cited, going, day after day, the same monotonous dog-trot, easily
outdistancing scores of apparently stronger men. He also had the
indispensable faculty of silence. He has always been the least talkative
man in Wall Street, but, with all his reserve, he has remained the soul
of courtesy and outward good nature.

Here, then, we have the characters of this great impending drama--Yerkes
in Chicago, Widener and Elkins in Philadelphia, Whitney and Ryan in New
York. These five men did not invariably work as a unit. Yerkes, though
he had considerable interest in Philadelphia, which had been the scene
of his earliest exploits, limited his activities largely to Chicago.
Widener and Elkins, however, not only dominated Philadelphia traction
but participated in all of Yerkes's enterprises in Chicago and held
an equal interest with Whitney and Ryan in New York. The latter
Metropolitan pair, though they confined their interest chiefly to their
own city, at times transferred their attention to Chicago. Thus, for
nearly thirty years, these five men found their oyster in the transit
systems of America's three greatest cities--and, for that matter, in
many others also.

An attempt to trace the convolutions of America's street railway and
public lighting finance would involve a puzzling array of statistics and
an inextricable complexity of stocks, bonds, leases, holding companies,
operating companies, construction companies, reorganizations, and the
like. Difficult and apparently impenetrable as is this financial
morass, the essential facts still stand out plainly enough. As already
indicated, the fundamental basis upon which the whole system rested
was the control of municipal politics. The story of the Metropolitan's
manipulation of the New York street railways starts with one of the
most sordid episodes in the municipal annals of America's largest city.
Somewhat more than thirty years ago, a group of New York city fathers
acquired an international fame as the "boodle aldermen." These men had
finally given way to the importunities of a certain Jacob Sharp, an
eccentric New York character, who had for many years operated New
York City railways, and granted a franchise for the construction of
a horse-car line on lower Broadway. Soon after voting this franchise,
regarded as perhaps the most valuable in the world, these same aldermen
had begun to wear diamonds, to purchase real estate, and give other
outward evidences of unexpected prosper