ork
Central and turn it over to other Eastern connections unless Vanderbilt
would give him a vital interest in the Vanderbilt lines.

Vanderbilt was harassed beyond endurance and, being of softer material
than his father, was fearful of the outcome of public opinion,
notwithstanding the fact that in a moment of anger--according to the
statement of a newspaper reporter whose veracity Vanderbilt denied
to his dying day--he had used the familiar expression, "The public be
damned!" There were intimations that the Legislature was planning to
impose heavy taxes on the property, solely because Vanderbilt held this
gigantic personal ownership in the property. This prospect frightened
him and he consulted friends whose judgment he respected. They urged him
to sell a considerable part of his holdings in order to distribute the
ownership of the property among a large number of people.

This plan could not be carried out, however, in the ordinary way,
because large sales of stock by the Vanderbilt interests, if the
speculating and investing public learned that he was making them, would
greatly depreciate the price and might create general demoralization and
a panic, while they would certainly injure the credit of the New York
Central property. But a way out of the dilemma had to be found. It was
at this juncture that a new personality, later to be closely identified
with the Vanderbilt lines for a long series of years, appeared upon
the scene. Vanderbilt was advised to consult J. Pierpont Morgan, of the
banking house of Drexel, Morgan and Co. At that time the name of J.P.
Morgan was just beginning to come prominently to the front in banking
circles in New York. The Drexels had been conspicuous in business in
Philadelphia for many years and in a sense were the fiscal agents of the
great Pennsylvania Railroad Company. But the spectacular success of the
House of Morgan a few years before in marketing the French government
loan in England had added largely to its prestige. And so Vanderbilt
concluded that, if any man could show him a way out in his difficult
problem, Pierpont Morgan was that man.

The upshot of the matter was that Morgan devised a plan for the sale of
a large amount of Vanderbilt's stock holdings through private sale in
England, and in such a way that the knowledge of such sale would not
become public in America. A confidential syndicate was formed which
undertook to take the stock in a block and pass it on to Englis