"'It is said, and doubtless with truth, that the great cities have hitherto been destroyers of the human race. A single American contrivance promises to correct the mischief. The cheap and rapid transportation of passengers on the elevated rail, when its capacity shall have been fully developed, will give healthful and pleasant homes in rural territory to the toiling millions of our commercial and manufacturing centres. It will snatch their wives and children from tenement-house horrors, and, by promoting domesticity, greatly diminish the habits of intemperance and vice so liable to be forced upon the humbler classes or nurtured in them by the present concomitants of their city life.'" On the 26th of September of this year the new president wrote: "I believe that the early completion of the New York Elevated Railroad from the South Ferry, passing Wall, Fulton and Catharine Street ferries up the Bowery and Third Avenue to the Grand Central Depot, will be a benefit to the three great railroads the trains of which start from the depot." And on the 1st of November, 1878, he was able to report to the directors: "It is not eighteen months since I purchased from some of your then directors a majority of the stock of your company at such a price that to-day it sells for more than five times as much as it cost me; and at the same time I bought from the same parties a very large amount of bonds, and to-day they sell for more than double what they cost me, including seven per cent. interest to date. The above stock and bonds I purchased on the express condition that the contracts of the company with certain parties to build this road for one million two hundred thousand dollars per mile ($1,200,000), payable one-half in stock and the balance in first mortgage bonds of this company at par, should be cancelled. The amount that has been saved to this company by the cancelling of this contract you all well know." William O. McDowell, in _Harper's Magazine_ for June, 1893, writes: