HOW MR PIERPONT MORGAN STARTED LIFE

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXV, Issue 5008, 4 July 1903, Page 2 (Supplement)

HOW MR PIERPONT MORGAN STARTED LIFE

A writer in the “Pall Mall Magazine” for February says it is generally understood that to bo a really great American captain of industry one must have gone over in the steerage with two dollars in one’s pocket, or, at least, must have begun life as a grocer’s boy at three dollars a week. Piorpont Morgan has had no such advantages. Not only can both h;s grandparents bo identified, but his family can be traced on both sides to the first settlers of New England His maternal grandfather was a poet—John Pierpont—the same whoso exhortation to ‘‘Stand! the ground’s your own, my braves, - ’ has been echoed by two generations of American schoolboys. Mr Morgan’s father loaded upon him Mi' Carnegie’s “curse of wealth” to tho extent of 10 minion dollars—an amount that loomed larger in those daiys than 100 million would now. Instead of preparing for a business career by driving a delivery waggon, he took a Gorman University course at Gottingen. He inherited not only wealth but banking connections, which smoothed his road in life. Doubtless he could have been a self-unde man if It had been necessary, shut it was not. Ho built his success on tho money and the business bequeathed by his father, as Frederick tho Great built his on tho treasure and the army of Frederick William. From the very first. Mr Morgan’s bent was constructive. When he entered the financial world the American railway system was the proy of wreckers. Mon like Fisk and Gould would gain temporary control of a prosperous company by methods often coming within the scope of tho criminal law, strip off the flesh and fling the picked bones by the roadside, Morgan’s ambition was to take an impoverished or bankrupt oonoem and, nurse it to prosperity. He grasped from the beginning the advantages of consolidation. Ho tried to eliminate Waste, stop rate wars and substitute combination for competition. His first coup was in connection with the insolvent Alleghany and Susquehanna Railroad, which he rescued from Fisk and Gould, reorganised, and sot on its feet. That was in 1869, when ho was 33 years old. In 1876 the firm of Drexel, Morgan and Co., of which he was then tho junior partner, financed the great refunding operation by which the bulk of the National Debt of the United States was changed from a six to a tour per cent, basis, and the resumption of specie payments was assured. It was in connection with this proceeding that the word “syndicate” first penetrated the common American consciousness.