In this state of public feeling, Lombard Street was not in a favorable mood to negotiate loans with this country, and, the whole fraternity of the Rothschilds shut their fists on their shining shekels and shook their heads negatively and ominously at the bare mention of advancing money to the once great but now doomed Republic. Money was dear at the time, and the Government was only obliged to pay what could have been obtained in other quarters. Curiously enough, private property then was considered better security than the Government endorsement, on the principle—which was not a very patriotic one, though in reality true—that the country could survive its form of government. That form, however, the best the world has yet seen, survived the shock and maintained its autonomy. That it did so was in a large measure due to the prompt action of Wall Street men in raising the sinews of war at the incipient stage of the rebellion. Had they failed to do so, it is not improbable that the repulse at Bull Run might have proved a decisive blow to the Union, and plunged the country into a state of anarchy from which nothing but a despotism almost as bad could have retrieved it. The negotiation of this loan brought out the twelve per cent. Treasury notes. After this issue the rates fell. Then came the 11 and the 10¾ per cent. issues, and subsequently the well-known and long to be remembered 7 3-10 Treasury notes. After this issue had been popularized, successfully disposed of, and finally taken up at maturity by the 5-20 loan, Jay Cooke was quick to issue, after their pattern, his famous 7 3-10 Northern Pacific Railroad bonds. Evidently he had a patent for negotiating that famous 7 3-10 per cent. railroad loan, as almost every clergyman, Sunday-school teacher and public benefactor were found to have invested in them, when the crash came, and although the road was the means of his financial downfall, with the ruin of an innumerable number of others besides, who were dragged into the same speculative whirlpool, this unfortunate event was not entirely an unmixed evil. It is true that this was the main and visible cause of precipitating the panic of 1873, of which I shall speak more fully in another chapter, but the Pacific road was the great pioneer in opening up the Far West, and developing its material resources, the great artery of the Western railroad system, conveying vigorous and durable vitality to the industrial life of the expansive regions beyond the Rockies.