“Andrew Carnegie, the outstanding figure of nineteenth-century industrialism, will go down through the ages as the very personification of ‘Triumphant Democracy.’ “Overcoming almost insuperable obstacles by his unusual energy and sheer tenacity of purpose, Andrew Carnegie rose from a humble messenger-boy to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He rose from obscurity to a unique position in the world. “Yet despite the tremendous effort put into everything he undertook, Andrew Carnegie’s meteoric rise was due entirely to the opportunity offered to all in a land of freedom and of free speech. This fact he emphasized in all his writings, and in all his speeches. Moreover, it had a profound effect upon the course he adopted for the administration of his vast fortune, for the development of mankind, and the furtherance of science.” VII JAMES J. HILL _Born near Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 1837_ _Died in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1916_ A hundred years ago Napoleon, with the sword, carved out of Europe an empire. To accomplish this, the lives of men by the thousand were sacrificed. With misery and bloodshed its boundaries were extended, and in a few years it had vanished into the history of the past. In like manner, for centuries have men of dominance changed the maps of the world, with armies and the sword. But within the memory of men who live to-day another kind of empire-builder gave to the new world an empire of another kind. With peace and prosperity, year by year, he developed its vast square miles of territory. With rails of steel he pushed its boundaries each year still further into the wilderness. Each year he opened up to the world new acres of fertile fields, rich mines, and the tremendous natural resources of a virgin country. It is an empire that time can never destroy. It is an empire that has brought prosperity to the world. All this was done by a poor Canadian boy, born in a log-cabin at the edge of the forest in the Province of Ontario, in the year 1837. James Jerome Hill was his name. [Illustration: _Copyright by Pach Brothers_ _Jas. J. Hill_ (signature)] On his mother’s side the boy inherited the sturdy characteristics of Scotch ancestry; on his father’s side he found the brilliance and spirit of the Irish race. The soil was the sole source of their livelihood. Born in a wilderness where dark forests still sheltered wolves and deer, and where the Indians still roamed, the boy, from earliest childhood, received impressions that moulded his life’s destiny. He was born to see man subdue the wilderness, to see his struggle with the forces of primitive nature, to see his inevitable victory. As his own father hewed his few acres from the forest, so in the coming years was James J. Hill to redeem vast wilderness territories and give them to the use of man.