Two other railway presidents are Samuel Sloan, of New York, who was born when Madison was in the White House; and Richard C. Kerens, of St. Louis. Daniel O’Day[9]—every inch of him Irish—is one of the most important members of the imperial group of financiers who float the flag of Standard Oil. Forty years since, he was a laborer in the oil regions, whose main problem was to find a job; today, as he jokingly says to his friends, his main problem is to find out how to invest his surplus. Another New Yorker of Titanic mold is Alexander E. Orr, who was nineteen years old before he had seen any other country than Ireland. As a president of large commercial bodies, he has few equals. He is a director who directs. For nearly fifty years he has stood under the heaviest responsibilities, and was recently chosen, because of his ability and uprightness, to preside over the immense interests of the New York Life Insurance Company. Footnote 9: Recently deceased. If we speak of great Irish bankers, where is there a large American city without one? In Pittsburg, for instance, where there are a score of banks bulging with steel millions, the dean of the financial fraternity is Thomas Mellon, who, like Alexander E. Orr, was born in Tyrone. In New York there are three, at least, who are too prominent to miss—Thomas M. Mulry, the new president of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, which was wholly Irish in its origin, and which holds a hundred millions in its vaults; Miles M. O’Brien, who was for some time the president of the board of education; and Samuel G. Bayne, who is notable for having organized national banks in seven states. Charles J. Bell is a conspicuous figure in the national capital, as John C. Davis is in Wyoming. And in Chicago John R. Walsh has been a notable banker and capitalist for twenty years. The recent collapse of his financial structure should not obscure the facts of his extraordinary career. To begin as a barefooted newsboy, and to struggle to a place of power in the sixth greatest city in the world, always preferring to fight big enemies rather than little ones—that was Walsh’s record. Among the cattle kings of the West are Timothy Kinney, of Wyoming, and George Russell, of Nevada. Also in Chicago, Milwaukee and Omaha are four brothers who know something about the cattle and beef trade—four brothers whose parents left Kilkenny in the forties because black famine threatened them with starvation; who began their business life with no more chance of fortune than any day laborer in the United States, and who are today numbered among the few masters of the food supply of the world—Michael, Edward A., John and Patrick Cudahy.