Philadelphians. It became necessary to sound the financial tocsin
in the ears of all the Union. Congress, States, cities, counties,
schools, churches, citizens and children were appealed to for
subscriptions. The shares were fixed at the convenient size of ten
dollars each, hardly the market-value of the stock-certificate,
"twenty-four by twenty inches on the best bank-note paper," which
became the property of each fortunate shareholder on the instant of
payment. But these seductive pictures belonged to a class of art with
which the moneyed public had become since '73 unhappily too familiar.
They had to jostle, in the gallery of the stock-market, a vast
and various collection exhaustive of the whole field of allegory,
mythological and technical, and framed in the most bewitching aureoles
of blue, red and green printer's ink. It seemed in '72 much more
probable that the Coon Swamp and Byzantium Trans-Continental Railway
would be able, the year after completion, to pay eight per cent. on
fifty thousand dollars of bonds to the mile, sold at seventy in the
hundred, than it did in '75 that ten millions of fifty-cent tickets
could be disposed of in six months at any point on the Continent. Thus
it happened that the exchange of Mr. Spinner's twenty square inches of
allegory for the three square feet of Messrs. Ferris & Darley's went
on slowly, and it became painfully obvious that the walls of but an
imperceptible minority of American homes would have the patriotic
faith and fervor of their occupants attested a century hence by these
capacious engravings, as that of a hundred years ago is by rusty
muskets and Cincinnati diplomas.

Still, the stock did not altogether go a-begging. The adjacent
State of New Jersey signed for the sum of $100,000, more remote New
Hampshire and Connecticut for $10,000 each, and little Delaware for
the same. Kansas gave $25,000. Five thousand were voted by the city