He labored ably and well, and not for wealth alone.  He was one of a group of big-visioned men who saw that a nation was only as great as its industries.  It was only in his later years that he loved power for the sake of power, and when, having outlived his generation, he had developed a rigidity of mind that made him view the forced compromises of the new regime as pusillanimous.

He considered his son Howard’s quiet strength weakness.  “You have no stamina,” he would say.  “You have no moral fiber.  For God’s sake, make a stand, you fellows, and stick to it.”

He had not mellowed with age.  He viewed with endless bitterness the passing of his own day and generation, and the rise to power of younger men; with their “shilly-shallying,” he would say.  He was an aristocrat, an autocrat, and a survival.  He tied Howard’s hands in the management of the now vast mills, and then blamed him for the results.

But he had been a great man.

He had had two children, a boy and a girl.  The girl had been the tragedy of his middle years, and Howard had been his hope.

On the heights outside the city and overlooking the river he owned a farm, and now and then, on Sunday afternoons in the eighties, he drove out there, with Howard sitting beside him, a rangy boy in his teens, in the victoria which Anthony considered the proper vehicle for Sunday afternoons.  The farmhouse was in a hollow, but always on those excursions Anthony, fastidiously dressed, picking his way half-irritably through briars and cornfields, would go to the edge of the cliffs and stand there, looking down.  Below was the muddy river, sluggish always, but a thing of terror in spring freshets.  And across was the east side, already a sordid place, its steel mills belching black smoke that killed the green of the hillsides, its furnaces dwarfed by distance and height, its rows of unpainted wooden structures which housed the mill laborers.

Howard would go with him, but Howard dreamed no dreams.  He was a sturdy, dependable, unimaginative boy, watching the squirrels or flinging stones over the palisades.  Life for Howard was already a thing determined.  He would go to college, and then he would come back and go into the mill offices.  In time, he would take his father’s place.  He meant to do it well and honestly.  He had but to follow.  Anthony had broken the trail, only by that time it was no longer a trail, but a broad and easy way.

Only once or twice did Anthony Cardew give voice to his dreams.  Once he said:  “I’ll build a house out here some of these days.  Good location.  Growth of the city is bound to be in this direction.”

What he did not say was that to be there, on that hill, overlooking his activities, his very own, the things he had builded with such labor, gave him a sense of power.  “This below,” he felt, with more of pride than arrogance, “this is mine.  I have done it.  I, Anthony Cardew.”