Coal Merger?

Thirty-five years ago, Charles R. Elint began his lifelong habit of forming mergers and combines. His sobriquet "father of the trusts" has been gained by the active part which he has played in the organization of 22 large corporations, including U. S. Rubber, American Woolen, American Chicle, Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Somerset Coal. Mr. Flint is now 75 years of age, but his favorite occupation still has such a hold upon him that he is now planning the largest project of his life--a $100,000,000 merger of soft-coal companies in West Virginia, involving about 75,000 acres of undeveloped coal fields, 150 producing mines, and an annual production of over 20,000,000 tons.

Mr. Flint, while ready to announce his intentions, refused to name the companies involved, since the merger has not yet become definitely agreed to by some of them. Individual operators whose properties are sought by Mr. Flint have been asked to submit balance sheets and earning statements, as a basis for merger operations.

The promoters of the merger advance the argument that consolidation of coal companies at present independent should permit of operating economies through centralized buying, greater mechanical efficiency, and savings in the costs of selling.

Charles Ranlett Flint was born in Thomaston, Me., in 1850. His people had always been shippers; he, looking-for his first job, went to "every shipping office in Manhattan," but no one would hire him. Thereupon he wrote himself a reference, had cards made which declared him to be an. expert dock-clerk, entered Grace & Co., shippers. Quickly he rose, became rich in a time phenomenally short even for that era of expansion. He pounced upon every new idea, helped, with his own funds, to develop the automobile, the submarine, the airplane, the dynamite- gun. Growth, he believed, was a matter of interlacing of organization--a theory which he practiced in his own consolidating activities. A captain of industry, still he stuck to the sea, which had been gracious to him; he built, captained, the Grade, the "swiftest steam yacht that ever split the salt." He has been the confidant of Tilden, the associate of Elaine, the purse-bearer of the Rothschilds, the sponsor of a South American Republic (Chile).