586 THE IMPENDING REVOLUTION. 



as much. The government thus holds a second mortgage 

 with an amount of debt nearly equal to its own ahead of 

 it All this enormous indebtedness was not incurred in 

 the construction or operation of the road or in the purchase 

 of the plant. The men who controlled the construction 

 went into the business with a capital of $100,000. They 

 spent only $50,000 of the money in preliminary surveys. 

 The government loaned them $16,000 a mile for construc- 

 tion of tracks on the level plains from Omaha to Cheyenne 

 at the foot of the alleged Rocky Mountains, (which, in 

 point of fact, don't exist on the line of the road), and 

 $16,000 more was obtained by sale of first mortgage 

 bonds. For several hundred miles across the supposed 

 Rockies the mortgages yielded $96,000 a mile. Thence, 

 over the nearly level plains to Salt Lake, and to the foot 

 of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, some 1,300 or 1,400 

 miles, $64,000 a mile was paid for a single track, with 

 wooden culverts and bridges, and almost without cuts or 

 fills; over the Sierras, $96,000 a mile, and beyond them, 

 $32,000. A prominent Senator, speaking of the point on 

 the California side of the mountain range where the $96,- 

 ooo a mile began to be reckoned from, said the other day: 



"It is known that more than thirty miles of valley 

 was included in this mountain survey.'* 



"Here is a confession by a legislator of his knowledge 

 of a steal of the difference between $32,000 and $96,000 a 

 mile for thirty miles, or about $2,000,000, to which he has 

 never before called attention. But the California "Big 

 Four" squeezed some three millions of subsidies out of 

 the cities and towns of California, and the two cormorant 

 companies clutched tens of millions from the proceeds of 

 construction bonds, and sale of town lots and subsidy 

 lands. Both roads, in point of fact, were built with half 

 the money the robbers obtained from the bonds and lands 

 sold. And the stock they have subscribed for on the 



