of immense quantities of bonds and stocks was not yet a part of the devices of the factory owner, although it was a fixed plan of the bankers and insurance companies.
The factory owner was the supreme type of that sheer individualism which had burst forth from the restraints of feudalism. He stood alone fighting his commercial contests with persistent personal doggedness. Beneath his occasional benevolence and his religious professions was a wild ardor in the checkmating or bankruptcy of his competitors. These were his enemies; he fought them with every mercantile weapon, and they him; and none gave quarter.
Apart from the destructive character of this incessant warfare, dooming many of the combatants, other intervening factors had the tendency of holding back the factory owners' quick progress— obstacles and drawbacks copiously described in later and more appropriate parts of this work.