The evidence is clear enough that the delay in the patenting of lands to the Central Pacific Railroad was due mainly to the inadequacy of the staff in the General Land Office at Washington and not to the policies of the railroad itself. This is shown by the wide disparity between listings and patents. The excess of lands selected over lands patented averaged 57,000 acres during the five years ending June 30, 1869. During the next five years the average excess was 64,000 acres, and during the five years ending June 30, 1886, it rose to 248,000. In 1887, as has been pointed out, there was a difference of 622,612.54 acres between the amount of acres which had been listed and those which had been passed to patent. Between 1887 and 1897, there was no year in which the Central Pacific had less than 300,000 acres of land listed and selected and the selections on file in the General Land Office for land in California alone. Yet it is not so important to fix responsibility in this matter, as to observe that the construction of the Central Pacific was not aided to any material degree by the lands offered to it under the legislation of 1862 and 1864. Up to the beginning of 1870, the company had received only four patents, totaling 144,386.63 acres,[84] which if sold at $2.50 per acre would have brought it $360,966.57. As a matter of fact, less than this was disposed of in the early years, and what was sold was on terms, not for cash in hand. In the later period, land-grant bonds with a lien on the land grant were sold to investors. The first issue of such bonds was, however, in 1871. The bearing of these conditions on the land-grant policy of the United States is very plain. Congress was legislating in order to get a transcontinental railroad built. Every form of assistance which could be immediately transmuted into funds facilitated construction to the full value of those funds. In contrast with this, assistance which could be realized on only after a lapse of years, served not as an aid to construction, but as a reward to promoters for having taken risks. While to some extent the land grant to the Central Pacific may have aided the sale of Central Pacific first mortgage bonds, in the main its effect was to give a grossly excessive and unnecessary profit to a few persons who held most of the stock of the company, without having invested any considerable capital of their own. Such a policy needs only to be understood to be condemned. Fixing Western Base of Sierras