Where every one else failed, out of this havoc and social disorder one little group of half a dozen men were rising to the power and wealth which have become the marvel of the world. The first of them came tardily into the field about 1862. He started a little refinery in Cleveland, hundreds of miles from the oil wells. The sixty and more manufacturers who had been able to plant themselves before 1860, when they had to distil coal into petroleum before they could refine petroleum into kerosene, had been multiplied into hundreds by the arrival of petroleum ready made from below. Some of the richest and most successful business men of the country had preceded him and were flourishing.[49] He had been a book-keeper, and then a partner, in a very small country-produce store in Cleveland. As described by his counsel some years later, he was a "man of brains and energy without money." With him were his brother and an English mechanic. The mechanic was bought out later, as all the expert skill needed could be got for wages, which were cheaper than dividends.[50] Two or three years later another partner was added, who began life as "a clerk in a country store,"[51] and had been in salt and lumber in the West. A young man, who had been in the oil region only eleven years, and for two of the eleven had been errand-boy and book-keeper in a mixed oil and merchandise business,[52] a lawyer, a railroad man, a cotton broker, a farm laborer who had become refiner, were admitted at various times into the ruling coterie. The revolution which revolved all the freemen of this industry down a vortex had no sooner begun than the public began to show its agitation through every organ. The spectacle of a few men at the centre of things, in offices rich with plate glass and velvet plush, singing a siren song which drew all their competitors to bankruptcy or insanity or other forms of "co-operation," did not progress, as it might have done a hundred years ago, unnoticed save by those who were the immediate sufferers. The new democracy began questioning the new wealth. Town meetings, organizations of trades and special interests, grand juries, committees of State legislatures and of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, the civil and criminal courts, have been in almost constant action and inquiry since and because.