“All the purposes, the expenditures on which have caused the floating debt,” said they, “seem to us to have been in themselves wise and politic, but the piling up of a large floating debt for even the best of purposes is always more or less imprudent and dangerous. The company’s credit might have borne the strain of the panic, but it was broken down by the Grant & Ward disaster, and the funding of its floating debt is now indispensable.... We have suggested to the president and directors, and now recommend to the committee that an effort should be made without delay to raise a permanent loan on the securities available for a total of $5,000,000.”[122] This, it will be observed, was the old remedy. Inability to meet current expenses was to be removed by capitalizing the debts which this inability had caused. The year 1885 was taken up with suits brought against the Erie by certain of its branch lines. In February the directors of the Buffalo & Southwestern Company brought suit to recover $345,000 interest defaulted during the previous January. The complaint alleged that the Erie was insolvent, and asked that it be restrained from using the gross receipts of the road until the default should have been made good. The Erie paid the back interest, but in July, after another default, an injunction was obtained forbidding it to divert any part of the earnings received or to be received from this property. It was recited that on May 24, 1881, the Buffalo & Southwestern had been leased to the Erie for 35 per cent of the gross earnings, subject to certain deductions; that the Erie had delayed payment of the rental due in January, 1885, and had refused to pay that due in July, 1885, but that it was still receiving the gross earnings of the plaintiffs’ road, and had applied these to the payment of its debts other than the rentals of this road.[123] In November, after the Erie’s other troubles were settled, the litigation was terminated by an agreement to reduce the Buffalo & Southwestern rental from 35 per cent to 27½ per cent. Other suits arose, directly or indirectly, because of the control which Mr. Jewett maintained as trustee of the stock of the Chicago & Atlantic and the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton railways even after his resignation from the Erie Company. On the one hand President King was anxious to repossess himself of these important branches for the Erie, and on the other Mr. Jewett was not disinclined to do what damage he could to the managers who had succeeded in supplanting him. In the matter of the Chicago & Atlantic Mr. Jewett gained the first victory in a temporary injunction forbidding the Erie to divert traffic from this line contrary to contract. This injunction was soon, however, substantially vacated, and President King in his turn obtained a decision that Jewett had been made trustee of the Chicago & Atlantic simply because he had been at the time vice-president of