pride. He wanted it to be a creditable road because it served himself, his own neighbors and his own neighborhood. It always meant more to him than did an ordinary business interest. It became in fact his hobby. He used to call it his savings bank.

He called it his savings bank because he fully understood that it performed a local public function, as does a savings bank, and because he put into it for many years a portion of his surplus income. The property was built up partly with his own money, and it could not have been made profitable except by means of liberal capital expenditures. The railroad and its equipment, which he bought from Elias Sims, was, as a piece of physical property, not much better than junk. The early stockholders had all lost money. Mr. Hanna knew that he had to make a good railroad before he could have a profitable railroad, and when he took control his object was to earn a profit by excellence of service. The public responsibility which he recognized as necessarily attached to the railroad was that of giving its patrons the best possible accommodations.

That the railroad really did become profitable was due, not merely to good management, but to the growth of the city and to the substitution of electric for horse power. Mr. Hanna entered the street railway, as he did the coal and iron business, at the right time. The conditions which were to make it much more profitable than ever before were just coming into existence. The growing population of Cleveland was spreading out and was obliged to do an increasing amount of travelling in the course of a day's work. Mechanical improvements offered an opportunity of largely reducing the cost per passenger. A judicious system of consolidation and transfers could be used to stimulate traffic. Mr. Hanna took advantage of all these opportunities and managed in the end to make the railroad pay interest, not merely on the fresh capital he had obtained, but upon all the capital originally invested in the enterprise. Before the new conditions had come into existence, the most capable management could scarcely have accomplished such a result.

Mr. Hanna's personal attitude both towards his own business ventures and later towards general economic questions was that of the industrial pioneer - the man who starts enterprises,

takes whatever chance they involve and builds them up with his own brains and hands. A street railway was from his point of view much like any other business enterprise. The chief difference was that the number of its customers gave it a semi-public function; but its duty to the public was simply the duty of all economic agents that of rendering efficient service. If it rendered efficient service, the public interest no less than its own special interest demanded (from his point of view) that it should obtain the full fruits of its good management. The public had no more claim on a share of the profits of a street railway than it had on a share in the profits of the Union National Bank; and if it attempted to extort such a share, the only result would be the discouragement of private enterprise, the refusal of capital to invest and the consequent diminution of improvement and deterioration of service.

The industrial pioneer needs more than anything else a free hand. In our own country he has until recently usually enjoyed a free hand. Mr. Hanna enjoyed it everywhere except in his street railway business; and being accustomed to it, he was impatient when any unnecessary obstacles were placed in the way of his plans of improvement. His company ran its cars on many streets under grants from the municipal government. Attached to these grants were certain specific conditions. The franchises ran for a comparatively short period, because a general law in Ohio limited their term to twenty-five years. The prosperity of the company and the excellence of its service depended partly on its ability to secure other franchises, necessary to the normal development of the system, and partly upon a renewal of its existing franchises. At the time of their expiration, Mr. Hanna considered his company fairly entitled to such extensions and renewals, because they were necessary to a continuation of good service and its further improvement. He honestly believed that the interest of all concerned would be best satisfied in case he and his associates were encouraged to keep on investing their capital in the business and extending the service to the limit by means of the renewal of old franchises and the grant of new ones on liberal terms.

As a matter of fact there were always difficulties. The municipal government of Cleveland, during the years when the

system of the Cleveland City Railway Company was being improved, consolidated and extended, was as corrupt as that of the average American municipality. The council, to whom was intrusted the grant of franchises, was composed of petty local politicians whose votes usually had to be secured by some kind of influence. There was no effective reform sentiment in the community. A street railway company that applied for and needed particular franchises had to purchase this influence or else go out of business. Practically every street railway in the country which was confronted by this situation (few escaped it) adopted the alternative of buying either the needed votes or the needed influence.

The West Side Street Railway Company and its successors were no exception to this rule. It was confronted by competitors who had no scruples about employing customary methods, and if it had been more scrupulous than they, its competitors would have carried off all the prizes. Mr. Hanna had, as I have said, a way of making straight for his goal. He was peculiarly intolerant of a nagging, unenlightened opposition or anything resembling a "hold up." He and his company did what was necessary to obtain the additional franchises needed for the development of the system. The railroad contributed to local campaign committees and the election expenses of particular councilmen; and it did so for the purpose of exercising an effective influence over the action of the council in street railway matters.

Mr. Hanna had in the beginning fought against the increasing corruption of municipal politics in Cleveland; but he had soon yielded and adapted himself to conditions. He was not a reformer either by disposition or by creed. He was always interested at any particular time in accomplishing some definite practical result, and in order to do so he took men and methods as he found them. What distinguished him from other American business men and politicians who used similar methods was that the results which he wished to accomplish were usually good results.

In the case of the street railway he was very anxious to give a thoroughly good service, and he was ready to perform every public duty which could in his opinion be fairly imposed upon the

company. He neither expected to make extortionate profits, nor had he undertaken the business for that purpose. As a matter of fact the money he made in the enterprise was small compared to the time and energy which it had cost him. The stock of the company during his management never paid over four per cent, and the amount of water it contained, compared to other street railways, was exceedingly small amounting to only about twenty-five per cent. Before the consolidation with the cable line the property of the company never had been bonded, because Mr. Hanna was opposed to paying dividends as long as the company was in debt. His financial, like his business, methods were thoroughly sound - as sound, to use his own analogy, as those of a savings bank.

At a later date, and before Mr. Hanna died, the Cleveland surface railroads became the storm centre of municipal politics in Cleveland. They were hauled before the court of public opinion by Tom L. Johnson, and rightly or wrongly they were condemned. Whatever faults they had committed they most assuredly expiated. But the fact that the verdict went against them should not be allowed to obscure their manifest good behavior compared to the really flagrant cases of street railway mismanagement in Chicago and New York.

Mark Hanna in particular was never an ordinary street railway financier. He had no interest in any street railway system outside of Cleveland, and the local system in which he was interested was a minor one, whose cars passed his own door, and in which he took the same sort of pride that a man might take in his own stable, carriages and horses. He had bought a collection of rusty rails, worm-eaten cars and tired horses, and had converted them by virtue of hard and patient work into an efficient railroad. His mental attitude towards his railroad was always determined by his early struggles and tribulations; and the memory of them prevented him from sufficiently understanding the difference between the conditions prevailing in the street railway business of Cleveland in 1882 and 1902.

Public opinion, however, came to recognize that the street railways had passed out of the pioneer stage; and for many years the local politics in Cleveland were dominated by the clash between the old and the new conception of the proper rela

tions between the city and the street railway companies. This clash began during Mr. Hanna's life. It was always a source of political embarrassment and weakness to him, because it involved him, as a national political leader, too much in a local political issue, and one on which public opinion was running against him. But embarrassing as it was, and much as one would like to see certain aspects of Mr. Hanna's street railway connection expunged from the record, he remained throughout the whole episode true to his own standards and characteristic personal tendencies. He had put himself into the street railway just as he had put himself into Rhodes & Co., the Union National Bank and the theatre; and he had become more of a man because of the personal expenditure. All his business enterprises were fundamentally personal investments, and returned to him something more and better than the wages of management and the current rate of interest.