Page:Americans (1922).djvu/268

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has performed unobtrusively—just a shade too unobtrusively. Carnegie had far more than the ordinary manufacturer's respect for literature, and he clearly hoped that his autobiography would be considered, in the stricter sense, as "literature." It contains, however, more instances of the "dangling participle" than perhaps ever before appeared in a single volume. There should be nothing sacred, to one charged with the editing of an unfinished manuscript, about Mr. Carnegie's dangling participles. Before the book goes into its second edition, these and such like easily corrigible slips should be silently amended. Then the really charming spirit which pervades it—I do not recall a harsh or ill-natured word from the beginning to the end of it—should make it a place in the best company, where it belongs.

Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 at Dunfermline, Scotland, son of a damask weaver who was ruined by the introduction of steam looms, and who in 1848 borrowed twenty pounds to bring his family to America, where "Andy" made his "start in life" at the age of thirteen as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory at a dollar and twenty cents a week. A second-rate "self-made man" might have attributed his success to the change of environment and to his own industry. It is a characteristic and attractive trait in Carnegie, creditable to both his heart and his head, that he recognizes and handsomely acknowledges his obligations not merely to his em-