New England -- Fiction; New England -- Politics and government -- Fiction
In the statute books of a certain state may be found a number of laws
setting forth the various things that a railroad or railroads may do,
and on the margin of these pages is invariably printed a date, that
being the particular year in which these laws were passed. By a singular
coincidence it is the very year at which we have now arrived in our
story. We do not intend to give a map of the state, or discuss
the merits or demerits of the consolidation of the Central and the
Northwestern and the Truro railroads. Such discussions are not the
province of a novelist, and may all be found in the files of the Tribune
at the State Library. There were, likewise, decisions without number
handed down by the various courts before and after that celebrated
session,--opinions on the validity of leases, on the extension of
railroads, on the rights of individual stockholders--all dry reading
enough.
At the risk of being picked to pieces by the corporation lawyers who may
read these pages, we shall attempt to state the situation and with all
modesty and impartiality--for we, at least, hold no brief. When Mr.
Isaac D. Worthington obtained that extension of the Truro Railroad
(which we have read about from the somewhat verdant point of view of
William Wetherell), that railroad then formed a connection with another
road which ran northward from Harwich through another state, and with
which we have nothing to do. Having previously purchased a line to the
southward from the capital, Mr. Worthington's railroad was in a position
to compete with Mr. Duncan's (the “Central”) for Canadian traffic, and
also to cut into the profits of the “Northwestern,” Mr. Lovejoy's road.
In brief, the Truro Railroad found itself very advantageously placed, as
Mr. Worthington and Mr. Flint had foreseen. There followed a period of
bickering and recrimination, of attempts of the other two railroads to
secure representation in the Truro directorate, of suits and injunctions
and appeals to the Legislature and I know not what else--in all of which
affairs Mr. Bijah Bixby and other gentlemen we could name found both
pleasure and remuneration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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