Fourth: The government (bunco-steerers inside and outside of Congress) cunningly agreed to take a second mortgage on the road for the government loan of $60,000,000.
Fifth: It was cunningly arranged by these business men in politics and these politicians in business that ninety-five per cent. of the government second mortgage loan should not bear interest till thirty years later; but that all the private loans should bear interest at once.
Sixth: The Railway Company was cunningly given permission to sell $100,000,000 in railway stocks.
Stocks were sold to Congressmen and very noble Senators.
Stocks were sold to these very noble statesmen below the market price.
Stocks sold to statesmen—it was cunningly arranged—need not be paid for till after the road was finished and the stocks were paying dividends. For example, Congressman W. B. Allison, afterward Senator Allison, of Iowa (so sly and stealthy that he became known as “Pussy-Foot”), bought some of the stocks “on the quiet,” too, from the infamous Ames; he paid out nothing for the stocks, but when he had owned the stocks for only a brief time and while the unfinished road was yet in comparatively poor condition, his dividends more than paid for his stocks.[[147]] The Union Pacific scandal snuffed out numerous lesser lights and sadly bedimmed the lustre of twenty-two other “great” names, such as Blaine, Logan, Garfield, Colfax.[[148]]
This villainy of the nation’s “great” men is worthy of Emerson’s interesting flattery of eminent prostitutes:
“When I read the list of men of intellect, of refined pursuits, giants in law, or eminent scholars, or of social distinction, men of wealth and enterprise in the commercial community, and see what they have voted for and what they have suffered to be voted for, I think no community was ever so politely and elegantly betrayed.”—(“Lecture on Woman.”)
One Congressman was given $500,000 for his assistance in getting the charter granted.
“Another [expense],” says Professor Ripley (Harvard University),[[149]] “of a worse sort concerned a government commissioner, Cornelius Wendell, appointed to examine the road and report whether or not it met the requirements of the law, who flatly demanded $25,000 before he would proceed to perform his duty ... his demand was paid in the same spirit in which it was made—as so much blood money.”