At this juncture Mr. Sidney Dillon resigned the presidency, and Mr. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was elected his successor. Mr. Dillon was well along in years, was said to be in poor health, and doubtless missed the support which Mr. Gould had been accustomed to render him. Mr. Adams was a younger man, only forty-nine years of age as against the sixty-nine of Mr. Dillon. He had been a member of the Massachusetts Railway Commission from 1869 to 1879, had served as government director of the Union Pacific in 1878, and now brought to his position as president an inexhaustible fund of energy, large resourcefulness, and more important still, a nice sense of his obligations towards the bondholders and shareholders of his road. Under his régime the economies earlier initiated were continued and extended; employees were discharged until, by June 28, 1884, the company had only about 10,000 men in its employ instead of the 20,000 who had been on the rolls at one time; and rolling mills, etc., were closed wherever the company found it cheaper to purchase rails and equipment at current prices. This, with the cessation of dividends, left a considerable surplus revenue applicable to the payment of the floating debt. In addition, bonds and stock from the company’s treasury were sold between January 1, 1884, and January 1, 1887, for which $6,550,000 were obtained; and the aggregate of resources made available was $16,200,000, of which $8,251,368 were applied to the floating debt, $6,708,632 to betterment of the road and branch-line construction, and $1,240,000 to increase of equipment.[488] In addition the proceeds from land sales were used to the same general end. In August, to reassure investors, President Adams stated that no part of the floating debt was pressing, and in November he repeated the statement; the truth of which was made evident by the payment of the last bit of net unfunded indebtedness on August 22, two years later. The result was highly creditable, although the continued cessation of dividends provoked some protest.