How the lust for power influences and drives lives and destiny.

Ambitious Hamilton Burton convinces his father to sell their farm and move to New York so that he can be educated to become a financial power. Years later, Hamilton, the most feared and unscrupulous man on Wall Street, controls the lives of his parents, sister Mary, and weak-willed brother Paul. When Mary becomes engaged to Jefferson Edwards, a business rival of Hamilton's she met on the farm, and she ignores Hamilton's objections, Hamilton ruins Edwards financially, causing ruin to others, but also leading to his own downfall. After Paul and his parents die, Hamilton is thrown from a window by a man he had ruined. Then, a title announces that the preceding showed what might have happened if Hamilton's father had sold their farm. Instead, Hamilton is now an engineer on the farm, serving people, not his own ambition, and Mary and Edwards are married.—AFI