Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/440

434 bushels less of wheat than in 188-i, and a bushel of wheat was worth nearly two bushels of corn, wheat selling at an average export price of 87 cents and corn at 49 cents per bushel. On the Chicago market wheat ranged from 73 cents to 91 cents per bushel. During the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1885, there was exported only 57,759,209 bushels of wheat having an aggregate value of $50,262,715, as against 106,385,828 bushels in 1882 having an aggregate value of $119,879,341.

Each month brought reports of the large number of telephones taken out at the request of subscribers; yet, when the returns for the year were tabulated, the totals for all the Bell companies in the United States showed a net gain in subscribers of 2,903, Owing to the extreme financial depression this was an entirely unexpected increase.

One company, in reporting a gain for the year of nineteen stations, expressed its elation over the fact that it meant a net gain of thirty paying stations through the elimination of a number of deadheads. This company reported having "removed 1,147 instruments and placed 1,179," during 1885, and added:

When we analyze the places in which we gain and lose, we find that of the fourteen exchanges containing over one hundred subscribers, which we are working to-day, all but three are larger than they were a year ago, while of the nineteen exchanges of less than one hundred, all but six are smaller than they were in April, 1884.

This company was operating thirty-three exchanges with an average of 171 subscribers to each exchange, and was in a stronger financial condition than three fourths of the other companies. Yet its treasury stock was unsalable at any reasonable price, even though the purchaser knew that the entire proceeds of the sale would be devoted to new construction. Two and three years previously people went wild over telephone stocks, not only borrowing money from banks to use in purchasing telephone securities, but actually mortgaging homes. But during 1885, it was only possible to dispose of many local telephone stocks by allowing an enormous discount of from 50 to 80 per cent, from par value. So this company told its stockholders that

we are convinced that we are now at the period when we must look to our current earnings to pay for all expenditures of every kind whatsoever. The system, as now established, must not only maintain itself, but must provide for the ordinary extensions and improvements which the growth of population and business and the development of improved apparatus may demand.

Notwithstanding the several concessions granted its licensees by the parent company during the previous year, it perceived early in 1885, that the prevailing industrial conditions coupled with the low financial condition of a majority of the local companies, rendered necessary a further modification in relationship. During 1884 the parent company returned $806,634 to the operating companies in which it held shares of stock, which was its proportion of the net earnings.