at an elevation of some ten thousand feet above the level of the sea is most assuredly a performance worthy of conspicuous record in journalistic annals, and highly creditable to American enterprise.
MONETARY DIFFICULTIES IN SPAIN.
Sir Arthur Helps, in his life of Mr. Brassey, remarks:—“There were few, if any, of the great undertakings in which Mr. Brassey embarked that gave him so much trouble in respect of the financial arrangements as the Spanish railway from Bilbao to Tudela. The secretary, Mr. Tapp, thus recounts the difficulties which they had to encounter:—
“‘The great difficulty in Spain was in getting money to pay the men for doing the work—a very great difficulty. The bank was not in the habit of having large cheques drawn upon it to pay money; for nearly all the merchants kept their cash in safes in their offices, and it was a very debased kind of money, coins composed of half copper and half silver, and very much defaced. You had to take a good many of them on faith. I had to send down fifteen days before the pay day came round, to commence getting the money from the bank, obtaining perhaps £2,000 or £3,000 a day. It was brought to the office, recounted, and put into my safe. In that way I accumulated a ton-and-a-half of money every month during our busy season. When pay week came, I used to send a carriage or a large coach, drawn by four or six mules, with a couple of civil guards, one on each side, together with one of the clerks from the office, a man to drive, and another—a sort of stableman—who went to help them out of their difficulty in case the mules gave any trouble up the hilly country. I was at the office at six o’clock, and I was always in a state of anxiety until I knew that the money had arrived safely at the end of the journey. More than once the conveyance broke down in the mountains. On one occasion the axle of our carriage broke in half from the weight of the money, and I had to send off two omnibuses to relieve them. I had the load divided, and sent one to one section of the line and one to the other.
“‘Q.—Was any attempt made to rob the carriage?
“‘A.—Never; we always sent a clerk armed with a revolver as the principal guard. We heard once of a conspiracy to rob us; but, to avoid that, we went by another road. We were told that some men had been seen loitering about the mountain the night before.’”
A CARLIST CHIEF AS A SUB-CONTRACTOR.
The natural financial difficulties of constructing a railway in Spain were added to by the strange kind of people Mr. Brassey’s agents were obliged to employ. One of the sub-contractors was a certain Carlist chief whom the government dared not arrest on account of his great influence. Mr. Tapp thus relates the Carlist chief’s mode of settling a financial dispute:—
“When he got into difficulties, Mr. Small, the district agent, offered him the amount which was due to him according to his measured work. He had over 100 men to pay, and Mr. Small offered him the money that was coming to him, according to the measurement, but he would not have it, nor would he let the agent pay the men. He said he would have the money he demanded; and he brought all his men into the town of Orduna, and the men regularly bivouacked round Mr. Small’s office. They slept in the streets and stayed there all night, and would not let Mr. Small come out of the office till he had paid them the money. He attempted to get on his horse to go out—his horses were kept in the house (that is the practice in the houses of Spain); but when he rode out they pulled him off his horse and pushed him back, and said that he should not go until he had paid them the money. He passed the night in terror, with loaded pistols and guns, expecting that he and his family would be massacred every minute, but he contrived eventually to send his staff-holder to Bilbao on horseback. The man galloped all the way to Bilbao, a distance of twenty-five miles, and went to Mr. Bartlett in the middle of the night, and told him what had happened. Mr. Bartlett immediately sent a detachment up to the place to disperse the men. This Carlist threatened that if Mr. Small did not pay the money he would kill every person in the house. When he was asked, ‘Would you kill a man
for that?’ he replied, ‘Yes, like a fly,’ and this coming from a man who, as I was told, had already killed fourteen men with his own hand, was rather alarming. Mr. Brassey and his partners suffer a great amount of loss by their contracts for the Bilbao railway.”