“The Union Pacific company has received $176,294,793.53 in surplus earnings and land sales during eighteen years, and if its stock had been fully paid, as Congress required that it should be and as its officers certified under oath that it was, nearly all of that money would be applicable to-day to the payment of the government debt. The company has paid out $28,650,770 in dividends, and $82,742,850 in interest on bonds, nearly all of which were distributed to shareholders without consideration. It has sunk over $10,000,000 in Denver, South Park and Pacific; it paid out $10,000,000 to Jay Gould and his associates for branch lines and other investments which were worthless, and which were unloaded upon the Union Pacific because of the faithlessness of the management of the company. The gross mismanagement of the Union Pacific and the other Pacific railroads has injured the credit of foreign investors to such an extent that hundreds of millions of dollars, which otherwise would have been sent here for investment and aided in the development of the country, have been locked up abroad.” Every line of this indictment is directed at Gould. Yet Charles Francis Adams, the author of “A Chapter in Erie,” and who became president of the Union Pacific about the time Gould retired, told the commission that he believed from careful scrutiny that Mr. Gould had always been more than fair to the company. But the commission, with all the facts before it, rejected his view of the case. When Mr. Gould secured possession of the Union Pacific, Sidney Dillon was president of it, and they with other large stockholders agreed upon a plan to fund the floating debt in bonds, of which Mr. Gould took $1,000,000. Mr. Gould remained in practical control of the property until about 1880, when public opinion clamored for a change, and as Mr. Gould said to one of the numerous investigating committees before which he was called upon during his busy life to testify: “I bowed to public opinion. I let outside parties in and soon, instead of thirty or forty stockholders, there were 6,000 or 7,000.” Mr. Charles Francis Adams succeeded Sidney Dillon as president, and in a short time an astonished public beheld the spectacle of the author of the scathing “Chapter of Erie” standing sponsor for the man he had denounced. Mr. Gould managed to persuade Mr. Adams to view the future of Union Pacific through his (Gould’s) eyes, and in consequence Mr. Adams unconsciously assisted Mr. Gould in disposing of large blocks of the stock to good advantage. In 1891 Mr. Gould again got control of the Union Pacific road, owing to peculiar Wall street conditions, and he calmly turned Mr. Adams out of the presidency and put Sidney Dillon back there.