pportunities for
arriving at an unprejudiced judgment recently informed the writer of
this article that one company alone employed the element of "influence"
to the extent of three millions of dollars, or its supposed equivalent.
Facts of this nature, however, are outside of our purpose; and we shall
limit our illustration of the character of the struggle to a brief
glance at the curious tangle of compromises which the charter itself
presents. Passed in the Lower House by a catch vote, and pushed with
difficulty through the Senate by appeals to party pledges, by
unimpeachable proofs of the feasibility of the scheme and the financial
integrity of its advocates, and above all by intimations amounting
almost to threats of a possible secession of the Pacific communities,
the act of 1862 bears the evidence of a conflict of purposes in almost
every one of its sections. It is evident, for example, that, with the
tide of civil war beating fiercely around the national capital, Congress
was still under the spell of the past, and severely distrustful of any
avoidable increase of public obligations. Bonds were loaned to the
enterprise at the rate of sixteen thousand dollars per mile for the easy
work, with treble aid for the mountain division and double for the Salt
Lake Valley; but this loan was made a first mortgage, twenty-five per
cent, was reserved till the completion of the road, and the transit
business of government was to be paid solely by the extinguishment of
the bonded debt. The land grant also was but six thousand four hundred
acres per mile. The clashing interests of St. Louis and Chicago are
shown in the ignoring of any special eastern terminus, and the location
of the initial point of a new trunk road upon the one hundredth
meridian, at some equidistant station, to be designated by the
President. As the Kansas party was already possessed of an organization,
the charter modified this advantage by incorporating the Nebraska
line[B], under the name of the Union Pacific Company, and gave it a
predominant place in the specifications of the act. The aid of
government, however, was proffered in equal degree to the road which
was to cross the mountains from Sacramento, and to both the Eastern
lines; the last two being required to complete a hundred miles each
within two years after they had respectively filed their assent to the
terms of the act, while the Central was to build at the rate of
twenty-five miles a year up the r