[1] Dr. Arthur von Gwinner (1856- ) is one of the most distinguished of modern financiers. He was born, appropriately enough, at Frankfort-on-the-Main when that city was a center of international finance. His father, a lawyer, was an intimate friend of Schopenhauer and the latter’s executor and biographer. In 1885 young Gwinner married a daughter of Philip Speyer and thus became a member of one of the famous families of bankers in Europe and America. For a time he conducted a private banking business in Berlin, but in 1894 he became an active director of the _Deutsche Bank_. Two years later he was sent to America to supervise the reorganization of the Northern Pacific Railway by its European creditors; and while he was in the United States, he formed lasting friendships with J. Pierpont Morgan and James J. Hill. In 1901 he succeeded Dr. von Siemens as the guiding spirit of the _Deutsche Bank_, which under his administration made even more remarkable progress than under his capable predecessor. As managing director of the _Deutsche Bank_ he became president of the Anatolian and Bagdad Railway Companies. It was in 1909 that Dr. von Gwinner’s father received from the Kaiser the patent of hereditary nobility—an honor said to have been intended as much for the distinguished son as for the distinguished sire. Intellectually, Dr. von Gwinner is an international man: he quotes Dickens and Shakespeare and Molière, Goethe and Schiller and Lessing, with almost equal facility. His delightful personality stands out in all the Bagdad Railway negotiations. [2] _Infra_, Chapter IX. The French bankers also shared in the ownership of the construction company. A. Géraud, “A New German Empire: the Story of the Bagdad Railway,” in _The Nineteenth Century_, Volume 75 (1914), p. 967; _Report of the Bagdad Railway Company_, 1903, pp. 4, 8.