it was over, he turned to the study of railroads as the biggest enterprise of the new era, wrote his Chapters of Erie, became a member of the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners, which was created largely through his instrumentality, and crowned his professional career with the presidency of the Union Pacific. He was perhaps the first Adams who looked west with any special interest. His flash of genius was divining the future importance of Kansas City. The business success on which he plumes himself is his organization of the Kansas City Stock Yards Company, which, under his forty-year headship, increased its capitalization from $100,000 to over ten millions, and earned annually above $1,200,000. He does not blush to declare that he also organized in Kansas City another enterprise which made in one year "twelve dividends of ten per cent each."
The big business men, however, like the big generals, disappointed him socially: "Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next." Having made, as the vulgar say, his "pile," this well-bred, energetic Massachusetts business man withdrew from the ungentlemanly world of business, moved from Quincy, the home of his ancestors, to Lincoln, because the former residence had become too "suburban," and devoted his leisure to writing his memoirs, criticizing Harvard, and composing communications to the Massachusetts Historical Soci-
