"There are many things known to the law," said Parnell to the president of the Special Commission trying the Irish members of Parliament, "which are strange to a non-legal mind."
This pioneer, inventor, and true Captain of Industry, real creator of wealth, has ever since had his neck bent to the pressure of hands too heavy for him. While all over the earth homes are brighter, knowledge is more easily got, and civilization forwarded, because of what his head has thought and his hands have done, he has retired to what is, in fact, a life of penal exile. He has been cut off from the darlings of his brain. Like the political prisoners of Siberia, he can eat and sleep and dress, but he cannot go into the world. His mind is at work there, in every factory and pipe line and lamp; but he must sit, unknown and unrewarded, in his pine cottage on unpaved Maurice Street, ploughed up in the prairies on the outskirts of Buffalo. Dearer than money to him, as to all such creative minds, would be the privilege of feeding the appealing activities of his brain with work. But he is banished from work. He has been set down outside the frontier of industry, and commanded never to return. No one dares buy or sell of him, nor adventure labor or money with him. He is an outcast. This is his greatest grief. The day I visited him he came into the sitting-room from the patch of garden behind the house. "I keep busy," he said, "to keep my mind off—anything to keep busy, if it is only pulling weeds." He is glad to see visitors. "I have been knocked out," he said, "so that nobody now comes to see me." His clear gray-blue eyes, tall, strong frame, firm mouth, large features and limbs, eager face, fit the facts of his career. He is one of the type of country-bred, hard-working American manhood of the last generation. There are no visionary lines in his face, as in his life there have been no impracticabilities, except his too great trustfulness. Gambling oil exchanges, wild oil-land speculations, inside "deals" with railroad freight agents, have never caught him. He has been a money-maker—not a money-taker. To-day, at eighty, the only thing he asks is that he may have the chance to work out his ideas. He talks patiently and courteously, with perfect intelligence and memory, but every once in a while breaks in with an outburst of what is evidently an unceasing refrain within—"I want to make oil."
The diminutive room we are in is stark in its simplicity and poverty. A paragraph in the morning paper on the table tells of "a massive oaken case, similar to a bookcase," which one of the chief reapers where Van Syckel has sowed is having put into his stable in New York. "It has doors of polished oak, with brass hinges, and heavy plate-glass. The inside will be lined with purple plush, and, when completed, the bits which shine in the mouths of his trotters and coach-horses will be arranged inside of this magnificent case in rows, ready for use, as well as an appropriate ornament for the stable."
It is better to be one of the king's horses than one of the king's men. But no words of envy pass his lips. He does not seem to repress them. He simply appears never to feel them. It chanced that as I left him, standing on the uppermost of the three wooden steps of his cottage, bleakness all about, "plain living" within, plain enough to satisfy the hardest climber for "high thinking," it chanced that his last words to me were—"I want to make oil," with an appeal to seek for him the opportunity so long denied. These words, plain and homely as they must seem to those who feed their appetite for the sublime and heroic with the highly varnished sayings of the battle-field and illustrious death-beds, will never cease to ring in my ears with a tone of greatness.[357]
SYMPATHETICAL CO-OPERATION
Some day, perhaps, when more of our story-readers have learned that there are things in the world quite as important as the frets, follies, and loves of boys and girls half-grown, more of our story-tellers will hold their magic mirror up to the full-pulsed life with which mankind throbs through the laboring years that stretch along after the short fever of mating is over. George Rice, coming from the Green Mountains of Vermont, entered the oil business twenty-nine years ago, when he and it were young. He was one of the first comers. Beginning as a producer in the Pithole region, in the days of its evanescent glory, in 1865, he prospered. Escaping the ruin which overtook those who stayed too long in that too quick sand, he was one of the first to develop the new field at Macksburg, Ohio, and to see the advantages of Marietta, on the Ohio River, as a point for refining. Crude oil could easily be brought from Ohio and Pennsylvania by barge down the Ohio River. The field he entered was unoccupied. He drove no one out, but built a new industry in a new place. In 1876 he had risen to the dignity of manufacturer, and had a refinery of a capacity of 500 barrels a week, and later of 2000 barrels. Owning wells, he produced, himself, a part of the crude which he refined. His position gave him access to all the markets by river and rail. Everything promised him fortune. His family took hold with him in the work of bread-winning. "The executive part of the business is done altogether by my family," he says. "One daughter keeps the books, another daughter does nine-tenths of the correspondence, and my son-in-law is the general manager."[358] One of the daughters was a witness in one of her father's cases before the Interstate Commerce Commission. "She discussed with counsel," said the New York World, "the knotty points involving tank-car rates, mileage, rebates, and the long and short haul as familiarly as any general freight agent present."