possible the work of railway promoters. By the year 1872 the Federal
government had granted in aid of railways 155,000,000 acres of land--an
area estimated as almost equal to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut,
Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The
Union Pacific Company alone secured from the federal government a free
right of way through the public domain, twenty sections of land with
each mile of railway, and a loan up to fifty millions of dollars secured
by a second mortgage on the company's property. More than half of the
northern tier of states lying against Canada from Lake Michigan to the
Pacific was granted to private companies in aid of railways and wagon
roads. About half of New Mexico, Arizona, and California was also given
outright to railway companies. These vast grants from the federal
government were supplemented by gifts from the states in land and by
subscriptions amounting to more than two hundred million dollars. The
history of these gifts and their relation to the political leaders that
engineered them would alone fill a large and interesting volume.

=Railway Fortunes and Capital.=--Out of this gigantic railway promotion,
the first really immense American fortunes were made. Henry Adams, the
grandson of John Quincy Adams, related that his grandfather on his
mother's side, Peter Brooks, on his death in 1849, left a fortune of two
million dollars, "supposed to be the largest estate in Boston," then one
of the few centers of great riches. Compared with the opulence that
sprang out of the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Southern
Pacific, with their subsidiary and component lines, the estate of Peter
Brooks was a poor man's heritage.

The capital invested in these railways was enormous beyond the
imagination of the men of the stagecoach generation. The total debt of
the United States incurred in the Revolutionary War--a debt which those
of little faith thought the country could never pay--was reckoned at a
figure well under $75,000,000. When the Union Pacific Railroad was
completed, there were outstanding against it $27,000,000 in first
mortgage bonds, $27,000,000 in second mortgage bonds held by the
government, $10,000,000 in income bonds, $10,000,000 in land grant
bonds, and, on top of that huge bonded indebtedness, $36,000,000 in
stock--making $110,000,000 in all. If the amount due the United States
government be subtracted, still there remained, in private ha