New York, then as now, we Americans regarded as the starting point of all great enterprises, and to New York I came. I called at once upon leaders in the world of finance--Commodore Vanderbilt, Commodore Garrison, William B. Astor, Moses H. Grinnell, Marshall O. Roberts, and others, and frankly told them of my plans. One of them said to me: "Train, you have reputation enough now. Why do something that will mar it? You are known all over the world as the Clipper-Ship King. This is enough glory for one man. If you attempt to build a railway across the desert and over the Rocky Mountains, the world will call you a lunatic." And this was all that I received from these gentlemen! Not a word of encouragement, not a cent of contributed funds--only the warning that the world, like themselves, would call me a madman. Unaffected by this cold reception, I kept steadily on with my task, and proceeded to organize the great railway. Congress granted the necessary charter in '62. It authorized the building of a road from the Missouri River to California, with an issue of $100,000,000 of stock and $50,000,000 of bonds--to be issued in sections, the first section to be at the rate of $16,000 a mile; and the last at $48,000 a mile, with 20,000,000 acres of land in alternate sections; and $2,000,000 to be subscribed, ten per centum to be paid into the State treasury at Albany. My friends in Boston took the stock, but I failed to get the cash to go ahead with the road in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. At this point, when matters looked a little dark, an idea occurred to me that cleared the sky. It made the construction of the great line a certainty. In Paris, a few years before, I had been much interested in new methods of finance as devised by the brothers Émile and Isaac Perrère. These shrewd and ingenious men, finding that old methods could not be used to meet many demands of modern times, invented entirely new ones which they organized into two systems known as the Crédit Mobilier and the Crédit Foncier--or systems of credit based on personal property and land. The French Government had supported these systems of the Perrères, and Baron Haussmann had resorted to them in his great undertaking in rebuilding and remodeling the French capital, making it the most beautiful city of the world. I determined upon introducing this new style of finance into this country.