Toll Bridges

Over the Ohio River at Madison, Ind., there is use for a bridge; over the Missouri at Hermann, Mo. and Courtney, Mo. are similar uses; and at all three places public authorities, too poor to build bridges at common expense, recently authorized private individuals to build toll bridges.

Last week J. G. White & Co., world-famed engineers and financiers, advertised that they would sell stock in the National Toll Bridge Co., just incorporated especially to finance those three bridges.

That advertisement followed by a fortnight the advertisement of H. M. Byllesby & Co. and the Federal Securities Corp. to sell debenture bonds in a railroad and highway toll bridge over the Mississippi at Vicksburg, Miss.

Between the appearance of the two advertisements Governor Smith of New York vetoed legislative measures to enfranchise toll bridges across the St. Lawrence at the Thousand Islands, and across the Niagara River at both Tonawanda and Niagara Falls, N. Y.

Governor Smith gave five sharp and sane reasons for his veto: 1) public authorities can finance bridges at lower cost than private; 2) bridges are public and the public should own them; 3) privately owned toll bridges are as old-fashioned as privately owned toll roads; 4) the particular New York franchises sought were practically perpetual; 5) if private corporations can make money on the construction of toll bridges, the government can.

Nonetheless toll bridges have been built and will be built privately. At the beginning of this year, the U. S. Bureau of Public roads reports, 233 toll bridges were in operation in the U. S. Private organizations owned 191 of them. Under construction were 29 new toll bridges, 20 being private. Proposed were 163 more, 100 of which were to be privately financed.

At least six good reasons exist for private capital to build toll bridges: 1) motor travelers are willing to pay tolls to shorten their journeys; 2) local authorities derive a certain, if trifling, indirect income; 3) government authorities are often too lethargic to construct needed bridges; 4) engineering friends of private capitalists, rather than the engineering friends of officeholders get the construction jobs and profits; 5) sale of bridge bonds and stocks provides work and profits for banking houses; 6) bridge bonds and stocks are investment opportunities for people with idle money.

Such being the case, the soundness of investments in toll bridges depends very largely upon the integrity of the banking house, checked up in every case by the personal banker of the investor who underwrites the bridge bonds.

After J. G. White & Co. sell the securities of the National Toll Bridge Co., the J. G. White Engineering Corp. ("greatest in the world") will superintend the construction of the proposed toll bridges across the Ohio and Missouri rivers. Millions will be spent and huge masses of steel will be flung across wide water, but all the same these jobs are small ones for James Gilbert White. He is a great imperialist of U. S. contracting. Upon five continents his engineers are carrying the dynamic principles of U. S. business into lands where U. S. political influence will perhaps never penetrate. A huge dam in Abyssinia, a railroad in South America, and the construction of a great hydro-electric plant in Italy--these are a few of the big jobs now under the aegis of J. G. White, the son of a poor Pennsylvania village preacher.

The village lad went West, to teach physics in the University of Nebraska, but, when he branched out into contracting, his star rose in the East and he definitely made Manhattan his base of operations in 1890. From his great house on Riverside Drive he can look across the mile wide Hudson River and perhaps dreams of bridging it. With "J. G.," who has now turned 60, lives "J. D.," his son, James Dugald White, 38. "J. D." is a director in all three of his father's companies, but avoids the connotations of "engineer" and describes himself as "in the bond business."