How extraordinarily profitable the business of Marshall Field & Co. was (and is), may be seen in the fact that its shares (it became an incorporated stock company) were worth $1,000 each. At his death Marshall Field owned 3,400 of these shares, which the executors of his estate valued at $3,400,000. That the exploitation of labor, the sale of sweatshop and adulterated goods, and many other forms of oppression or fraud were a consecutive and integral part of his business methods is undeniable. But other factors, distinctly under the ban of the law, afford an additional explanation of how he was able to undersell petty competitors, situated even at a distance. What all of these factors were is not a matter of public knowledge. At least one of them came to light when, on December 4, 1907, D. R. Anthony, a representative in Congress from Kansas, supplied evidence to Postmaster-General Meyer that the house of Marshall Field & Co. had enjoyed, and still had, the privilege of secret discriminatory express rates in the shipment of goods. This charge, if sustained, was a clear violation of the law; but these violations by the great propertied interests were common, and entailed, at the worst, no other penalty than a nominal fine. From such sources came the money with which he became a large landowner. Also, from the sources enumerated, came the money with which he and his associates debauched politics, and bribed common councils and legislatures to present them with public franchises for street and elevated railways, gas, telephone and electric light projects--franchises intrinsically worth incalculable sums.[177] With the money squeezed out of his legions of poverty-stricken employees and out of his rent-racked tenants he became an industrial monarch. The inventory of his estates filed in court by his executors revealed that he owned stocks and bonds in about one hundred and fifty corporations. This itemized list showed that he owned many millions of bonds and stocks in railroads with the construction and operation of which he had nothing to do. The history of practically all of them reeks with thefts of public and private money; corruption of common councils, of legislatures, Congress and of administrative officials; land grabbing, fraud, illegal transactions, violence, and oppression not only of their immediate workers, but of the entire population.[178] He owned--to give a few instances--$1,500,000 of Baltimore and Ohio stock; $600,000 of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; $1,860,000 of Chicago and Northwestern, and tens of millions more of the stock or bonds of about fifteen other railroads.