238 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
been granted a franchise for a Third Avenue line, was badly 
in debt. The creditors were not even hopeful of getting their 
money back. Field had seen similar situations in his mercan- 
tile experiences and had definite views about how to proceed. 
After careful consideration, he formulated a liberal and 
courageous offer. 
He expressed himself as willing to acquire control of the 
elevated company and serve as its president without salary, 
as he had served in the cable-laying. But first he wanted it 
free of all hampering debts and insisted that future outlays 
must be for sound values and paid in cash. He favored can- 
celing a contract calling for over a million dollars a mile in 
cost of construction—a price obviously too high and sugges- 
tive of under-cover deals. The city had been undergoing an 
epidemic of graft and dishonesty. It seemed to Field that, in 
view of the uncertainty of the creditors’ recovering their in- 
vestment, they should be willing to accept sixty cents on the 
dollar in the form of bonds. He hoped that the directors, 
being influential men, would agree to such a proposal and 
accept bonds for the debts due them. 
Something of the moral spirit and resounding phrases of 
the period is indicated by an address about the elevated rail- 
way made before the New York Historical Society at the 
Academy of Music by a leading lawyer, Charles O’Conor, the 
same man who had once ridiculed the cable. He declared 
grandiloquently: “It is said, and doubtless with truth, that 
the great cities have hitherto been destroyers of the human 
race. A single American contrivance promises to correct the 
mischief. The cheap and rapid transportation of passengers 
on the elevated rail, when its capacity shall have been fully 
developed, will give healthful and pleasant homes in rural 
territory to the toiling millions of our commercial and manu- 
facturing centres. It will snatch their wives and children from 
tenement-house horrors, and, by promoting domesticity, 
greatly diminish the habits of intemperance and vice so liable 
