THRIFTY, SAGACIOUS PATRIOTISM.
Who could deny that the phalanx of capitalists scrambling forward to share in this carnival of plunder were not gifted with unerring judgment? From afar they sighted their quarry. Nearly all of them were the fifty per cent. "patriot" capitalists of the Civil War; and, just as in all extant biographies, they are represented as heroic, self-sacrificing figures during that crisis, when in historical fact, they were defrauding and plundering indomitably, so are they also glorified as courageous, enterprising men of prescience, who hazarded their money in building the Pacific railroads at a time when most of the far West was an untenanted desert. And this string of arrant falsities has passed as "history!"
If they had that foresight for which they were so inveterately lauded, it was a foresight based upon the certainty that it would yield them forty-eight per cent. profit and more from a project on which not one of them did the turn of a hand's work, for even the bribing of Congress was done by paid agents. Nor did they have to risk the millions that they had obtained largely by fraud in trade and other channels; all that they had to do was to advance that money for a short time until they got it back from the Government resources, with forty-eight per cent profit besides.
The Senate Committee's report came out at a time of panic when many millions of men, women and children were out of work, and other millions in destitution. It was in that very year when the workers in New York City were clubbed by the police for venturing to hold a meeting to plead for the right to work. But the bribing of Congress in 1864, and the thefts in the construction of the railroad, were only parts of the gigantic frauds brought out—frauds which a people who believed themselves under a democracy had to bear and put up with, or else be silenced by force.