The era of trusts, which have been the dominating factor in business life for the past four years, seems approaching its the organising of a trust of trusts to control the iron trade of the Tnited States. The news of to-day is that this gigantic project is practically accomplished and that its capital will reach the Stupendous figures somewhere between $80,000,000 and a billion dollars. J. Picrpout Morgan has been the active agency in the consolidation. It is to in-elude the Carnegie Steel Company, Federal Steel Company, American Steel and Wire Company, Rockefeller Ore and Transportation interests, National Steel Company, American Tin-Plate Company, American Steel Hoop Company, American Sheet Steel Company, National Tube Company, American Bridge Company.
Such of these component companies as had not the controlling power in the country in their particular lines of the iron business were yet of great size—in particu lar, for instance, the Carnegie Company, which is credited with making last year a net profit of $42,000,000, and the Federal Steel Company, its chief competitor, with its capital of $20,000,000.
It is the purpose of the trust to control the output of iron and steel in their various forms from the mine to the finished_product.
The billion-dollar trust will in all probability have as its president Charles M. Schwab. He is now president of the Carnegie Steel Company, is thirty-nine years of age, draws a salary of $50,000 a year and has stock holdings in the company amounting to $80,000,000. Twenty-tone years ago he entered the employ of the company as a stake-driver in a surveying corps at a salary of one dollar a day. He will control, as president, $96,000 men, upon whom 2,000,000 people are dependent.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.