of whom had pursued careers more or less paralleling Gould's; a sophisticated confraternity they comprised, fully and finely capable of understanding one another.

All were wary old stagers; Gould could not easily overreach them; while all of them were not quite as astute as Sage, most were widely schooled in every devious tactic and ruse of financial and industrial warfare. Their safety lay in their lack of trust; the very reverse of the virtues they preached was developed by the necessities of their conflict. But when a credulous man, such as Cyrus W. Field, the originator of the submarine cable, stepped along with his confiding faith in Gould's friendship, spoliation and ruin were easy accomplishments. Field was simple enough to believe in Gould; only after Gould had mercilessly squeezed his wealth out of him, and had turned him adrift a bankrupt, did Field, too late, begin to realize that friendship had no place in the competitive whirligig. Field had little reason to whine over his misfortunes; the wealth that Gould tore from him was the product of a series of frauds in the results of which he was very willing to share.

GOULD SWEEPS IN ELEVATED RAILROADS.

This fleecing of Field happened in Gould's thimblerigging of elevated railroad stocks in New York city. No part whatever had Gould in the building of this elevated system; the franchises by which the roads were constructed and operated had been obtained by bribery. After other capitalists had done the bribing and had shown how profitable these elevated railroads were, Gould and Sage reached out for their ownership.

It was fairly well established before the Hepburn

Legislative committee, in 1879, that about $650,000 had been expended in bribes to get the charter of one of these elevated railroad companies, the Gilbert, later called the Metropolitan. Under examination, Jose F. Navarro, one of the officials of the company, testified that up to the time the building of this railroad was started, $650,000 had been spent, Questioned as to whether it had been expended at New York or at Albany (the seat of the Legislature) he replied that he did not know. It was quite clear from the interrogatories and answers that this $650,000 had been used as a corruption fund.16 Probably a similar sum had been used to get the franchise of the other elevated railroad, the New York.

The old device, so familiar in railroad building, of organizing a construction company, was employed in the building of the elevated railroads. A company called the New York Loan and Improvement Company was brought forth to carry on the work of construction. The same men were directors of both construction company and elevated railroad companies, and made fraudulent contracts with themselves.17 Such capitalists and "philanthropists" as George M. Pullman, John P. Kennedy 18 and others profited heavily from

16 Railroad Investigation of the State of New York, 1879, v: 43; These franchises originated during the period of the Tweed regime. The New York Legislature was then being_frequently corrupted. When the franchise for the Bleecker Street and Fulton Ferry surface line, New York City, was obtained, $434,~ 000 of its bonds were distributed gratuitously. (See "The History of Public Franchises in New York City, p. 121.)

17 Ibid., 12.

18 Of Pullman some facts have been brought out in Vol. i of this work. Another example of his methods and standards at about this time may be instructive. After Jacob Sharp had bribed the New York City Board of Aldermen with $500,000 in cash, in 1884, to give Sharp a franchise for a surface railway on Broadway, the owners of the franchise issued $952,000 in

these fraudulent transactions; they were, at the same time, reaping wealth elsewhere by many other methods of the same character.

After the first two elevated railroads were built, a new scheme of plunder was conceived and carried out. A company called the Manhattan was chartered with a capital of $2,000,000, ostensibly to build elevated railways. But it did not build a single foot; the same clique in control of the New York Loan and Improvement Company turned up in control of the Manhattan, and they leased the two existing roads to the Manhattan. Little actual cash did this lease cost them; they illegally increased the Manhattan's capital stock from $2,000,000 to $13,000,000, which amount they divided as loot.19 By stockjobbing methods Gould and Sage then crushed out most of the small stockholders, and secured control. They proceeded to water the stock still more, consolidate the whole system, and crowd out the more powerful stockholders.

FIELD THROWN OUT.

Certain of the heavy stockholders, such as Field, stood in with Gould and Sage, but others bitterly fought the various fraudulent moves and expedients that Gould and Sage brought into play. The outcome of the ensuing legal contest could be forecasted. Gould seldom stock and $2,500,000 in bonds for the construction of a railway only three miles in length, and the real cost of which was only $160,000. These bonds were unlawfully and dishonestly issued. Pullman knew that fact, and also of the bribery. In exchange for cars supplied by him, he received $150,000 of these bonds at fifty cents on the dollar.-See report of, and testimony before, the New York Senate Investigating Committee, "Senate Committee-Broadway Railroad, 1886": 181.

19 Railroad Investigation of the State of New York, 1879, v: 6 and 7.

went into court without owning his judge. The judicial tool this time was Westbrook of the New York Supreme Court; when Gould had started out in his career of theft, Westbrook had been his first lawyer. Now as judge, Westbrook issued orders and injunctions backing up. Gould and Sage's fraudulent acts. His subservience was so notorious that he once held court in Gould's private office in the Western Union Telegraph Company's office and issued an injunction.20

After becoming absolute masters of the elevated railway systems in New York city Gould and Sage no longer had any use for Field. At the first opportunity the stock market was rigged to divest Field, and he was thrown out to linger and die a ruined man.

20 The New York State Assembly later impeached Judge Westbrook for malfeasance in office; but from the Senate, as trial body, he managed to get a verdict of acquittal.

CHAPTER IV

THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE GOULD FORTUNE

What was the concrete result, the grand culmination of Gould's fifteen years of plundering? He, himself, gave a demonstration when on March 13, 1882, he called in Sage and other associates and exhibited to them a box crammed with securities. Disparaging reports had been scattered in Wall street that he had been hard hit by recent declines in the stock market; and it was to belie these statements that he summoned in witnesses to attest by impressive proofs that his wealth and power were unaffected. He spread out $23,000,000 of Western Union stock; $12,000,000 of Missouri Pacific stock, and $19,000,000 of other stocks. "There is not another man in America except Vanderbilt," observed Sage, "who could make such a display of stock as that." But the securities thus revealed were only a part of Gould's wealth; they did not include many other varieties. Two years later he ostentatiously made another and still larger display.

Those heaps of stocks and bonds were the legal tokens of this one man's far-reaching power. By their ownership he was vested not only with the mastery of the great inflowing revenues from numerous corporations, but the autocratic control over a vast army of wage workers. Every dollar of his fortune had been extracted by deceit, bribery, fraud and theft, yet here he was, one of the dominating magnates of the country, the 86