of industry. It schooled him even better than does a college course to know the uses of grit, self-reliance and courage. It made a man of him at the time of life when many other youths have not grasped the significance of the word responsibility.
In 1862, Mark's father died, and the young man took charge of the business for the estate. When he closed up the store successfully, five years later, he knew all about the grocery business, and his energy was proverbial in the city of Cleveland. At the age of twenty-seven he married, and went into business with his father-in-law, Daniel P. Rhodes. The firm Rhodes & Company traded in coal, iron ore, and pig iron. That was a generation ago. Young Hanna threw himself into that business with passionate enthusiasm. He learned the iron trade from the bottom, omitting none of the details. He was insatiably curious. He learned about coal mines and bought coal lands, learned about ore and bought mines, learned about boats and bought boats. He built the first steel boats that plied the lakes; established foundries and forges and smelters. Men were working in his employ, from western Pennsylvania to the base of the Rocky Mountains. He knew his men and he knew the work they did. He knew the value of a day's work, and he got it and paid for it. Where there was labor trouble the contest was short and decisive. The employer met the men himself. Either things were right or they were wrong. If he thought they were wrong, he adjusted them on the spot. If he believed they were right, the work went on. The regularity with which he won his labor contests gave him business prestige, and later in life placed him at the head of the American Civic Federation, in which he took an emphatic and a most helpful interest.
After he had reduced mining to an intelligent system—for he had a genius for organization and administration—he added shipping the products; and he reduced that, too, to a system and turned to ship-building. Reducing that to its lowest terms, where all worked harmoniously, he built a street railway, and when he came to operate it, he had reduced the labor problems involved in its operation to such exactitude that all strikes were avoided on that system, though oft frequent occurrence on other Cleveland lines. In the early eighties he bought the Cleveland opera house, and a little afterward entered the banking business, to the management of each of which he applied the same methods of industry, thoroughness and attention to mi-
