Fourth avenue surface line. The lower the wages, the greater the
dividends.

The further history of the Fourth avenue surface line cannot here be
pursued in detail. Suffice to say that the Vanderbilts, in 1894,
leased this line for 999 years to the Metropolitan Street Railway
Company, controlled by those eminent financiers, William C. Whitney
and others, whose monumental briberies, thefts and piracies have
frequently been uncovered in official investigations. For almost a
thousand years, unless a radical change of conditions comes, the
Vanderbilts will draw a princely revenue from the ownership of this
franchise alone.

It is not necessary to enter into a narrative of all the laws that
Vanderbilt bribed Legislature after Legislature, and Common Council
after Common Council, into passing--laws giving him for nothing
immensely valuable grants of land, shore rights and rights to land
under water, more authorizations to make further consolidations and
to issue more watered stock. Nor is it necessary to deal with the
numerous bills he considered adverse to his interests, that he caused
to be smothered in legislative committees by bribery.


VANDERBILT'S CHIEF OF STAFF

His chief instrument during all those years was a general utility
lawyer, Chauncey M. Depew, whose specialty was to hoodwink the public
by grandiloquent exhibitions of mellifluent spread-eagle oratory,
while bringing the "proper arguments" to bear upon legislators and
other public officials. [Footnote: Roscoe Conkling, a noted