IN ASSESSING the importance of a business leader, his contribu-
tion to the industry and to the public welfare must be consid-
ered. This is particularly true in an examination of business suc-
cess in the free-enterprise economy of the period following the
Civil War. Argument is still hot between those who deny and
those who defend that system as the best means of affording to
the community a high standard of living. Although it is probable
that the unregulated capitalistic economy of the nineteenth
century has been weakened, there is still no agreement upon the
extent to which a regulated economy can exist without destroy-
ing the profit motives which make a free-enterprise system pos-
sible.

It is therefore particularly profitable to examine the contribu-
tions made both in terms of business advance and public service
which were made by Gould in the generation following the Civil
War. Gould was, and still remains, a business type. He had his
virtues and he had his faults. His defects have been exaggerated
beyond their true significance. Gould possessed a cold-blooded
unscrupulousness which enabled him to take full advantage of
the primitive nature of the art of corporate finance and the status
of corporate law, and to adapt to his purposes the low state of
political morals prevailing at the time.

What positive contribution did he make to the transporta-
tion and telegraph industries with which for the better part of his
business life he was so closely associated? What contribution did
he make to the well-being of the general public? How did he
promote the general interests of the community? To many con-
servative businessmen of the time, interested primarily in the
promotion of stability and in the maintenance of the earnings of
well-established enterprises, Gould was a wrecker of existing
values, "a destroyer of the peace," ¹ to use the language of one of

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