e corporation that should seriously undertake it
and complete it within a reasonable number of years, and because of the
opportunity it gave him of remaining a distinguished public figure, he
had eventually shouldered the project. It was open to many objections
and criticisms; but the genius which had been sufficient to finance
the Civil War was considered sufficient to finance the Northern Pacific
Railroad. Cooke undertook it with the idea of being able to put the
merits of the proposition before the people direct--not through the
agency of any great financial corporation--and of selling to the
butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker the stock or shares that
he wished to dispose of.

It was a brilliant chance. His genius had worked out the sale of great
government loans during the Civil War to the people direct in this
fashion. Why not Northern Pacific certificates? For several years he
conducted a pyrotechnic campaign, surveying the territory in question,
organizing great railway-construction corps, building hundreds of miles
of track under most trying conditions, and selling great blocks of his
stock, on which interest of a certain percentage was guaranteed. If it
had not been that he knew little of railroad-building, personally, and
that the project was so vast that it could not well be encompassed by
one man, even so great a man it might have proved successful, as under
subsequent management it did. However, hard times, the war between
France and Germany, which tied up European capital for the time being
and made it indifferent to American projects, envy, calumny, a certain
percentage of mismanagement, all conspired to wreck it. On September 18,
1873, at twelve-fifteen noon, Jay Cooke & Co. failed for approximately
eight million dollars and the Northern Pacific for all that had been
invested in it--some fifty million dollars more.

One can imagine what the result was--the most important financier and
the most distinguished railway enterprise collapsing at one and the same
time. "A financial thunderclap in a clear sky," said the Philadelphia
Press. "No one could have been more surprised," said the Philadelphia
Inquirer, "if snow had fallen amid the sunshine of a summer noon." The
public, which by Cooke's previous tremendous success had been lulled
into believing him invincible, could not understand it. It was beyond
belief. Jay Cooke fail? Impossible, or anything connected with him.
Nevertheless, he had faile