[166] See Part III, "Great Fortunes From Railroads." [167] "Kings of Fortune":172. [168] Census of 1900. [169] Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau:104-253. [170] In those parts of this work relating to great fortunes from railroads and from industries, this phase of commercial life is specifically dealt with. The enormities brazenly committed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 are sufficiently remembered. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect. [171] So valuable was a partnership in this firm that a writer says that Field paid Leiter "an unknown number of millions" when he bought out Leiter's interest. CHAPTER IX THE FIELD FORTUNE IN EXTENSO In close similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which Marshall Field obtained the money which he invested in land. Consecutively came a ramification of other revenue-producing properties. Once in motion, the process worked in the same admixed, interconnected way as it did in the amassing of contemporary large fortunes. It may be literally compared to hundreds of golden streams flowing from as many sources to one central point. From land, business, railroads, street railways, public utility and industrial corporations--from these and many other channels, prodigious profits kept, and still keep, pouring in ceaselessly. In turn, these formed ever newer and widening distributing radii of investments. The process, by its own resistless volition, became one of continuous compound progression. LAND FOR ALMOST NOTHING. Long before the business of the firm of Marshall Field & Co. had reached the annual total of $50,000,000, Field, Leiter and their associates had begun buying land in Chicago. Little capital was needed for the purpose: The material growth of Chicago explains sufficiently how a few dollars put in land fifty or sixty years ago became in time an automatically-increasing fund of millions. A century or so ago the log cabin of John Kinzie was the only habitation on a site now occupied by a swarming, conglomerate, rushing population of 1,700,000.[172] Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the habitat of nearly two millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury. A saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires than it did voters in 1840.