in the thirties and the forties and manifested itself most
unfortunately in the new Western States--Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
and Michigan. Here bonfires and public meetings whipped up the
zeal; people believed that railroads would not only immediately
open the wilderness and pay the interest on the bonds issued to
construct them, but that they would become a source Of revenue to
sadly depleted state treasuries. Much has been heard of
government ownership in recent years; yet it is nothing
particularly new, for many of the early railroads in these new
Western States were built as government enterprises, with results
which were frequently disastrous. This mania, with the land
speculation accompanying it, was largely responsible for the
panic of 1837 and led to that repudiation of debts in certain
States which for so many years gave American investments an evil
reputation abroad.

In the more settled parts of the country, however, railroad
building had comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the
railroad map of the forties indicates that railroad building in
this early period was incoherent and haphazard. Practically
everywhere the railroad was an individual enterprise; the
builders had no further conception of it than as a line
connecting two given points usually a short distance apart. The
roads of those days began anywhere and ended almost anywhere. A
few miles of iron rail connected Albany and Schenectady. There
was a road from Hartford to New Haven, but there was none from
New Haven to New York. A line connected Philadelphia with
Columbia; Baltimore had a road to Washington; Charleston, South
Carolina, had a similar contact with Hamburg in the same State.
By 1842, New York State, from Albany to Buffalo, possessed