in its history. The Metropolitan reports show that they spent anywhere
from $500,000 to $600,000 a mile building underground trolley lines
which, at their own extravagant estimate, should have cost only
$150,000. In a few years untold millions, wasted in this way,
disappeared from the Metropolitan treasury. In 1907 the Public
Service Commission of New York began investigating these "construction
accounts," but it had not proceeded far when the discovery was made that
all the Metropolitan books containing the information desired had been
destroyed. All the ledgers, journals, checks, and vouchers containing
the financial history of the Metropolitan since its organization in 1893
had been sold for $117 to a junkman, who had agreed in writing to grind
them into pulp, so that they would be safe from "prying eyes." We shall
therefore never know precisely how this money was spent. But here again
the Chicago transactions help us to an understanding. In 1898 Charles T.
Yerkes, with that cynical frankness which some people have regarded as
a redeeming trait in his character, opened his books for the preceding
twenty-five years to the Civic Federation of Chicago. These books
disclosed that Mr. Yerkes and his associates, Widener and Elkins, had
made many millions in reconstructing the Chicago lines at prices which
represented gross overcharges to the stockholders. For this purpose
Yerkes, Widener, and Elkins organized the United States Construction
Company and made contracts for installing the new electric systems on
the lines which they controlled by lease or stock ownership. It seems a
not unnatural suspicion that the vanished Metropolitan books would have
disclosed similar performances in New York.

The concluding chapter of this tragedy has its setting in the Stock
Exchange. These inside gentlemen, as already said, received no cash as
their profits from these manipulations--only stock. But in the eyes
of the public this stock represented an enormous value. Metropolitan
securities, for example, represented the control and ownership of all
the surface transit business in the city of New York. Naturally, it had
a great investment value. When it began to pay regularly seven per cent
dividends, the public appetite for Metropolitan became insatiable. The
eager purchasers did not know, what we know now, that the Metropolitan
did not earn these dividends and never could have earned them. The mere
fact that it was paying, as rentals on