When, after ten more years of expansion, the great Union Pacific property went into the hands of receivers in 1893, it had grown to a system of more than 8000 miles. It completely controlled the Oregon railway and steamship lines, the lines to St. Louis, and also an important extension known as the Union Pacific, Denver and Gulf Railroad, running from a point in Wyoming across Colorado to Fort Worth, Texas. The financial failure of the system was due to a variety of causes. Its management had been extravagant and inefficient, and construction and expansion had been too rapid. The policy of building expensive branch lines where they were not needed and of obligating the parent company to finance them had been a grievous mistake and had contributed largely to the downfall of the company. Further than this, the credit of the Union Pacific was steadily growing weaker because the time was drawing near when its heavy debt to the United States Government would fall due. In all its history of more than twenty years the company had never paid any interest on the government debt nor had it maintained a sinking fund to meet the principal when due. Consequently, the accruing interest had mounted year by year and, should the Government enforce payment at maturity in 1897-99, the company would be doomed to bankruptcy. This government debt, including accrued interest, amounted to the sum of $54,000,000. Attention should not, however, be diverted from the fact that during all these years a vast expansion of competitive lines had been going on far southward of the Union Pacific. Under the guiding genius of Collis P. Huntington, the Southern Pacific Company in 1884 had consolidated and solidified a gigantic system of railways extending from New Orleans to the Pacific and throughout the entire State of California to Portland, Oregon, with branch lines radiating through Texas and making close connection with roads entering St. Louis. In addition to these railroads, Huntington acquired control of a steamship line operating from New York to New Orleans and Galveston, and subsequently of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, operating along the coast from Oregon south to the Isthmus of Panama and across the Pacific Ocean. The ever-growing effects of this powerful and well-managed competitor--combined with the large development of the Santa Fe system during these years, the competition of the completed Northern Pacific, and the possibilities of the new Great Northern Railway or Hill line, now completing its main artery to the Pacific--were far-reaching enough in themselves to bring the Union Pacific upon evil days. Consequently few were surprised when, under the great pressure of the panic of 1893, the property was forced to confess insolvency. The Union Pacific had simply repeated the story of most American railroads; it had been constructed in advance of population and had to pay the penalty. Yet it