| CHAPTER I. | INDUSTRIAL AMERICA AT THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR |
| CHAPTER II. | THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN TRUST |
| CHAPTER III. | THE EPIC OF STEEL |
| CHAPTER IV. | THE TELEPHONE: "AMERICA'S MOST POETICAL ACHIEVEMENT" |
| CHAPTER V. | THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC UTILITIES |
| CHAPTER VI. | MAKING THE WORLD'S AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY |
| CHAPTER VII. | THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE AUTOMOBILE |
| BIBLIOGRAPHICAL. | |
A comprehensive survey of the United States, at the end of the Civil War, would reveal a state of society which bears little resemblance to that of today. Almost all those commonplace fundamentals of existence, the things that contribute to our bodily comfort while they vex us with economic and political problems, had not yet made their appearance. The America of Civil War days was a country without transcontinental railroads, without telephones, without European cables, or wireless stations, or automobiles, or electric lights, or sky-scrapers, or million-dollar hotels, or trolley cars, or a thousand other contrivances that today supply the conveniences and comforts of what we call our American civilization. The cities of that period, with their unsewered and unpaved streets, their dingy, flickering gaslights, their ambling horse-cars, and their hideous slums, seemed appropriate settings for the unformed social life and the rough-and-ready political methods of American democracy. The railroads, with their fragile iron rails, their little wheezy locomotives, their wooden bridges, their unheated coaches, and their kerosene lamps, fairly typified the prevailing frontier business and economic organization. But only by talking with the business leaders of that time could we have understood the changes that have taken place in fifty years. For the most part we speak a business language which our fathers and grandfathers would not have comprehended. The word "trust" had not become a part of their vocabulary; "restraint of trade" was a phrase which only the antiquarian lawyer could have interpreted; "interlocking directorates," "holding companies," "subsidiaries," "underwriting syndicates," and "