Page:The Wisconsin idea (IA cu31924032449252).pdf/311

 seventh in the table showing the amount of corporation taxes collected by the United States government from the various states.

It is an easy thing to say that a state is prosperous, but when hard-headed men in Wall Street admit that a certain state, in which a political agitation to which they are opposed has gone on for many years, is prosperous and when the bonding houses concede that all the stocks and bonds of great financial interests and public utilities of all kinds are upon a sound basis in that state, surely there must be some evidence of it. If we find that failures in the United States have increased about 33⅓ per cent in ten years and have decreased in Wisconsin some 10.8 per cent, that speaks well for a state as advanced in radical legislation as Wisconsin. If we find that the cost of material used in manufacture has increased 52 per cent in four years in a state having no coal, the agitation is not driving capital out of the state. If we find that there have been absolutely no failures of state banks in that state for over ten years and but three national banks went into receivership because of embezzlement during that period, certainly it speaks well not only for the prosperity of the state, but for the safeguarding of the money invested. The clearing house exchanges have increased in the United States about 100 per cent in ten years and in Milwaukee 117 per cent in that time. New construction in gas utilities has increased 22 per cent