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 "community of interest"-- all this jargon of modern business would have signified nothing to our immediate ancestors.

Our nation of 1865 was a nation of farmers, city artisans, and industrious, independent business men, and small-scale manufacturers.

Millionaires, though they were not unknown, did not swarm all over the land.

Luxury, though it had made great progress in the latter years of the war, had not become the American standard of well-being.

The industrial story of the United States in the last fifty years is the story of the most amazing economic transformation that the world has ever known; a change which is fitly typified in the evolution of the independent oil driller of western Pennsylvania into the Standard Oil Company, and of the ancient open air forge on the banks of the Allegheny into the United States Steel Corporation.
The slow, unceasing ages had been accumulating a priceless inheritance for the American people.