There were energy and enterprise in the highest degree, but not efficiency or organization.

Little as we knew it, in 1876 we were mainly gathering together the plans and the raw materials for the building up of the modern business world, with its quick, tense life and its national structure of immense coordinated industries.
In 1876 the age of specialization and community of interest was in its dawn.

The cobbler had given place to the elaborate factory, in which seventy men cooperated to make one shoe.

The merchant who had hitherto lived over his store now ventured to have a home in the suburbs.

No man was any longer a self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe.