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 JOHN MITCHELL 317 as strenuously as possible and as selfishly as possible for his own personal advancement. Consciously or unconsciously again, John Mitchell represents that newer theory of man and economics, developed first, possibly, by Thomas Carlyle, that social progress is most rapid, the sum total of human happi- ness greatest, when altruism and not selfishness prevails, when each seeks to help others and not himself alone. John Mitchell, this new man of the new time, is a self -made man. Self-made men are common in America. Generally speaking, we mean by the term self-made that the man to whom the term applies has, without the aid of inherited wealth or a college education, secured for himself a place in the so- ciety of the time. Andrew Carnegie, Charles M. Schwab, and John Wanamaker were self-made men. They began as poor boys, without advanced education and, by the aid of energy, ability, and intelligence, have placed themselves at the head of various business enterprises of this country. Li the larger sense John Mitchell was, like these men, self-made. The dif- ference lay wholly in the finished product. John Mitchell was bom at Braidwood, Illinois, on the 4th of February, 1870. Braidwood was a mining town stretching its full and ugly length upon a low, flat, marshy prairie. In the winter it caught the full sweep of far-driven storms and was half buried in snow. In spring it was surrounded by endless miles of marsh and mud. In summer it lay between inter- mingled fields of com and slough-grass. The town was no more monotonous than the life of the child, John Mitchell, to the age of twelve years. When he was three years old his mother died. Soon after, his father married again. The stepmother was a good woman but had what seemed to many unusually severe ideas of conduct and discipline. At six years of age the boy saw his father brought home dead from the mines, killed there in one of the ever-recurring accidents. This father had been the boy^s ideal. A soldier in the Civil War, and consequently an ardent American citizen, ever in- terested in all that affected the country *s political or social action, he left his social rectitude as a heritage to his son. In after years the memory of that father, known so little in those