Yerkes purchased the old street railway lines, lined his pockets by making contracts for their reconstruction, issued large flotations of watered stock, heaped securities upon securities and reorganization upon reorganization and diverted their assets to business in a hundred ingenious ways.
In spite of the crimes which Yerkes perpetrated in American cities, there was something refreshing and ingratiating about the man.
Possibly this is because he did not associate any hypocrisy with his depredations.

"The secret of success in my business," he once frankly said, "is to buy old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it upon other fellows." Certain of his epigrams--such as, "It is the strap-hanger who pays the dividends"-- have likewise given him a genial immortality.
The fact that, after having reduced the railway system of Chicago to financial pulp and physical dissolution, he finally unloaded the whole useless mass, at a handsome personal profit, upon his old New York friends, Whitney and Ryan, and decamped to London, where he carried through huge transit enterprises, clearly demonstrated that Yerkes was a buccaneer of no ordinary caliber.
Yerkes's difficulties in Philadelphia indirectly made possible the career of Peter A.B.Widener.

For Yerkes had become involved in the defalcation of the City Treasurer, Joseph P.Mercer, whose translation to the Eastern Penitentiary left vacant a municipal office into which Mr.Widener now promptly stepped.

Thus Mr.Widener, as is practically the case with all these street railway magnates, was a municipal politician before he became a financier.

The fact that he attained the city treasurership shows that he had already gone far, for it was the most powerful office in Philadelphia.