i6 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ate. We had nothing to run on, save the precarious servant allow- 

 ance, then fixed at $12,500 per month, and liable to be cut to nothing 

 at any day. Our expenses for 1893 had been nearly $18,000 per 

 month. Sometimes we could sell a few horses from the stock farm, but 

 it was never clear that the stock farm belonged to the university and 

 not to the Stanford estate, and every dollar we gained this way piled 

 up the possibilities of litigation. All these days were brightened by 

 the steady support of her friends and advisers, Samuel F. Leib, Timothy 

 Hopkins and Kussell Wilson. Mr. Hopkins furnished the Library of 

 Biology and paid unasked many minor expenses, his left hand not 

 taking receipts for what his right hand was doing. No one can tell 

 how much the university owes to these men, who in the darkest days 

 planned to make the future possible. Very much too the university 

 owed to the fraternal devotion of Mrs. Stanford's brother, Mr. Charles 

 G. Lathrop, who cared for with sympathetic hand the scanty receipts 

 and scanty fragments of these harassed days. The warm sympathy 

 of Thomas Welton Stanford came from across the seas. His gift of 

 the Library Building came as a shadow of a great rock in a weary land. 



At last, adjustment of one kind after another being made, there 

 was a glimpse of daylight, when we were thrust without warning into 

 still darker night. 



The government suit for fifteen millions was brought for the pur- 

 pose of tying up everything in the Stanford estate until the debts of 

 the Central Pacific Bailway were paid. It was not claimed that the 

 university owed anything, or that the Stanford estate owed anything, 

 or that the railway owed anything, on which payment was due, and as a 

 matter of fact the Southern Pacific Company paid in full every dollar 

 it owed to the government as soon as it became due, and with full in- 

 terest. There was never any reason to suppose that it would not do so, 

 and never any reason to suppose that it could not afford to pay this 

 debt, for the power to control the line from Ogden to San Francisco, 

 called the Central Pacific, was in itself an enormous asset, worth the 

 value of this debt. Failure to pay this debt would have meant loss of 

 control of the most valuable single factor in the great railroad system. 



The claim of the United States was secured by a second mortgage 

 on the Central Pacific. It was supposed that it would be sold to satisfy 

 the first mortgage, and that it would realize no more than this sum, 

 leaving, as a railway manager C3naically expressed it, nothing but " two 

 streaks of rust and the right of way." The government proposed, by 

 a sort of injunction, to hold up the Stanford property, which would 

 then be seized, in case the Southern Pacific Eailway system should at 

 some future .time be found in debt. There was no warrant in law or 

 in good policy for this suit. One United States judge spoke of it as 

 " the crime of the century." It is not easy to work out the motives, 



