Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/252

240 1. Receivers' certificates should only take rank as a lien preceding the class of creditors on whose application the receivers are appointed, and should only be issued to raise money to conserve the property, and not for betterments.

2. As soon as receivers are appointed, the court should call a meeting of the mortgage creditors, to learn if the receiver selected is satisfactory.

3. The court should see that all proceedings under which receivers are appointed are prosecuted to an end with the utmost diligence, and, failing this, at once discharge the receivers.

4. As it is evident that our courts, as at present constituted, have neither the time nor the ability to manage large corporations, and hence must rely on their officers, the receivers, there should be a new court, part of whose judges should be business men, to whom all such applications should be made.

5. The protection of this court should extend to collaterals of the insolvent debtor which are pledged for loans, as there is no good reason why this class of creditors should be allowed to sacrifice the property of the debtor when all others are stopped.

It is not intended in this article to reflect on the judiciary, who probably have done the best they could under circumstances really foreign to their training and duties, and who have naturally left matters pretty much to their officers, the receivers; nor is it meant to imply that, in some cases, the timely protection of the court has not been of great advantage to the creditors; but when, as in the case of the Logansport, Crawfordsville, and Southwestern Railroad Company, we see the first-mortgage bondholders deprived of the management of their property, and it so loaded with receivers' certificates that when it is sold they swallow up every cent; when, as in the case of the Vicksburg and Meridian Railroad Company, we find the receiver not only buying new rails, but changing the gauge of the whole line; when, in cases nearer home, we find receivers using the bondholders' money to pay leased lines, and issuing car-trusts to increase the equipment, is it not time to call a halt, and ask both the courts and the people to consider what they are doing?

has pointed out, in "Petermann's Mittheilungen," how the idea of a great world-water-parting may be worked out from a consideration of the earth's surface. He has laid down on a polar projection-map, showing both the Old and New World Continents, in illustration of his proposition, a single continuous line, broken only by Bering Strait, extending from the south point of America north along the west side of South and North America, in an irregular diagonal across Asia to the Isthmus of Suez, and down Eastern Africa to the Cape. General Tillo, however, admits that there are special continental water-partings which do not quite conform to the line of the great parting, although, as a matter of fact, nearly all the great rivers of the world are divided by this parting into two directions.