But he had accomplished a great deal, and he was only thirty-one. Thirty years more, and did his energies survive devastating tropical fevers, the rarely relaxing strain of organizing and guarding industries, investments, transit systems, the ever-trembling aggregations of capital called Trusts, sound a money basis as his own were built upon, all the manifold ramifications of a fortune, which, through the increased resources of the country during the past ten years, through his own and his father’s genius, and by the mere force of momentum, was now close upon a billion dollars; still far in the lead of all the other colossal fortunes which in the past decade had raised the United States to a position no less menacing to herself than to the rest of the world; did not only his health, his life, survive the strain, but his ambition, his hope, his faith in the worth while, then might he expect something like immortal fame. Most men would have said that he had fame and power enough to satisfy any man of his years. His accomplishment in South America alone had made his name a byword on two hemispheres. In company with his college friend, Jeremiah Keene, who promptly renounced the Northwest, he had gone to South America, intent upon fencing it off from European invasion and saving his country from what he believed must otherwise be an inevitable and humiliating war. Privately, he thought the Monroe Doctrine an obsolete absurdity, and heartily wished it never had been conceived. Like all of his countrymen who thought, he would infinitely have preferred the civilizing forces of Europe in South America to the tumultuous opera-bouffe republics of vicious hybrids, where no American could invest his money with a reasonable certainty of seeing the tail of it a year hence; but the Monroe Doctrine was as sacred to the American people as the Lord’s Prayer, therefore the only thing to do was to make it theirs in fact as well as in fancy, and such an accomplishment must be the work of one man, of a citizen of the United States, who possessed that hitherto unheard-of combination of boundless wealth and burning patriotism. The government would never give a serious thought to the matter until the fleets of Europe were in the Caribbean Sea.