This administration was, however, subject to restrictions, of which two deserve special notice. In the first place, the trustees undertook to operate the railroad, when completed, on such a basis that the rates and fares charged should be the lowest rates and fares which would yield enough earnings to meet costs of operation, interest, and sinking fund requirements, and to pay a dividend not exceeding 6 per cent upon capital stock paid in. This clause was evidently intended to reassure shippers who had been or might become interested in the new railroad. But besides this, the trustees agreed that they would not knowingly vote said stock “for the benefit or in the interest of any person or corporation or interest hostile to the interest of, or in business competition with the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway Company, or of or to or in favor of any party or parties or company or companies owning or controlling any parallel line of road to the detriment and injury of the corporation hereinbefore mentioned.”[474] To this clause there was later added another of the same import, to the effect that the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway should not be leased to, or consolidated with, any company which might own, control, manage, or operate any of the roads then existing in the San Joaquin Valley, and that neither the trustees nor their successors should have any power as stockholders to assent to any such consolidation or lease, or in any way to put the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway under the same management as that of any other railroad then existing in the San Joaquin Valley.[475] In so carefully worded a document as the trust agreement here under consideration, the prohibition of combination with competing railroads or with railroads then existing in the San Joaquin Valley had the force of an affirmative permission to the trustees to consolidate their property with that belonging to any company not in the prohibited class. As a practical matter this meant consolidation with the Santa Fé and with that railroad only, for the reason that there was no other system with which combination would have been significant. The trust agreement was approved at a meeting of stockholders held on April 5, 1895,[476] and by the middle of the following month holders of more than three-fourths of the stock had given written assent to the trust conditions. The fair inference from the terms of the trust agreement is that the promoters looked upon the union of the San Francisco and San Joaquin Railway and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé as a proper and likely outcome of the construction of the former road. This same conclusion is strengthened by consideration of the China Basin lease, concerning which a few words may be said. The China Basin Lease