Then had come the long years at home, varied only by the yearly tramp in Europe and an occasional visit to South America, where Keene was his general representative, and his boyhood chum, Jeff Hunter, his scout and secret agent. Two-thirds of the control of affairs had gradually passed into his hands, but he had found time to carry out his father’s more personal programme as well as his own: the great army of working-men in his employ believed in him blindly, and withstood the pressure of trades-unions. He had, indeed, raised the standard of wages throughout the United States, and had made so many bitter enemies that much of his best talent was consumed in circumventing the attempts of other great capitalists to ruin him. With the decent laboring man he was more popular than any President of the United States could hope to be; and this class was not only grateful for his actual benefits, and appreciated his sincerity, but believed that he had been as especially created to pilot the United States through her difficulties as the great men of the early days of the republic. His methods and his genius were different, but so were the times. With the professional politician of the laboring class, with that breed who made their bread and beer by agitating, he was deservedly unpopular, but he now had most of them in his pocket, and they gave him little trouble. He hoped to bring about a condition of living in the United States which would avert a death struggle between capital and labor; if this task were beyond him, then would he at least be in a position in some measure to control it. When the war broke out with Spain it was a matter of deep mortification and disappointment to him that the great electrical and mechanical ideal he had conceived in his youth was so far from completion. It had, indeed, given him more trouble than all his other enterprises together. Three accomplished electricians had met with violent deaths in the building on the prairie, and he had their discontented families on his hands. Two reporters had been maimed for life while attempting to solve a mystery which annoyed the public, accustomed to the easy elucidations of the press, and others had “lost their jobs” for failure as signal, if less painful. All these men were among Fessenden’s bitterest and most enterprising foes.