A history of railway management and railway intrigue, however, would quickly undeceive them. In such a history, the tricks of projectors and the mysteries of the share-market would occupy less space than the analysis of the multiform dishonesties which have been committed since 1845, and the genesis of that elaborate system of tactics by which companies are betrayed into ruinous undertakings which benefit the few at the cost of the many. Such a history would not only have to detail the doings of the personage famed for “making things pleasant;” nor would it have merely to add the misdeeds of his colleagues; but it would have to describe the kindred corruptness of other railway administrations. From the published report of an investigation-committee, it would be shown how, not many years since, the directors of one of our lines allotted among themselves 15,000 new shares then at a premium in the {56} market; how to pay the deposits on these shares they used the company’s funds; and how one of their number thus accommodated himself in meeting both deposits and calls to the extent of more than £80,000. We should read in it of one railway chairman who, with the secretary’s connivance, retained shares exceeding a quarter of a million in amount, intending to claim them as his allotment if they rose to a premium; and who, as they did not do so, left them as unissued shares on the hands of the proprietors, to their vast loss. We should also read in it of directors who made loans to themselves out of the company’s floating balances at a low rate of interest, when the market rate was high; and who paid themselves larger salaries than those assigned: entering the difference in an obscure corner of the ledger under the head of “petty disbursements.” There would be a description of the manœuvres by which a delinquent board, under impending investigation, gets a favourable committee nominated—“a whitewashing committee.” There would be documents showing that the proxies enabling boards to carry contested measures, have in some cases been obtained by garbled statements; and, again, that proxies given for a specified purpose have been used for other purposes. One of our companies would be proved to have projected a line, serving as a feeder, for which it obtained shareholders by offering a guaranteed dividend, which, though understood by the public to be unconditional, was really contingent upon a condition not likely to be fulfilled. The managers of another company would be convicted of having carried party measures by the aid of preference-shares standing in the names of station-masters; and of being aided by the proxies of the secretary’s children too young to write.