osited their coins in a little fare box. At night tiny oil lamps
made the darkness visible; in winter time shivering passengers warmed
themselves by pulling their coat collars and furs closely about their
necks and thrusting their lower members into a heap of straw, piled
almost a foot deep on the floor.

Who would have thought, forty years ago, that the lighting of these dark
and dirty streets and the modernization of these local railway systems
would have given rise to one of the most astounding chapters in
our financial history and created hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
millionaires? When Thomas A. Edison invented the incandescent light, and
when Frank J. Sprague in 1887 constructed the first practicable
urban trolley line, in Richmond, Virginia, they liberated forces that
powerfully affected not only our social and economic life but
our political institutions. These two inventions introduced anew
phrase--"Public Utilities." Combined with the great growth and
prosperity of the cities they furnished a fruitful opportunity to
several particularly famous groups of financial adventurers. They led to
the organization of "syndicates" which devoted all their energies, for
a quarter of a century, to exploiting city lighting and transportation
systems. These syndicates made a business of entering city after city,
purchasing the scattered street railway lines and lighting companies,
equipping them with electricity, combining them into unified systems,
organizing large corporations, and floating huge issues of securities.
A single group of six men--Yerkes, Widener, Elkins, Dolan, Whitney,
and Ryan--combined the street railways, and in many cases the lighting
companies, of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and at least
a hundred towns and cities in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, New Hampshire, and Maine. Either jointly
or separately they controlled the gas and electric lighting companies
of Philadelphia, Reading, Harrisburg, Atlanta, Vicksburg, St. Augustine,
Minneapolis, Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City, Sioux City, Syracuse, and
about seventy other communities. A single corporation developed nearly
all the trolley lines and lighting companies of New Jersey; another
controlled similar utilities in San Francisco and other cities on the
Pacific Coast. In practically all instances these syndicates adopted
precisely the same plan of operation. In so far as their activities
resulted