The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-09-29
BURSTING OF "soo" BUBBLE.
Ruined Stockholders and Idle Work men From Lake Superior Company.

Ruined Stockholders and Idle Work men From Lake Superior Company. Detroit Free Press.
 While it is all very well to have poets eye ''in fine frenzy rolling" there are material disadvantages in combining poetry with business, as the employees and stockholders of the Consolidated Lake Superior Company at Sault Ste. Marie can testify. The crisis has finally been reached in the company's affairs. Its mines and factories and railroads have suspended operations, More than $500 men have been thrown out of em- ployment at the beginning of winter in a district which affords no opportunities for new employment, and the industrial and commercial life Of .fiourishing Can adian city is half paralyzed.
 It is a most deplorahle condition of af- fairs. and it is to be hoped that the inevitable reorganization will take place immediately so that the paying proper ties of the company can be operated again; for not all the properties are un- profitable. Some. of them have been pay ing dividends, but these dividends have all been swallowed up in the general losses from the establishment as a whole.
 The Consolidated Lake Superior com pany is perhaps the most extraordinary example of mushroom fnanciering that the country has seen in recent years. MT. Clergue went to Sault Ste. Marie to investigate, the opportunities for a pulp mill. He became intoxicated with the prospects that presented themselves to a lively Imagination; he intoxicated others. and as a result millions of dol lars have been wasted in an attempt to create an industrial universe in little more time than the Almighty. according to Moses, spent to creating the world. Out of this pulp mill project grew not only pulp mills. btu iron mines and rail- roads and blast furnaces and steel mills and power houses and street railway lines and ferry boats and pretty nearly every form of industry that could be es- tablished in timber and mineral dis trict.
 The power house and the railroad H. lustrate the general plan of constructive financiering. The canal and power house were projected on a princely sale. and are wholly sui generis; but unfortun- ately when both were completed there was nobody to buy power of the com pany. Apparently this trifiing detail had never been considered. and the magnifi- cent plant has remained idle because mo- body wished to use it. The railroad, which extends toward the bleak and bar ren region of Hudson's Bay, is said to have been built regardless of expense. It was a first class piece of railroad con- struction-one that would have done credit to the New York Central or Penn sylvania systems; but when it was built there was nobody to use it except the company, and for all it's purposes a logging road would have answered as we'll It was like building an expensive flour mill in the Black Hills in the ex- pectatfon that some day enough wheat would be grown in the crevices of the rocks to make it possible to grind flour there; or, like building a sawmiil on the Kansas prairies in the belief that for ests would ultimately spring up there and the mill would have timber to man. ufacture.