Soon the railroads began to war among themselves, and in a mad scramble to secure business at any price they cut each other’s rates and unlawfully entered into secret compacts with certain big shippers, permitting the latter to enjoy lower freight rates than their competitors.  The smaller shippers were soon crushed out of existence in this way.  Competition was throttled and prices went up, making the railroad barons richer and the people poorer.  That was the beginning of the giant Trusts, the greatest evil American civilization has yet produced, and one which, unless checked, will inevitably drag this country into the throes of civil strife.

From out of this quagmire of corruption and rascality emerged the Colossus, a man so stupendously rich and with such unlimited powers for evil that the world has never looked upon his like.  The famous Croesus, whose fortune was estimated at only eight millions in our money, was a pauper compared with John Burkett Ryder, whose holdings no man could count, but which were approximately estimated at a thousand millions of dollars.  The railroads had created the Trust, the ogre of corporate greed, of which Ryder was the incarnation, and in time the Trust became master of the railroads, which after all seemed but retributive justice.

John Burkett Ryder, the richest man in the world—­the man whose name had spread to the farthest corners of the earth because of his wealth, and whose money, instead of being a blessing, promised to become not only a curse to himself but a source of dire peril to all mankind—­was a genius born of the railroad age.  No other age could have brought him forth; his peculiar talents fitted exactly the conditions of his time.  Attracted early in life to the newly discovered oil fields of Pennsylvania, he became a dealer in the raw product and later a refiner, acquiring with capital, laboriously saved, first one refinery, then another.  The railroads were cutting each other’s throats to secure the freight business of the oil men, and John Burkett Ryder saw his opportunity.  He made secret overtures to the road, guaranteeing a vast amount of business if he could get exceptionally low rates, and the illegal compact was made.  His competitors, undersold in the market, stood no chance, and one by one they were crushed out of existence.  Ryder called these manouvres “business”; the world called them brigandage.  But the Colossus prospered and slowly built up the foundations of the extraordinary fortune which is the talk and the wonder of the world today.  Master now of the oil situation, Ryder succeeded in his ambition of organizing the Empire Trading Company, the most powerful, the most secretive, and the most wealthy business institution the commercial world has yet known.