As a matter of fact, however, they did much more. They developed in that year the issue which has dominated Chicago local politics ever since—the proper compensation to the city for public franchises. These valuable rights should not be given away, they declared, and they repeated it for good measures as well as bad. Not only must the city be paid, but public convenience and interest must be safeguarded. The boodlers boodled and the franchises went off; the protestation hurried the rotten business; but even that haste helped the cause. For the sight, week after week, of the boodle raids by rapacious capital fixed public opinion, and if the cry raised then for municipal ownership ever becomes a fact in Chicago, capital can go back to those days and blame itself. Most of the early Chicago street railway franchises were limited, carelessly, to twenty-five years—the first one in 1858. In 1883, when the earliest franchises might have been terminated, the Council ventured to pass only a blanket extension for twenty years—till July 30, 1903. This was well enough for Chicago financiers, but in 1886–87, when Yerkes appeared, with Widener and Elkins behind him, and bought up the West and North Side companies, he applied Pennsylvania methods. He pushed bills through the Legislature, saw them vetoed by Governor Altgeld, set about having his own Governor next time, and in 1897 got, not all that he wanted (for the people of Illinois are not like the people of Pennsylvania), but the Allen bill, which would do—if the Chicago City Council of 1897 would give it force.