much as his supervisors neglected -.heir duty to him as a citizen and property holder. And that wasn’t all: the company wasn’t earning the dividends it was paying to him! Why? The price of gas was high enough; gas companies elsewhere earned big dividends at a much lower rate, and his father was proposing to reduce the price from $1.25 to 75 cents. Young Mr. Spreckels couldn’t get answers to his questions from the officers and directors; they wouldn’t listen to him. So he did as reformers do in politics; he appealed “to the people,” and the people heard him gladly. In other words, the stockholders to whom he addressed a circular elected Rudolph Spreckels to the Board of Directors. Then he found out what the matter was.
Those respectable old business men on the board were dummy directors. They took orders like our dummy legislators, and, like these despised politicians, were organized by a boss who ran this business as our- political bosses run cities and states, inefficiently and dishonestly. Mr. Spreckels sent to Chicago for a chief account- ant; and he sent so far because he needed a man who would be free from local reverence for the standing of the officers and directors of the San Francisco Gas Company. He feared “pull” and “corruption.” And the Chicago man came;
