Then the flow ceased. The brief gleam of prosperity which had shone over North America after the gloom of the later seventies vanished. Never had railway building been carried on so vigorously in the United States as in the years 1881-83, and the reaction was correspondingly severe. The collapse of the boom which had accompanied the first {155} operations in Manitoba, the failure of harvest after harvest, the fading away of settlers and speculators alike, robbed all but a persistent few of faith in the Canadian North-West and in the railway whose fortunes rose or fell with it. The way of the Canadian Pacific was made particularly hard by the manoeuvres of rival companies. Some of the United States Pacific roads, awake to the seriousness of the competition threatened, attacked it in the New York market. The Grand Trunk, naturally alarmed by the incursion of the new road into its best paying territory in the East, used all the power of its influential directors and its army of shareholders in England to bar the London market. The financial policy adopted by the Canadian Pacific was unique in the records of great railway enterprises on this continent. It was simply to rely entirely on stock issues, to endeavour to build the road without incurring any bonded debt. Not until the last year of construction, 1885, were bonds based upon the security of the road itself issued for sale. It was doubtless desirable, if possible, to avoid the reckless methods by which so many American roads had been hopelessly waterlogged by excessive bond issues. The memory of the {156} St Paul and Pacific's six-million share capital as against its twenty-eight-million bonded indebtedness was fresh in the minds of the members of the syndicate. By keeping fixed charges low, while earning power was still uncertain, they lessened the risk of having the road pass out of the stockholders' control into a receiver's hands. Yet as bonds could have been sold more easily than stock, it increased the difficulty of finding the necessary capital. Even so, it came within an ace of succeeding.