In a second candidature the aspirant was more successful, and he became one of nine representatives of Sangamon County, in the State Legislature of Illinois, who, being all more than six feet high, were called "The Long Nine." With his Brobdingnagian colleagues Abraham plunged at once into the "internal improvement system," and distinguished himself above his fellows by the unscrupulous energy and strategy with which he urged through the Legislature a series of bubble schemes and jobs. Railroads and other improvements, especially improvements of river navigation, were voted out of all proportion to the means or credit of the then thinly-peopled State. To set these little matters in motion, a loan of eight millions of dollars was authorized, and to complete the canal from Chicago to Peru, another loan of four millions of dollars was voted at the same session, two hundred thousand dollars being given as a gratuity to those counties which seemed to have no special interest in any of the foregoing projects. Work on all these roads was to commence, not only at the same time, but at both ends of each road and at all the river- crossings. There were as yet no surveys of any route, no estimates, no reports of engineers, or even unprofessional viewers. "Progress was not to wait on trifles; capitalists were supposed to be lying in wait to catch these precious bonds; the money would be raised in a twinkling, and being applied with all the skill of a hundred De Witt Clintons--a class of gentlemen at that time extremely numerous and obtrusive--the loan would build railroads, the railroads would build cities, cities would create farms, foreign capital would rush in to so inviting a field, the lands would be taken up with marvellous celerity, and the land tax going into a sinking fund, that, with some tolls and certain sly speculations to be made by the State, would pay principal and interest of debt without even a cent of taxation upon the people. In short, everybody was to be enriched, while the munificence of the State in selling its credit and spending the proceeds, would make its empty coffers overflow with ready money. It was a dark stroke of statesmanship, a mysterious device in finance, which, whether from being misunderstood or mismanaged, bore from the beginning fruits the very reverse of those it had promised." We seem here to be reading the history of more than one great railway enterprise undertaken by politicians without the red tape preliminaries of surveying or framing estimates, progress not deigning to wait upon trifles. This system of policy gave fine scope for the talents of the "log-roller," here defined as an especially wily and persuasive person, who could depict the merits of his scheme with roseate but delusive eloquence, and who was said to carry a gourd of "possum fat"--wherewith he "greased and swallowed" his prey. One of the largest of these gourds was carried by "honest Abe,"