These last assertions will surprise not a few. The general public who never see a railway-journal, and who skip the reports of half-yearly meetings which appear in the daily papers, are under the impression that dishonesties like those gigantic ones so notorious during the mania, are no longer committed. They do not forget the doings of stags and stock-jobbers and runaway-directors. They remember how men-of-straw held shares amounting to £100,000, and even £200,000; how numerous directorates were filled by the same persons—one having a seat at twenty-three boards; how subscription-contracts were made up with signatures bought at 10_s_ and even 4_s_ each, and porters and errand-boys made themselves liable for £30,000 and £40,000 a-piece. They can narrate how boards kept their books in cipher, made false registries, and refrained from recording their proceedings in minute-books; how in one company, half-a-million of capital was put down to unreal names; how in another, directors bought for account more shares than they issued, and so forced up the price; and how in many others, they repurchased for the company their own shares, paying themselves with the depositors’ money. But, though more or less aware of the iniquities which have been practised, the generality think of them solely as the accompaniments {55} of bubble schemes. More recent enterprises they know to have been _bonâ fide_ ones, mostly carried out by old-established companies; and knowing this, they do not suspect that in the getting-up of branch lines and extensions, there are chicaneries near akin to those of Capel Court; and quite as disastrous in their ultimate results. Associating the ideas of wealth and respectability, and habitually using respectability as synonymous with morality, it seems to them incredible that many of the large capitalists and men of station who administer railway affairs, should be guilty of indirectly enriching themselves at the expense of their constituents. True, they occasionally meet with a law-report disclosing some enormous fraud; or read a _Times_ leader, characterising directorial acts in terms which are held libellous. But they regard the cases thus brought to light as entirely exceptional; and, under that feeling of loyalty which ever idealises men in authority, they constantly tend towards the conviction, if not that directors can do no wrong, yet that they are very unlikely to do wrong.