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. iii Galt’s name rose to impersonal eminence. The properties embraced in the Great Midwestern organism were referred to as Galt properties. Their securities were Galt bonds or Galt stocks. The acts of the Great Midwestern were not its own; they were Galt’s. There was a Galt influence which reached beyond his own domain. Once an important railroad system in which neither he nor the Great Midwestern had any direct interest was about to reduce its rate of dividend. The directors on their way to the meeting said they would vote to reduce it. But they didn’t. When the meeting was over they were asked why they had changed their minds. The explanation was that Galt had sent word to them that he wished them not to do it. He said it would be a shock to public confidence, and that he would divert enough traffic to the road to enable it to earn the dividend it had been paying. And presently Wall Street people were talking of a Galt crowd or a Galt party, meaning all that group of men associated with him in his undertakings.