What was most interesting in this was less Carnegie’s attempt to make Christ an acolyte of Herbert Spencer and to make Christianity a version of an already antique liberalism, but rather his reticence, compared with men like Rockefeller and Charles Francis Adams, to acknowledge publicly how fortunes were acquired. Carnegie knew his own fortune owed much to the tariff, which he assiduously labored to keep high; but he wrote as if tariffs, subsidies, and insider dealing were the fruits of evolution.
