CHAPTER XI 



JOSEPH KEELER RECALLS COMMERCIAL AND POLITICAL EVENTS 

 OF FORTY YEARS 



The events of the years following 1870 were deeply stamped 

 upon the memory of Joseph Keeler, for it was in 1873 that he 

 was brought, as a young man in his father's warehouse, face to 

 face with one of the longest periods of business depression, 

 which Canada had known. So it was easy for him to give, as 

 he did at their next meeting, details to the professor covering 

 the crisis, which was a sequence to the financial collapse follow- 

 ing the Black Friday, 18th of September, 1873, in New York, 

 when the Jay Cook Company was forced to close the doors of its 

 broking and banking house, while having $4,000,000 on deposit 

 and holding $15,000,000 of the bonds of the Northern Pacific 

 Railway. Many thousand miles of railway had been built 

 during the previous ten years, enormous subsidies by the Federal 

 Government from $16,000 to even $48,000 per mile on the moun- 

 tain sections had been advanced to the Credit Mobilier, which 

 financed the Union Pacific Railway to San Francisco; while 

 the total expenditures on railways for these years was $1,700,- 

 000,000. He said: 



"The people of the United States had been alarmed, if not 

 shocked, at the revelations of too close relations between sena- 

 tors and members of the House and the Credit Mobilier, so that 

 the orgy of speculation and of railway building, without as yet 

 receipts from the traffic, as their lands were not widely settled, 

 came to a logical end, as all debauches must, and the breaking 

 of the banks of financiers, the breaking of the hearts of widows 

 and the breaking of the brains of thousands of overwrought 

 business men all came together. And the pity of it all was that 

 the panic did not remain south of the line. Canada was poor 

 but, nevertheless, the fever of railway promoting was in the air. 

 Then were planned and partly constructed the Canada South- 

 ern and Airline railways across the Lake Erie peninsula, as well 



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