But if the railroads have been the making of the land, it is not to be denied that the land has been the making of the railroads.  Egyptian minds they must have been, that grudged the tracts given by the United States to the greatest of roads, the greatest road in the world.  Having bestowed a line of alternate sections on this immense undertaking,—­vital in importance, and impossible without such aid,—­the Government at once doubled the price of the intermediate sections, and sold them at the doubled price, though they had been years, and might have been ages, in market unsold, without means of communication and building.  Who, then, was the loser?  Not the United States; for they received for half the land just what they would otherwise have received for the whole.  Not the State; for it lays hands on a good slice of the annual profits, not to speak of incalculable benefits beside.  Not the farmer, surely; for what would his now high-priced land be worth, if the grand road were annihilated?  Not the bond-holder; for he receives a fair, full interest on his money.  Not the stock-holder; for he looks with eyes of faith toward a great future.  It was a sort of triangular or quadrangular or pentangular bargain, in which all these parties were immensely benefited.  The traveller blesses such liberal policy, as he flies along towards the land of oranges, or turns aside to measure mammoth beets or weigh extra-supernal corn, to “bore” or to “prospect,” to pick at ooelite and shale or to “peep and botanize” through an inexhaustible Flora.  The present writer has certainly reason to be grateful,—­not, alas! with that gushing warmth of feeling which the owners of shares or bonds naturally experience,—­but as an “’umble individual” who could not have found material for this valuable article, if certain gentlemen who do own the said shares had not been very enterprising.

The man who may be said to have devised the land-basis for railroads through unsettled tracts—­a financier of unsurpassed sagacity, and once the soul of commercial honor as well as intelligence—­should not, in his dishonored grave, and far beyond the reach of human scorn or vengeance, be denied the credit of what he accomplished before the fatal madness seized his soul and dragged him to perdition.  Let it be enough that his name has come to be an epithet of infamy in his land’s language.  Let not the grandeur of his views, the intent with which he set out, and the good he achieved, be lost in oblivion.  Pride—­“by that sin fell the angels!”—­cast him headlong down the irrecoverable steep,—­

  “And when he fell, he fell like Lucifer,”—­

aye! like Wolsey and Bacon,—­

  “Never to rise again!”

It is no sin to hope that the All-seeing eye discerned in those noble undertakings and beneficent results the germ of wings that shall one day bear him back to light and mercy.  Let us, who benefit by his good deeds, not insist on remembering only the evil!