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 issues of fictitious stock,
created purely for the benefit of inner rings, have been almost
the prevailing rule. Stock speculation and municipal corruption