While American public officials were engaged in the routine task of extending the political boundaries of the United States, the foundations of imperial strength were being laid by the masters of industrial life--the traders, manufacturers, bankers, the organizers of trusts and of industrial combinations. These owners and directors of the nation's wealth have been the real builders of the American Empire. As the United States has developed, the economic motives have come more and more to the surface, until no modern nation--not England herself--has such a record in the search for material possessions. The pursuit of wealth, in the United States, has been carried forward ruthlessly; brutally. "Anything to win" has been the motto. Man against man, and group against group, they have struggled for gain,--first, in order to "get ahead;" then to accumulate the comforts and luxuries, and last of all, to possess the immense power that goes with the control of modern wealth. The early history of the country presaged anything but this. The colonists were seeking to escape tyranny, to establish justice and to inaugurate liberty. Their promises were prophetic. Their early deeds put the world in their debt. Forward looking people everywhere thrilled at the mention of the name "America." Then came the discovery of the fabulous wealth of the new country; the pressure of the growing stream of immigrants; the heaping up of riches; the rapacious search after more! more! the desertion of the dearest principles of America's early promise, and the transcribing of another story of "economic determinism." Until very recent times the American people continued to talk of political affairs as though they were the matters of chief public concern. The recent growth and concentration of economic power have showed plainly, however, that America was destined to play her greatest rôle on the economic field. Capable men therefore ceased to go into politics and instead turned their energies into the whirl of business, where they received a training that made them capable of handling affairs of the greatest intricacy and magnitude. 2. _Every Man for Himself_ The development of American industry, during the hundred years that began with the War of 1812, led inevitably to the unification of business control in the hands of a small group of wealth owners. "Every man for himself" was the principle that the theorists of the eighteenth century bequeathed to the industrial pioneers of the nineteenth. The philosophy of individualism fitted well with the temperament and experience of the English speaking peoples; the practice of individualism under the formula "Every man for himself" seemed a divine ordination for the benefit of the new industry. The eager American population adopted the slogan with enthusiasm. "Every man for himself" was the essence of their frontier lives; it was the breath of the wilderness.