hypocrisy with his
depredations. "The secret of success in my business," he once frankly
said, "is to buy old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it upon other
fellows." Certain of his epigrams--such as, "It is the strap-hanger who
pays the dividends"--have likewise given him a genial immortality.
The fact that, after having reduced the railway system of Chicago to
financial pulp and physical dissolution, he finally unloaded the whole
useless mass, at a handsome personal profit, upon his old New York
friends, Whitney and Ryan, and decamped to London, where he carried
through huge transit enterprises, clearly demonstrated that Yerkes was a
buccaneer of no ordinary caliber.

Yerkes's difficulties in Philadelphia indirectly made possible the
career of Peter A. B. Widener. For Yerkes had become involved in the
defalcation of the City Treasurer, Joseph P. Mercer, whose translation
to the Eastern Penitentiary left vacant a municipal office into which
Mr. Widener now promptly stepped. Thus Mr. Widener, as is practically
the case with all these street railway magnates, was a municipal
politician before he became a financier. The fact that he attained the
city treasurership shows that he had already gone far, for it was the
most powerful office in Philadelphia. He had all those qualities of
suavity, joviality, firmness, and personal domination that made possible
success in American local politics a generation ago. His occupation
contributed to his advancement. In recent years Mr. Widener, as the
owner of great art galleries and the patron of philanthropic and
industrial institutions, has been a national figure of the utmost
dignity. Had you dropped into the Spring Garden Market in Philadelphia
forty years ago, you would have found a portly gentleman, clad in a
white apron, and armed with a cleaver, presiding over a shop decorated
with the design--"Peter A. B. Widener, Butcher." He was constantly
joking with his customers and visitors, and in the evening he was
accustomed to foregather with a group of well-chosen spirits who had
been long famous in Philadelphia as the "all-night poker players." A
successful butcher shop in Philadelphia in those days played about the
same part in local politics as did the saloon in New York City. Such
a station became the headquarters of political gossip and the meeting
ground of a political clique; and so Widener, the son of a poor German
bricklayer, rapidly became a political leader in the Twen