Produced by David E. Brown, Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) A Captain of Industry BEING _The Story of a Civilized Man_ BY UPTON SINCLAIR AUTHOR OF "THE JUNGLE," ETC. GIRARD, KANSAS THE APPEAL TO REASON 1906 COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY J. A. WAYLAND. _All rights reserved._ A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY PREFACE This little story was written nearly five years ago. The verdict upon it was that it was "unpublishable," and so I put it away until I should be in position to publish it myself. Recently I read it over, and got an interesting vision of how the times have changed in five years. I put it away a revolutionary document; I took it out a quiet and rather obvious statement of generally accepted views. In reading the story, one should bear in mind that it was written before any of the "literature of exposure" had appeared; that its writer drew nothing from Mr. Steffens' probing of political corruption, nor from Miss Tarbell's analysis of the railroad rebate, nor from Mr. Lawson's exposé of the inner life of "Frenzied Finance." U.S. A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY I I purpose in this chronicle to tell the story of A CIVILIZED MAN: casting aside all Dreams and Airy Imaginations, and dealing with that humble Reality which lies at our doorsteps. II Every proverb, every slang phrase and colloquialism, is what one might call a petrified inspiration. Once upon a time it was a living thing, a lightning flash in some man's soul; and now it glides off our tongue without our ever thinking of its meaning. So, when the event transpired which marks the beginning of my story, the newspapers one and all remarked that Robert van Rensselaer was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.