should be thereby requested to open books to examination, and to invite stockholders to contribute voluntarily a sum sufficient to keep the company from immediate failure.[97] The proposal showed a proper spirit, but was impracticable. Four days later Mr. Jewett was appointed receiver on application of representatives of the Attorney-General and of the Railroad.[98] This was the second receivership which the Erie had had to face, and the situation was materially worse than at the previous failure. According to the statement of President Jewett the funded indebtedness in May, 1875, amounted to $54,394,100, and the fixed charges to $5,059,828; while the net earnings for the previous nine months had decreased 13.4 per cent from the corresponding period for the previous year, and a serious deficit was in view. Temporary measures of relief had served but to drag the company further into the mire;[99] and, most important of all, the causes for the existing difficulties were of a permanent nature, so that the future gave promise of still harder conditions than had existed in the past. What was needed was a reorganization which should undo the evil work of Gould, Fisk, Drew, and their associates, and which should secure the margin of surplus earnings which the reorganization of 1859–62 had failed to provide. Perhaps the chief difficulty lay in the fact that the men who were responsible for the increased capitalization were not at all those on whom the brunt of reconstruction would fall; for while the managers of the road had been Americans, the gullible investors had been Englishmen; and it was reported that much of the watered stock of the Gould régime had been unloaded on the English market.