THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.

Grey River Argus, Volume VIII, Issue 525, 29 May 1869, Page 4

THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.

' It seems that the Pacific Railroad, now approaching completion, is something more than a gigantic enterprise. It is also a stupendous job. The eastern division of it is being constructed by seventy persons, constituting what is known as the "Pacific Railroad Ring." Its cost will not exceed £20,000 sterling, but the stock and bonds issued by the " ring" will represent £04,000,000 sterling, and the passenger and goods traffic rates will be so adjusted as to pay a dividend of ten per cent, upon a capital upwards of two-thirds of which is fictitious, while the company — or, in other words, the " ring" — receives a subsidy of £6000 a mile from the Government, besides a land grant of 12,000 acres a mile, to say nothing of donations of real estate from the cities it passes, or of the millions of dollars which are earned upon such sections of the line as are abeady opened, and which are applied for purposes of construction ? What is the nature of this ring 1 It is thus described in the lasivtaumber of the Nmih Amcricanßcview: — " The members of it are in Congress ; they are the trustees for the bondholders, they are directors, they are stockholders, they are contractors. In Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the plains they expend them, and on the Credit Mobilier they divide them. Ever shifting characters, they are ever übiquitous—now enginiecing a bill, and now a bridge — they receive money into one hand as a corporation, and pay it into the other as a contractor. " When we come to investigate the origin of this " ring," we find it to have taken its rise in fraud and felony. Such, at least, is the account given of it by the ablest and most hightoned politician in the United States. "The paternity of this institution," observes the Bevieio just quoted from, "is currently supposed to be between General Duff Green and the irrepressible George Francis Train ; or, rather, to speak more exactly, some intelligent broker is supposed to have stolen from Green the charter under which the association was organised, and Train applied the stolen property to be purposes of Pacific Railroad construction." Of all the "rings" which have been organised in the United States for the spoliation of the public or the robbery of the revenue, the Pacific railroad " ring" appears to be the most ingenious, the most comprehensive, and the most efficient in its operations. "As stockholders they own the road, as mortgagees they have a lien upon it, as directors they contract for its construction, and as members of the Credit Mobilier they build it." As these seventy men will share among them upwards of £40,000,000 sterling, the proceeds of bonds issued over and above the sum actually disbursed or required for' the construction of the line, they will eventually become one of the richest corporations in the world, and, as the North American Review justly remarks, " will surely hereafter constitute a source of corruption in the politics of the land, and a resistless power in its legislature."