Both the upper and the lower-enterprises, however, remained for many years after their inception in a quiescent state, serving simply as topics of newspaper discussion, or of buncombe addresses from local rostrums. But in 1860-61 the unexpected discovery of large deposits of the precious metals in Colorado and in Nevada gave an enormous impulse to the carrying trade of the plains, and the same argument which proved so cogent in California aroused the Western capitalists from their lethargy. Rumors of the new line over the Sierra also found their way East; and the Legislature of Kansas, now a young and vigorous State, passed a joint resolution in March, 1862, urging on Congress the immediate creation of a national Pacific Railroad Company. In anticipation of this action, the agents of the lower route had already proceeded to Washington, where they found themselves suddenly in the presence, not only of the representatives of the Central Company of California, but also of the Chicago projectors and their New York friends. It will scarcely be profitable at the present time to descend into the particulars of the rivalry which interests in many respects so divergent necessarily entailed. A gentleman who had singular opportunities for arriving at an unprejudiced judgment recently informed the writer of this article that one company alone employed the element of "influence" to the extent of three millions of dollars, or its supposed equivalent. Facts of this nature, however, are outside of our purpose; and we shall limit our illustration of the character of the struggle to a brief glance at the curious tangle of compromises which the charter itself presents. Passed in the Lower House by a catch vote, and pushed with difficulty through the Senate by appeals to party pledges, by unimpeachable proofs of the feasibility of the scheme and the financial integrity of its advocates, and above all by intimations amounting almost to threats of a possible secession of the Pacific communities, the act of 1862 bears the evidence of a conflict of purposes in almost every one of its sections. It is evident, for example, that, with the tide of civil war beating fiercely around the national capital, Congress was still under the spell of the past, and severely distrustful of any avoidable increase of public obligations. Bonds were loaned to the enterprise at the rate of sixteen thousand dollars per mile for the easy work, with treble aid for the mountain division and double for the Salt Lake Valley; but this loan was made a first mortgage, twenty-five per cent, was reserved till the completion of the road, and the transit business of government was to be paid solely by the extinguishment of the bonded debt. The land grant also was but six thousand four hundred acres per mile. The clashing interests of St. Louis and Chicago are shown in the ignoring of any special eastern terminus, and the location of the initial point of a new trunk road upon the one hundredth