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silver mines of the country. Add the iron, copper, lead, and other minerals, and the sum is still but a fourth of the receipts of the railroads. Include the millions of tons of coal, the building stone, petroleum, gas, and every other product extracted from the earth, and the aggregate falls short by half. Now add the values to the farmers of all the wheat, rye, oats, barley, potatoes, and tobacco produced by the entire nation, and the sum would still fail to equal the tolls collected by the railroads each year.

Of this immense sum, seven hundred millions goes for wages, supplies, repairs, and other necessary running expenses, leaving a round half billion to be applied on capital. So enormous, however, is the investment, that, save in a few favored instances, the returns are exceedingly meagre. Some $350,000,000 is absorbed in interest on the bonds, yet nearly $1,000,000,000 of these securities receives no return for its use. Dividends on stock reach $90,000,000. But about $4,000,000,000 of the stock, or seventy dollars in every hundred, is passed by in the distribution. Little wonder, therefore, that during the last twenty years more than 500 companies have failed to meet their obligations and have gone into the hands of receivers. The combined length of these bankrupt roads is 100,000 miles, or more than half the present mileage. Their stocks and bonds aggregated five and a half billions, which is about one-half the entire issue of railroad securities. Of this no less than 29,000 miles, representing one and three quarters billions of values, went under during the single panic year of 1893. How much of this wealth has been lost in the wreckage or wiped out through the various schemes of reorganization is best known to the unfortunate holders. Certain it is that these losses in the aggregate must reach hundreds of millions.

An interesting feature of railroad travel is the element of personal safety. With myriads of opportunities for men to blunder and for steel to fail, the wonder is that accidents are so few. Each of the 2,000 passenger trains moving night and day has from forty to a hundred or more wheels, while the wheels on one of the 4,000 constantly moving freight trains may number 500. These wheels strike 300,000,000,000 rails during the twelve months. Yet scarcely fifty wheels and a hundred rails give way so far as to cause a recorded train accident in the course of the year. On the average a person would travel 4,500,000 miles before being injured, and 72,000,000 miles before being killed. Traveling night and day year after year the passenger would sustain his first injury at the end of twenty-five years, and meet his death by train accident at the end of four centuries.