IX Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie's countrymen felt in his lifetime that $350,000,000 worth of power over them was more than any man ought to hold. Accordingly, except when they were asking him to found a library or to endow a college, they did what they could to keep him humble and to persuade him that no one envied him and that no one would bow an inch lower to him out of reverence for his fabulous wealth. This was no doubt sound democratic discipline. He himself must have applauded the spirit of it. "It was long," he says in commenting on his own radically democratic upbringing, "before I could trust myself to speak respectfully of any privileged class or person who had not distinguished himself in some good way and therefore earned the right to public respect." But he knew all the time, and his countrymen knew at heart, that adding up his stocks and bonds would not summarize his talents and virtues. His gifts made him appear the most magnificent philanthropist that the world had ever seen. And by qualities which remained with him after he had distributed his fortune, he was one of the most original, interesting, and representative men of his generation. The Iron Master possessed intelligence of the first rank in its kind, an open and free spirit coupled with extraordinary firmness of character, indefatigable energy and initiative and a "creative" benevolence, together with abundant humor, poetic sentiment, and deep feeling with regard to the things that matter. Hs was, in short, a personality. He appreciated, furthermore, the significant and picturesque aspects of his own career and savored its contrasts like a man of letters. When in his old age, at his retreat on the Scotch moors, he undertook at the insistence of his friends to compose his memoirs, he had the material, the perspective, and the mood for a book fit to stand on the shelf by Franklin's. Following his own precept and Franklin's example, he wrote out his recollections simply, modestly, blithely, like an old gentleman with a good conscience telling the story of his life to his friends and relatives. The war diverted him from his work before the manuscript was in shape for publication. He wrote on the margin: "Whoever arranges these notes should be careful not to burden the public with too much. A man with a heart as well as a head should be chosen." Professor John C. Van Dyke was selected as an editor possessing both these qualifications. His task, which he says was little more than to arrange the matter in chronological sequence, he has performed unobtrusively—just a shade too unobtrusively. Carnegie had far more than the ordinary manufacturer's respect for literature, and he clearly hoped that his autobiography would be considered, in the stricter sense, as "literature." It contains, however, more instances of the "dangling participle" than perhaps ever before appeared in a single volume. There should be nothing sacred, to one charged with the editing of an unfinished manuscript, about Mr. Carnegie's dangling participles. Before the book goes into its second edition, these and such like easily corrigible slips should be silently amended. Then the really charming spirit which pervades it—I do not recall a harsh or ill-natured word from the beginning to the end of it—should make it a place in the best company, where it belongs.