ic Railroad is one to
which every American citizen must point with a pride none the less
hearty for the fact that its route has not yet been absolutely decided.
The one curse mingled with a young republic's many blessings is the
intrusion of political influences into the dispassionate field of
national enterprise. We might have determined the line of our Pacific
Road before the breaking out of the Rebellion, and by this time its
first or Great-Plains section should have been in running order, but for
the partisan jealousies which prevailed in high places between the
advocates of the different routes. Slavery, that _enfant gate_ of our
old-school and now happily obsolete statecraft, insisted on the
expensive toy of a southern and unpractical line, until our
representatives, harassed by the problem how to gratify her without
incurring the contempt of the financial world, gave over to the drift of
events the settlement of their country's chief commercial question. We
are now in a position to decide coolly; no entangling alliances with a
dead-weight social system bias our plain judgment of practical pros and
cons; but the opportunity for decision arrives a little too late and a
little too early for action. Congress, the legitimate custodian of the
Pacific Railroad, may be said to have passed the last four years in
climbing to the level of the country's vital exigency. Till Congress
reaches that and understands it fully, there is no surplus energy to be
thrown away on the else paramount matters of a peaceful age.

But it must not be forgotten that the Pacific Railroad stands next to
the maintenance of National Unity on the docket of causes for
adjudication by our representative tribunal. The people have filed it
away till the grand appeal is settled; but they have not forgotten it.

It is none the pleasanter thought to them because they have no time to
talk about it, that the great highway of the continent has been left,
_pendente lite_, in the hands of squabbling speculators, and that
personal recriminations bar the progress of our commerce between sea and
sea. The indifference of our public trustees to the disgraceful
controversies which have embarrassed work on the eastern end of the line
is itself not a disgrace only because human power is limited to the care
of one great matter at a time. The first Congress that meets under the
olive of an honorable peace must at once take the Pacific Railroad into
the Nation's hands,