een sixty and seventy
millions. The majority of the stock issued and sold was subject to a
financial device whereby twenty per cent. controlled eighty per cent.,
Cowperwood holding that twenty per cent. and borrowing money on it as
hypothecated collateral. In the case of the West Side corporation, a
corporate issue of over thirty millions had been made, and these
stocks, owing to the tremendous carrying power of the roads and the
swelling traffic night and morning of poor sheep who paid their
hard-earned nickels, had a market value which gave the road an assured
physical value of about three times the sum for which it could have
been built. The North Chicago company, which in 1886 had a physical
value of little more than a million, could not now be duplicated for
less than seven millions, and was capitalized at nearly fifteen
millions. The road was valued at over one hundred thousand dollars
more per mile than the sum for which it could actually have been
replaced. Pity the poor groveling hack at the bottom who has not the
brain-power either to understand or to control that which his very
presence and necessities create.

These tremendous holdings, paying from ten to twelve per cent. on every
hundred-dollar share, were in the control, if not in the actual
ownership, of Cowperwood. Millions in loans that did not appear on the
books of the companies he had converted into actual cash, wherewith he
had bought houses, lands, equipages, paintings, government bonds of the
purest gold value, thereby assuring himself to that extent of a fortune
vaulted and locked, absolutely secure. After much toiling and moiling
on the part of his overworked legal department he had secured a
consolidation, under the title of the Consolidated Traction Company of
Illinois, of all outlying lines, each having separate franchises and
capitalized separately, yet operated by an amazing hocus-pocus of
contracts and agreements in single, harmonious union with all his other
properties. The North and West Chicago companies he now proposed to
unite into a third company to be called the Union Traction Company. By
taking up the ten and twelve per cent. issues of the old North and West
companies and giving two for one of the new six-per-cent
one-hundred-dollar-share Union Traction stocks in their stead, he could
satisfy the current stockholders, who were apparently made somewhat
better off thereby, and still create and leave for himself a handsome
ma