withstanding the severe financial and industrial depression, 
he went on expanding his coke business. He not only 
succeeded in borrowing enough money to operate the ovens 
he already had, but to buy more. 
After this, Mr. Frick’s progress was rapid. The panic 
of 1873 really gave him his chance, enabling him, with 
his great faith in the future, to obtain large tracts of coal 
lands. No one else understood quite as well as Mr. Frick, 
the value of coking coal in the great steel industry, then 
beginning to make a rapid growth. At 30 years of age he 
was a millionaire. His business interests overflowed into 
many fields. He incorporated the H. C. Frick Coal and 
Coke Company, with a capital of $2,000,000, and owned 
3,000 acres of coal lands, with 1,026 coke ovens. In 1882, 
there was a consolidation of the business of Mr. Frick with 
that of Carnegie Brothers & Co., and he became chairman 
of that corporation in 1889. The Duquesne Steel Works 
were later acquired, consolidated into the Carnegie Steel 
Company, and Mr. Frick became chairman. 
For many years—both before and after the organiza- 
tion of the United States Steel Corporation—Mr. Frick 
was one of the men of first magnitude who controlled the 
industrial policies of the United States. He usually 
exercised his power inconspicuously, but his compelling 
prominence cropped out from time to time. For instance, 
when the Interstate Commerce Commission published, 
in 1906, the names of the largest owners of railway stocks, 
Mr. Frick headed the list of individual owners; and in a 
list published in 1909, he was put down as the largest 
owner of Pennsylvania Railroad stock, the largest owner 
of Chicago and Northwestern, and one of the largest of 
Atchison, Norfolk and Western, and Baltimore and Ohio. 
Mr. Frick was a devotee of art, and exercised unusual 
skill and judgment in making his collection, supported by 
ample means. His collection is said to have cost him 
between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000, and to be worth 
$50,000,000 at present. It is easily rated as the finest 
private collection in the world. The supreme master- 
piece of the collection is the portrait of Rembrandt by 
himself. painted near the close of the artist’s life. This