its leased lines, annual sums far
in excess of their earning capacity, necessarily prevented anything in
the nature of profitable operation. The unpleasant fact is that these
dividends were paid with borrowed money merely to make the stock
marketable. It is not unlikely that the padded construction accounts,
already described, may have concealed large disbursements of money
for unearned dividends. When the Metropolitan was listed in 1897, it
immediately went beyond par. The excitement that followed forms one of
the most memorable chapters in the history of Wall Street. The investing
public, egged on by daring and skillful stock manipulators, simply went
mad and purchased not only Metropolitan but street railway shares
that were then even more speculative. It was in these bubble days that
Brooklyn Rapid Transit soared to heights from which it subsequently
descended precipitately. Under this stimulus, Metropolitan stock
ultimately sold at $269 a share. While the whole investing public was
scrambling for Metropolitan, the members of the exploiting syndicate
found ample opportunity to sell. The real situation became apparent when
William C. Whitney died in 1904 leaving an estate valued at $40,000,000.
Not a single share of Metropolitan was found among his assets! The
final crash came in 1907, when the Metropolitan, a wrecked and plundered
shell, confessed insolvency and went into a receivership. Those who had
purchased its stock found their holdings as worthless as the traditional
western gold mine. The story of the Chicago and Philadelphia systems,
as well as that of numerous other cities, had been essentially the same.
The transit facilities of millions of Americans had merely become
the instruments of a group of speculators who had made huge personal
fortunes and had left, as a monument of their labors, street railway
lines whose gross overcapitalization was apparent to all and whose
physical dilapidation in many cases revealed the character of their
management.

It seems perhaps an exaggeration to say that the enterprises which have
resulted in equipping our American cities and suburbs with trolley lines
and electric lighting facilities have followed the plan of campaign
sketched above. Perhaps not all have repeated the worst excesses of
the syndicate that so remorselessly exploited New York, Chicago, and
Philadelphia. Yet in most cases these elaborate undertakings have been
largely speculative in character. Huge issue