I assume that a return of six percent would be ample on capital, let us say, to construct an additional track for the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Philadelphia. That would be improvement capital. Would the same rate be satisfactory for money invested in an unbuilt road into an undeveloped country? To state the case is to state the argument, and yet no railroad commissioner has yet been created with both the wisdom and the courage to stand openly for a distinction between development capital and pioneer capital. Unless returns are permitted large enough to induce a reasonable man to take a risk none will take it, for the unreasonable man has no money to risk. In a preceding paragraph I referred to the attempt of Mr. Spreckels to build a railroad across, or rather through, and much of the way under, the most barren succession of mountain peaks and defiles I have ever seen. An automobile road has been built at great expense across the mountain. Nine-tenths of the way not a green leaf or living thing—not even a bird or insect—will be seen. Mr. Spreckels is a very wealthy man. He is supposed to own over fifty-one percent of the gas, electric light, street railways and ferries of San Diego. He does not, however, consume fifty-one percent of the food cooked by the gas he generates; he does not enjoy fifty-one percent of the light that illuminates that beautiful little city; he does not take fifty-one percent of the rides on street car or ferry; and not one percent of the unearned increment, the advance in the value of property occasioned by his public-spirited enterprises, inures to him. Having more money than he can use and more than his children can legitimately spend, why does he risk everything on a railroad involving an aggregate of more than twenty miles of tunnel through solid granite? I will tell you why. For some reason, let us hope a sufficient reason, the All-wise Father has implanted in certain natures somewhat more than the average vision, somewhat more than the average courage, somewhat more than the average desire to achieve, and He seems to have ordained that these men shall be happy only when achieving. Service expresses the thought admirably when he put into the mouth of the returning Klondiker: “Yes, there’s gold and it’s haunting and haunting; It lures me on as of old. But it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting, So much as just finding the gold.” So it has ever been, and thus it is and ever will be. These daring, progressive souls risk their past, their present, their future and the future of their families, upon gigantic propositions, the consummation of which makes the appellation, “I am an American,” the proudest boast of man. CHAPTER XIX UNEARNED INCREMENT