in cheap, comfortable, rapid, and comprehensive transit systems
and low-priced illumination, their activities greatly benefited the
public. The future historian of American society will probably attribute
enormous influence to the trolley car in linking urban community with
urban community, in extending the radius of the modern city, in freeing
urban workers from the demoralizing influences of the tenement, in
offering the poorer classes comfortable homes in the surrounding
country, and in extending general enlightenment by bringing about a
closer human intercourse. Indeed, there is probably no single influence
that has contributed so much to the pleasure and comfort of the masses
as the trolley car.

Yet the story that I shall have to tell is not a pleasant one. It is
impossible to write even a brief outline of this development without
plunging deeply into the two phases of American life of which we have
most cause to be ashamed; these are American municipal politics and
the speculative aspects of Wall Street. The predominating influences
in American city life have been the great franchise corporations.
Practically all the men that have had most to do with developing our
public utilities have also had the greatest influence in city politics.
In New York, Thomas F. Ryan and William C. Whitney were the powerful,
though invisible, powers in Tammany Hall. In Chicago, Charles T. Yerkes
controlled mayors and city councils; he even extended his influence
into the state government, controlling governors and legislatures. In
Philadelphia, Widener and Elkins dominated the City Hall and also became
part of the Quay machine of Pennsylvania. Mark Hanna, the most active
force in Cleveland railways, was also the political boss of the State.
Roswell P. Flower, chief agent in developing Brooklyn Rapid Transit,
had been Governor of New York; Patrick Calhoun, who monopolized the
utilities of San Francisco and other cities, presided likewise over the
city's inner politics. The Public Service Corporation of New Jersey
also comprised a large political power in city and state politics. It is
hardly an exaggeration to say that in the most active period, that
from 1880 to 1905, the powers that developed city railway and lighting
companies in American cities were identically the same owners that had
the most to do with city government. In the minds of these men politics
was necessarily as much a part of their business as trolley poles
and steel