The plan failed because the time allowed for deposits was too short. In spite of the objections raised 31,356 general mortgage bonds and 411,218 shares of stock were deposited in twenty-five days, and it was maintained that additional securities would surely be obtained to make up the percentages required. The managers alleged, however, that extension was impracticable, and announced that the scheme could not go through.[263] The year following this attempt at rehabilitation was full of the struggles of different interests, each jealous of any concession and working devotedly for its own hand. Prominent at this time was Mr. I. L. Rice, the same gentleman who has before been quoted in connection with Mr. McLeod’s operations in New England stocks. Mr. Rice had been a member of the syndicate which had put Mr. McLeod into the presidency, and had served as foreign representative of the company during his régime. He had been instrumental in forming the anthracite coal combination, and at the time of the Reading failure had been in England raising money to finance the coal holdings then acquired.[264] Returning from Europe upon the appointment of receivers, he examined the Reading books with the results which have been noticed, and now appeared as the active enemy of everything connected with Mr. McLeod, even to the receivers who had succeeded him. In May, 1893, he resigned the seat which he had held on the Reading board, on the ground that the management had condoned the use by Mr. McLeod of the company’s securities in carrying on his private and personal speculations; in September he resigned from the income bondholders’ committee, and attacked in a circular the McLeod régime and the succeeding receivership;[265] and in December he applied for the removal of the receivers, alleging that they had grossly neglected their duties to the stockholders, and had ignored the financial transactions of Mr. McLeod prior to their appointment.[266] In spite of his hostility to the existing régime, Mr. Rice hoped to rehabilitate the company without foreclosure or, indeed, formal reorganization. The action of others was inspired by a less optimistic view. The original suit on which receivers had been appointed had been brought by one Thomas C. Platt; but as early as March Alfred Sully and A. B. Rand of New York, and John Lowrie of London, holders of first and second preference income bonds, petitioned to intervene. In July Judge Dallas dismissed the Lowrie suit, but the petition was renewed in September, alleging that Mr. Platt “did not file his bill in good faith on his own behalf, and on behalf of all other holders of bonds, but at the request and for the benefit and protection of the men who were then managers of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company and the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company, and that the suit was not being pressed with due diligence.”[267]