Business: Gold and Iron

Charles H. Markham, 65, for 16 years president of the Illinois Central, had a new position made to order for him last week—Chairman of the Board of Directors. He had been ill for four months and his associates, "desiring to preserve his health and his services for the I. C.," voted Lawrence Aloysius Downs, now head of the Central of Georgia Railroad, to succeed him as president.

Railroad men have a way of being self-made. Lawrence Downs is thoroughly a part of this tradition. After graduating from Purdue he went to work as a rodman for the I. C., rose steadily through the engineering department. A heavy man, mentally and physically, his particular talent is a blunt, wholehearted affability which endears him to all members of a profession in which this gift is the norm of social intercourse. "Handling men," he has said, "is largely a matter of getting them to like you." Charles Markham has said the same thing; Stuyvesant Fish said it too in the days when he was president of the Illinois Central. Presidents Fish, Markham, Downs—successively they built their lives into a railroad.

Once there were steamboats on the Mississippi. Writers, thinking about those boats, fancy a certain gallantry, lost now, in the passengers who used them; the names of the boats, too, were beautiful and proud—The Anna Linington, Belle Zane, Magnolia, The Doubloon, The Fashion, The Great Republic. And it is true that people on shore could hear music blown over dark waters from the frail and lighted decks; niggers were fiddling there, gamblers in tall hats were playing faro, planters and belles and bankers swept down the river; they are gone. ' But who shall say that another age, because it happens to be over, is prettier than our own? The proud boats carried produce as well as gallantry; the niggers who fiddled helped, in their off moments, to carry bales aboard; and when the boats quit the river it was because a new and quicker freight had joined Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. Some Eastern financiers had built the Illinois Central.

The undertaking flourished from the first. The river boats offered little competition and had pretty well disappeared by the time Edward H. Harriman was looking for a Chicago entrance for his Union Pacific trunk line from Council Bluffs. He had bought his way into the Illinois Central which Stuyvesant Fish controlled. Now Mr. Fish was a gentleman who tempered empire building with elegance; he did not believe that a person of quality need handle a railroad less gracefully than he would a cravat. His cigars, acumen, and the atmosphere of success and imported cologne that enveloped his person charmed all the southerners with whom he had occasion to come in contact. But he made one blunder. He quarreled with Mr. Harriman, was fired.