Page:Facts, failures and frauds- revelations, financial, mercantile, criminal.djvu/19

FACTS, PAILUEES, A2fD FBATJDS. 7 for the creation of stock when shares were at a premium, though the new enterprises might afford but small returns, and thus diminish the general rate of profit derivable from trunks and existing branches. The result was far more agreeable to individuals to whom means were thus afforded of securing high premiums on new shares than to those who purchased securities unduly enhanced in price as permanent investments, this course of proceeding, in the way of financial management, leading to ruinous disappointment and serious national inconvenience. Though the low price to which shares ultimately fell was generally attributed to the injudicious location of lines, the inadequacy of their traffic, and the exorbitancy of their cost, all these are insufficient to account for that undue depreciation which railway property underwent, and from which it has scarcely yet recovered. For this depreciation reference must be made to the means taken by proprietors to enable them to divide among themselves millions of pounds sterling in the way of premiums, to the creation of nominal capital far exceeding the actual outlay, and to the exhaustive effects resulting from the highest allowable dividends being paid irrespective of legitimate receipts.

Amidst the efforts put forth for the construction of railways in connection with the early lines, and the rise of new and rival companies, which made it expedient for those of an older date to endeavour to secure the advantages they already enjoyed by setting about planning branches in different directions, without any view, however, to a complete consentaneous system, may be distinguished as standing out from these multiform contests which led to irremediable sacrifices, the apparent evidences of a certain dual energy and power, exhibited on a gigantic and hitherto imparalleled scale, between the eastern and western counties of England. The two grand branching routes of southern trunk-lines proceeding northward, after becoming in a manner interlocked in the great central belt, again emerge,