The decade of the eighties, so far as common carriers are concerned, was primarily characterized by new railroad construction. Over 70,000 miles of line were built in ten years,--a mileage just about equal to the total new construction for both the ten preceding and the ten following years combined. The movement culminated in 1882, and again in 1887, in two veritable crazes of promotion and speculative activity, unequalled before or since in our railroad history. The first was suddenly stopped by a short, sharp railroad panic in 1884. Jay Gould's operations in Union and Kansas Pacific set a pace for manipulation and fraud, which could have no other sequel. The second craze was doubtless in part restrained by the moral effect of the passage in 1887 of the Act to Regulate Commerce; although, viewed in a larger way, it was more directly due to the exhaustion both of the supply of capital and of confidence among investors. These two outbreaks of railroad promotion are deserving of further comment, both by reason of their extent and character. Prior to 1880, new railroads constructed had averaged a little over two thousand miles annually. The figures for 1881-1882, respectively, were 6,711 and 9,846 miles, rising finally to a total of 11,569 miles in 1882. This record has never been surpassed but once: when, four years later at the height of the second "boom," 12,983 miles of new line were laid down. A large part of this building was in the Far West and Southwest, these regions being now opened up as the upper Mississippi valley had been developed between 1868 and the panic of 1873. A second transcontinental route was opened in 1881, through the joining of the Southern Pacific and Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe roads at Deming and El Paso. Within two years thereafter two direct routes to connect the Southern Pacific system with New Orleans were completed. The Pacific Northwest was admitted to rail connection with the rest of the country in 1883-1884, by two significant events. The Northern Pacific road was then opened, and the Oregon Short line to connect the Columbia river basin with the Union Pacific system. The Great Northern road reached the Pacific slope in the year 1893, accompanied by the Canadian Pacific, constructed just over the border. This activity in far western railroad building was mainly due to the growth of the Pacific slope; but it was also favored by the successful competition of railways with the water routes round Cape Horn. It was estimated that as late as 1878, not over one quarter of the total tonnage moved into California went by rail. But the railroads then inaugurated a system of special contracts by which shippers who agreed to use the railroads exclusively, were given considerably reduced rates. By 1884 when the plan was discontinued, the percentage of tonnage carried to California by rail rose from twenty-five to between sixty and seventy-five percent. In the eastern states, the eighties was the period of