Here were these Wall Street law-breakers, who had for two years been defying the Commission on the Flovilla matter, who had ignored their rulings on the stoppage of passenger trains, who had continually refused to obey the law requiring them to post bulletins of delayed trains, who, at Pitts, had acted contrary to the orders of the Commission, and who had never accepted a freight rate decision which was not just what they wanted—and their lawyer had the insolence to serve notice on the Commission that if it bothered his Wall Street clients further, he would turn his back upon it and seek that unfailing haven of Corporate rascality, the Federal Courts! CROW ONCE MORE, LITTLE ROOSTER! * * * * * [Illustration: “Some editors make editorial music that way.”] As to the illegal charges made by the roads, in the manner explained by me in the 3rd specification of my article, I stand my ground, and I say that the Supreme Court has never declared that such a discrimination against a town on the main line was legal. On the contrary, it was held to be illegal. As to specification number 4, that the Corporations rob the people of the state by compelling them to pay dividends upon fictitious capitalization, who can deny it? Every privately owned railroad in this state has had all the water poured into it that it would hold. The fixed charges are based upon this fraudulent capitalization. The people pay dividends upon it. The freight and passenger rates are kept up, and accommodations kept down, and labor squeezed, and safety appliances neglected, and bridges allowed to stand till they fall beneath a load of screaming, bleeding, dying passengers, because the Wall Street rascals who watered the stock demand dividends upon the millions which they created out of ink and paper. Clark Howell dares to say that the Central is capitalized for less now than before the war. For shame! For shame! One must be awfully hard up for an office before he can bring himself to make a statement like that for a railroad. The Capital stock of the Central was $7,500,000 before the war; and General Toombs declared that half of it was water. The Capital stock of the Central proper is perhaps 75,000 shares, as it was before the war. It may be even less. But that’s a matter of no consequence whatever. The really important question is, _How much capitalization does the Central carry upon which it has to pay revenue?_ Everybody remembers how Pat Calhoun got control of the Central, and everybody knows how thick Clark Howell was with Pat. Wanted to put him in the Senate, you know. Well, Pat and his Wall Street friends slapped a debt of _sixteen million dollars_ on the Central during the gay time they had control of it. Then the road was wrecked in the most approved Wall Street manner, and many a genuine widow and real orphan wept bitterly in their grief, for they had gone to bed in comfort and woke to poverty.