While the whole investing public was scrambling for Metropolitan, the members of the exploiting syndicate found ample opportunity to sell.

The real situation became apparent when William C.Whitney died in 1904 leaving an estate valued at $40,000,000.
Not a single share of Metropolitan was found among his assets! The final crash came in 1907, when the Metropolitan, a wrecked and plundered shell, confessed insolvency and went into a receivership.

Those who had purchased its stock found their holdings as worthless as the traditional western gold mine.

The story of the Chicago and Philadelphia systems, as well as that of numerous other cities, had been essentially the same.
The transit facilities of millions of Americans had merely become the instruments of a group of speculators who had made huge personal fortunes and had left, as a monument of their labors, street railway lines whose gross overcapitalization was apparent to all and whose physical dilapidation in many cases revealed the character of their management.
It seems perhaps an exaggeration to say that the enterprises which have resulted in equipping our American cities and suburbs with trolley lines and electric lighting facilities have followed the plan of campaign sketched above.

Perhaps not all have repeated the worst excesses of the syndicate that so remorselessly exploited New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.