New Hampshire, and Vermont.  The Union Pacific Company alone secured from the federal government a free right of way through the public domain, twenty sections of land with each mile of railway, and a loan up to fifty millions of dollars secured by a second mortgage on the company’s property.  More than half of the northern tier of states lying against Canada from Lake Michigan to the Pacific was granted to private companies in aid of railways and wagon roads.  About half of New Mexico, Arizona, and California was also given outright to railway companies.  These vast grants from the federal government were supplemented by gifts from the states in land and by subscriptions amounting to more than two hundred million dollars.  The history of these gifts and their relation to the political leaders that engineered them would alone fill a large and interesting volume.

=Railway Fortunes and Capital.=—­Out of this gigantic railway promotion, the first really immense American fortunes were made.  Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, related that his grandfather on his mother’s side, Peter Brooks, on his death in 1849, left a fortune of two million dollars, “supposed to be the largest estate in Boston,” then one of the few centers of great riches.  Compared with the opulence that sprang out of the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Southern Pacific, with their subsidiary and component lines, the estate of Peter Brooks was a poor man’s heritage.

The capital invested in these railways was enormous beyond the imagination of the men of the stagecoach generation.  The total debt of the United States incurred in the Revolutionary War—­a debt which those of little faith thought the country could never pay—­was reckoned at a figure well under $75,000,000.  When the Union Pacific Railroad was completed, there were outstanding against it $27,000,000 in first mortgage bonds, $27,000,000 in second mortgage bonds held by the government, $10,000,000 in income bonds, $10,000,000 in land grant bonds, and, on top of that huge bonded indebtedness, $36,000,000 in stock—­making $110,000,000 in all.  If the amount due the United States government be subtracted, still there remained, in private hands, stocks and bonds exceeding in value the whole national debt of Hamilton’s day—­a debt that strained all the resources of the Federal government in 1790.  Such was the financial significance of the railways.

[Illustration:  RAILROADS OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1918]

=Growth and Extension of Industry.=—­In the field of manufacturing, mining, and metal working, the results of business enterprise far outstripped, if measured in mere dollars, the results of railway construction.  By the end of the century there were about ten billion dollars invested in factories alone and five million wage-earners employed in them; while the total value of the output, fourteen billion dollars, was fifteen times the figure for 1860.  In the Eastern states industries multiplied.  In the Northwest territory, the old home of Jacksonian Democracy, they overtopped agriculture.  By the end of the century, Ohio had almost reached and Illinois had surpassed Massachusetts in the annual value of manufacturing output.