In a rare moment of self-inspection, after one of his darling visions had come true, he said:
“After all, Coxey, it’s the Lord makes the tide rise. We don’t control it. We only ride it.”
It was an amazing tide. Never was one like it before. It floated old hulks that had been lying helpless and bankrupt on the sands for years. And when men began to say it was high enough, that it was time to prepare for the ebb, Galt said it was yet beginning. On the day Great Midwestern stock sold at one hundred dollars a share,—par!—he said to Mordecai: “That’s nothing. It will sell at two hundred. Buy me twenty thousand shares at this price.”
“I belief you, Mr. Gald,” said Mordecai in an awe-struck whisper.
ii
Proceeds of the incessant enormous issues of new securities had been invested first in the reconstruction of the Great Midwestern itself and then in the shares of other railroads, beginning with the Orient & Pacific. That was the first of a series of transactions. We now owned outright or controlled by stock ownership no fewer than fifteen other railroad properties, besides lake and ocean steamship lines, docks, terminals, belt lines, trolley systems, forests, oil fields and coal mines. The Great Midwestern was the vertebra of an organism, ramifying east, west, north and south; it reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with antennæ to Asia and Europe. Its treasury was inexhaustible, fed by so many streams.
Not only did our own earnings increase amazingly as all those other properties poured their traffic into us, but the Great Midwestern treasury received dividends on the shares by which it controlled those traffic bringers. Thus we garnered twice. There was yet a third source of profit. As the Great Midwestern acquired new properties Galt rebuilt them out of their own earnings or by use of their own credit, so that their value increased. Thus, they brought us traffic, they paid dividends into our treasury and at the same time they were so enhanced in physical value by Galt’s methods of development that they were soon worth three or four times what they had cost. All this was in each case so obvious, once it had happened, and yet so remarkable in the aggregate, that people could scarcely believe it. A writer in one of the financial papers exclaimed: “If these figures are true, then the Great Midwestern Railway Company could go out of the railroad business entirely and live richly on the profits that appear from its investments in the securities of other railroads.”
And the figures were true.