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