Next, these super-plutocratic trustees turned over to Stanford University the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars a year, without explanation, and this sum of money was deposited in the Union Trust Company of San Francisco without interest. Let Professor Brander Matthews inquire around among his banker friends in New York, and find out how much they would be willing to pay him in the way of interest on a deposit account, amounting at its maximum to eight hundred thousand dollars a year! I am informed that when Mr. Anderson came into the board, representing the Morgan interests in the Standard Oil Bank of California, he pointed out that that arrangement was not a profitable one for the university. Also, I am told by a Stanford professor, in whose rigid integrity I have many reasons for trusting, that he once heard one of these trustees state angrily that the board had that afternoon made a loan of five hundred thousand dollars to one of their own members, at a ridiculously low rate of interest on the real estate security offered. Afterwards the trustee who had borrowed this money got into trouble, and no one knows how much money the university lost. In the last president’s report I find a “capital decrease” recorded of $17,320 on Sacramento Northern Railway bonds. I also find an item, “Stock not recorded on books, when acquired in 1919 at Northern Electric Company reorganization.” This is only one sample—nobody knows how many other items are “not recorded on books!” There are other matters of record which can be verified by anyone. These trustees are the high-up members of the California plutocracy, the shrewdest business men the state possesses; they work diligently for their own financial interests, and have vastly increased their personal fortunes during the last thirty years. But what have they done for Stanford? They have made failures of the most important business transactions they have managed for the university. The president of the board of trustees is one of the richest ranchers in California, and there are on the board officials and directors of several of the state’s colossal land companies; how comes it that men like Mr. Newhall and Mr. Nickel have never been able to tell Stanford how to make a success of its big ranches? The Palo Alto, Vina and Gridley ranches all failed, and the last two were finally sold at sacrifice prices. There were something like a hundred thousand acres, sold for about four million dollars, which is forty dollars an acre. The Gridley ranch was sold at a price so low that every piece of it was almost immediately saleable at an advance about forty per cent, without further subdivision; a great part of this land is now being held for two hundred and seventy-five dollars an acre.