Seventy-nine land-grant railroads (twenty-one of them “direct beneficiaries of Congress”) have been granted 200,000,000 acres of land (reduced by forfeiture to 158,286,627 acres).
“Over one-half of this acreage was granted by acts passed between 1862 and 1864.”[[157]]
That is to say, during twenty-four terrible months, just while the nation was sweating blood from every pore, while the people were not looking at anything except the war, precisely at that time, patriotic statesmen gave away to railway promoters who shed no “blood for the flag,” gave to these “gentlemen of push and enterprise” a sufficient amount of the people’s lands to provide a hundred and twenty-five-acre farm for every one of the 800,000 men mustered out of the Union armies in 1865.
Professor Parsons says “the total national land-grants alone have aggregated 215,000,000 acres”—(15,000,000 acres higher than the estimate by Professors Cleveland and Powell).
“It could be said of more than one railroad company as was said by an English capitalist who inspected ... the properties of the Illinois Central, ‘This is not a railway company; it is a land company.’”[[158]]
It is interesting (and instructive) to note that the charter of the Northern Pacific Railway with its 47,000,000 acre land gift, with astoundingly liberal amendments to the U. P. charter, was granted July 2, 1864, precisely at a time when the nation’s attention was again riveted to two specially terrible campaigns which absorbed the nation wholly in the war: Grant and Lee, with immense armies, were fighting bitterly, and Sherman with 98,000 men and Johnston with 45,000 men had been fighting fiercely and almost continuously from June 10 to July 2, 1864. As stated above, the Northern Pacific got 47,000,000 acres of land.[[159]]
The three railways, says Professor Parsons in substance,[[160]] the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific and the Northern Pacific, cost somewhat less than $132,000,000, and were capitalized at more than $383,000,000—that is to say, about $250,000,000 (two-thirds of the capitalization) was fictitious,—a fraud, a lie, commercial patriotism.
While at wining and dining tables in closely guarded private parlors in the best hotels in Washington this unmatchable plundering was cunningly arranged (“to develop the country, of course”) working class men and boys, half starved and weary, were obediently slaughtering themselves at the word of command—for 43 cents a day, in depreciated paper money forced upon them by pirate patriots.
While the nation is blinded with tears and the common men’s blood gushes from their torn veins, the “business” man, with pious patriotism talking grandly of the “glorious flag,” cunningly sneaks to the nation’s store-house, a blushless burglar; he climbs aboard the ship of state, a conscienceless pirate.[[161]]