Every business was pressed to the snow line. Old life insurance associations had been successful; new ones sprang up on every hand. The agents filled every town. These agents were given a portion of the premium. You could hardly go out of your house without being told of the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death. You were shown pictures of life insurance agents emptying vast bags of gold at the feet of a disconsolate widow. You saw in imagination your own fatherless children wiping away the tears of grief and smiling with joy. These agents insured everybody and everything. They would have insured a hospital or consumption in its last hemorrhage. Fire insurance was managed in precisely the same way. The agents received a part of the premium, and they insured anything and everything, no matter what its danger might be. They would have insured powder in perdition, or icebergs under the torrid zone with the same alacrity. And then there were accident companies, and you could not go to the station to buy your ticket without being shown a picture of disaster. You would see there four horses running away with a stage, and old ladies and children being thrown out; you would see a steamer being blown up on the Mississippi, legs one way and arms the other, heads one side and hats the other; locomotives going through bridges, good Samaritans carrying off the wounded on stretchers. The merchants, too, were not satisfied to do business in the old way. It was too slow; they could not wait for customers. They filled the country with drummers, and these drummers convinced all the country merchants that they needed about twice as many goods as they could possibly sell, and they took their notes on sixty and ninety days, and renewed them whenever desired, provided the parties renewing the notes would take more goods. And these country merchants pressed the goods upon their customers in the same manner. Everybody was selling, everybody was buying, and nearly all was done upon a credit. No one believed the day of settlement ever would or ever could come. Towns must continue to grow, and in the imagination of speculators there were hundreds of cities numbering their millions of inhabitants. Land, miles and miles from the city, was laid out in blocks and squares and parks; land that will not be occupied for residences probably for hundreds of years to come, and these lots were sold, not by the acre, not by the square mile, but by so much per foot. They were sold on credit, with a partial payment down and the balance secured by a mortgage.