c servants or as officers of corporations
they were supposed to be promoting settlement and transportation; as
individuals they were promoting their own fortunes. This result was
secured by the appropriation of public lands and the conversion of
investments which the public lands supported. That this sort of thing
occurred on a large scale and that it involved the violation of both
public and private trusts is fairly clear.

Public sentiment has judged and condemned the men who in their own
interests thus perverted national policy; and we approve the verdict.
But it is not so easy to condemn the policy itself or to indict the
generation that adopted it. Looking at the matter from the standpoint
of the nation, it was precisely the inefficiency and the corruption in
government which augmented the theoretical distrust of government and
made it unthinkable to the people of the seventies, that the Government
should build and operate railways directly. The land-grant policy
entailed corruption and waste, of course; but what mattered a few
million acres of land! No one had heard of a conservation problem at
the close of the Civil War. Resources were limitless; without
enterprise, without labor and capital, without transportation they had
no value, they were free goods. The great public task of the nineteenth
century was to settle the continent and make these resources available
for mankind. This task it performed with nineteenth-century methods.
From our standpoint they may have been wasteful methods, but they did
get results. In its historical setting, the viewpoint from which the
task of settlement was approached was not so far wrong.

When we examine the counts against the railroads as private
enterprises, we find that the poor construction, which from our point
of vantage looks like dangerous, wasteful, hand-to-mouth policy, is
only in part explained by the fact of reckless and dishonest finance. I
am advised by an eminent and discriminating observer that the
distinguished Italian engineer to whom Argentina entrusted the building
of its railroad to Patagonia, produced a structure which in engineering
excellence is the equal of any in the United States to-day. But the
funds are exhausted and the Patagonia railroad is halted one hundred
and fifty miles short of its goal; there are no earnings to maintain
the investment.

The reaction of high interest rates on the practical sense of American
capitalists and engineers has m