It was early evening. Slowly I made headway up the platform against the tide of New Jersey commuters returning from work. With a scuffling roar of feet, and no vocal sound whatever, they came racing through the terminal in one buffalo mass, then divided into hasty streams, flowed along the platforms and boarded the westbound trains, strangely at ease with extraordinary burdens, such as reels of hose, boxes of tomato plants, rakes, scythes, hand cultivators, bags of bulbs, carpentering tools and bits of lumber.
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We, the eastbound passengers from the Washington train, gathered at one of the empty slips. Through the gates I saw a patch of water. Suddenly a stealthy mass up-heaved, hesitated, then made up its mind and came head on with terrific momentum. At the breathless moment the engines were reversed, there was a gnashing of waters, and the boat came fast with a soft bump. The gates burst open and the people decanted themselves with a headlong rush. We stood tight against the wall to let them pass. As the tail of the spill filed by we were sent aboard, the gates banged to behind us, and the boat was off toward the other shore for another load. This was before the unromantic convenience of Hudson River tunnels.
A scourge of unemployment fell upon the land and labor as such, with no theory of its own about money, knowing only what it meant to be out of work, assailed the befuddled intelligence of the country with that embarrassing question: Why were men helplessly idle in this environment of boundless opportunity?
In the autumn of 1896 a strange event came suddenly to pass. People were delivered from the Soft Money Plague, not by their own efforts, as they believed, but because maladies of the mind are like those of the body. If they are not fatal you are bound to get well. Doctors will take the credit. The Republican party won the election that year on a gold platform, and this is treated historically as a sacred political victory for yellow money; the white money people were hopelessly overturned. But it was wholly a psychic phenomenon still. Why all at once did a majority of people vote in a certain way? To make a change in the laws, you say. Yes, but there the mystery deepens. Immediately after this vote was cast the shape of events began to change with no change whatever in the laws. The law enthroning gold was not enacted until four years later, in 1900, and this was a mere formality, a certificate of cure after the fact. By that time the madness had entirely passed, for natural reasons.
Valentine was in Europe for his annual vacation. Galt called a special meeting of the directors. He talked for an hour on the importance of controlling railroads that could originate traffic. The Great Midwestern did not originate its own traffic. The Orient & Pacific was a far western road with many branches in a rich freight producing area. The Great Midwestern had been getting only one third of its east bound freight, and it was a very profitable kind of freight, moving in solid trains of iced cars at high rates; the other two thirds had been going to competitive lines.
Just then the door burst open. Thirty or forty reporters had been waiting in the outer office all day. Their excitement at last broke bounds; they simply came in. The Evening Post man was at their head. 2ff7e9595c
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