Stocks sold to statesmen—it was cunningly arranged—need not be paid for till after the road was finished and the stocks were paying dividends. For example, Congressman W. B. Allison, afterward Senator Allison, of Iowa (so sly and stealthy that he became known as “Pussy-Foot”), bought some of the stocks “on the quiet,” too, from the infamous Ames; he paid out nothing for the stocks, but when he had owned the stocks for only a brief time and while the unfinished road was yet in comparatively poor condition, his dividends more than paid for his stocks.[147] The Union Pacific scandal snuffed out numerous lesser lights and sadly bedimmed the lustre of twenty-two other “great” names, such as Blaine, Logan, Garfield, Colfax.[148] This villainy of the nation’s “great” men is worthy of Emerson’s interesting flattery of eminent prostitutes: “When I read the list of men of intellect, of refined pursuits, giants in law, or eminent scholars, or of social distinction, men of wealth and enterprise in the commercial community, and see what they have voted for and what they have suffered to be voted for, I think no community was ever so politely and elegantly betrayed.”—(“Lecture on Woman.”) One Congressman was given $500,000 for his assistance in getting the charter granted. “Another [expense],” says Professor Ripley (Harvard University),[149] “of a worse sort concerned a government commissioner, Cornelius Wendell, appointed to examine the road and report whether or not it met the requirements of the law, who flatly demanded $25,000 before he would proceed to perform his duty ... his demand was paid in the same spirit in which it was made—as so much blood money.” Another authority thus:[150] “Oakes Ames, member of Congress, from Massachusetts, and a promoter of the Union Pacific and its bills before the national legislature, distributed Credit Mobilier stock to _influential_ Congressmen on the understanding that it should be paid for _out of the dividends_, which dividends depended largely on the passage of the bills giving grants of land and money to the U. P. The bills were passed. The dividends of the very first year paid for the stock and left a balance to the credit of the donees; and the total _construction_ profits were $43,925,328 above all expenses, in which profits the stock-holding Congressmen who passed the railroad grants had an important share.” SEVENTH: The statesmen-business men cunningly agreed that when the government used the road (which it had furnished more than sufficient means to construct) one-half the regular rate should be paid in cash and the other half should apply as credit on the government loan.