If my reasoning here is correct, there is cause for our great railroad capitalists to look out for the security of their investments. The basis for their wealth may prove far less certain than they have imagined it to be. With the prevailing and steadily increasing public feeling against the methods of railroad capitalists and the working of our railroad system, what assurance can there be that, when a remedy for these corporate wrongs comes to be clearly propounded, it will not be eagerly urged upon the attention of the Legislatures and adopted without much ceremony? The dash of a Governor’s pen is, therefore, all that stands between the railroad millionaire and the sudden extinction of a large portion of his inflated paper wealth. Is this a chimerical conclusion? The question, it seems to me, deserves a far more serious consideration than those most vitally concerned have yet bestowed upon it. No man can confidently deny the possibility of such a result as is here indicated. No one familiar with the present public temper on the subject of railroad monopoly can reasonably question _the probability even_ of a settlement of this kind being ere long resorted to. Under these circumstances, it is a question very pertinent to the times, whether the foundation of our railroad aristocracy is as broad or as firm as it has been supposed to be, and whether a healthy solution of the great railroad problem is as difficult and as remote as some despondent people have represented it to be. [Illustration: A ONE THOUSAND DOLLAR BOND OF THE STATE OF GEORGIA. Repudiated. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXVII. GEORGIA REPUDIATION BONDS.