of years, and because of the opportunity it gave him of remaining a distinguished public figure, he had eventually shouldered the project.  It was open to many objections and criticisms; but the genius which had been sufficient to finance the Civil War was considered sufficient to finance the Northern Pacific Railroad.  Cooke undertook it with the idea of being able to put the merits of the proposition before the people direct—­not through the agency of any great financial corporation—­and of selling to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker the stock or shares that he wished to dispose of.

It was a brilliant chance.  His genius had worked out the sale of great government loans during the Civil War to the people direct in this fashion.  Why not Northern Pacific certificates?  For several years he conducted a pyrotechnic campaign, surveying the territory in question, organizing great railway-construction corps, building hundreds of miles of track under most trying conditions, and selling great blocks of his stock, on which interest of a certain percentage was guaranteed.  If it had not been that he knew little of railroad-building, personally, and that the project was so vast that it could not well be encompassed by one man, even so great a man it might have proved successful, as under subsequent management it did.  However, hard times, the war between France and Germany, which tied up European capital for the time being and made it indifferent to American projects, envy, calumny, a certain percentage of mismanagement, all conspired to wreck it.  On September 18, 1873, at twelve-fifteen noon, Jay Cooke & Co. failed for approximately eight million dollars and the Northern Pacific for all that had been invested in it—­some fifty million dollars more.

One can imagine what the result was—­the most important financier and the most distinguished railway enterprise collapsing at one and the same time.  “A financial thunderclap in a clear sky,” said the Philadelphia Press.  “No one could have been more surprised,” said the Philadelphia Inquirer, “if snow had fallen amid the sunshine of a summer noon.”  The public, which by Cooke’s previous tremendous success had been lulled into believing him invincible, could not understand it.  It was beyond belief.  Jay Cooke fail?  Impossible, or anything connected with him.  Nevertheless, he had failed; and the New York Stock Exchange, after witnessing a number of crashes immediately afterward, closed for eight days.  The Lake Shore Railroad failed to pay a call-loan of one million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars; and the Union Trust Company, allied to the Vanderbilt interests, closed its doors after withstanding a prolonged run.  The National Trust Company of New York had eight hundred thousand dollars of government securities in its vaults, but not a dollar could be borrowed upon them; and it suspended.  Suspicion was universal, rumor affected every one.