Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/166

. We had nothing to run on, save the precarious servant allowance, then fixed at $12,500 per month, and liable to be cut to nothing at any day. Our expenses for 1893 had been nearly $18,000 per month. Sometimes we could sell a few horses from the stock farm, but it was never clear that the stock farm belonged to the university and not to the Stanford estate, and every dollar we gained this way piled up the possibilities of litigation. All these days were brightened by the steady support of her friends and advisers, Samuel F. Leib, Timothy Hopkins and Russell Wilson. Mr. Hopkins furnished the Library of Biology and paid unasked many minor expenses, his left hand not taking receipts for what his right hand was doing. No one can tell how much the university owes to these men, who in the darkest days planned to make the future possible. Very much too the university owed to the fraternal devotion of Mrs. Stanford's brother, Mr. Charles G. Lathrop, who cared for with sympathetic hand the scanty receipts and scanty fragments of these harassed days. The warm sympathy of Thomas Welton Stanford came from across the seas. His gift of the Library Building came as a shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

At last, adjustment of one kind after another being made, there was a glimpse of daylight, when we were thrust without warning into still darker night.

The government suit for fifteen millions was brought for the purpose of tying up everything in the Stanford estate until the debts of the Central Pacific Railway were paid. It was not claimed that the university owed anything, or that the Stanford estate owed anything, or that the railway owed anything, on which payment was due, and as a matter of fact the Southern Pacific Company paid in full every dollar it owed to the government as soon as it became due, and with full interest. There was never any reason to suppose that it would not do so, and never any reason to suppose that it could not afford to pay this debt, for the power to control the line from Ogden to San Francisco, called the Central Pacific, was in itself an enormous asset, worth the value of this debt. Failure to pay this debt would have meant loss of control of the most valuable single factor in the great railroad system. The claim of the United States was secured by a second mortgage on the Central Pacific. It was supposed that it would be sold to satisfy the first mortgage, and that it would realize no more than this sum, leaving, as a railway manager cynically expressed it, nothing but "two streaks of rust and the right of way." The government proposed, by a sort of injunction, to hold up the Stanford property, which would then be seized, in case the Southern Pacific Railway system should at some future time be found in debt. There was no warrant in law or in good policy for this suit. One United States judge spoke of it as "the crime of the century." It is not easy to work out the motives,