Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1857-07-16 00:00:00

but I demand a right to expose a series of the most gross
misstatements I ever saw in any article in The Times which
you have allowed the writer of your City Article to
publish to-day, under the pretence of giving a fair
summary of the case between the ordinary and preference
shareholders of this company.

1. There has now been ample opportunity of proving
whether Redpath's frauds were owing to the " mismanage-
ment" and " negleect of the directors," and the result has
been that the only person on whose neglect the committee
of either Honse of Parliament made any remark is Mr.W.
H. Clark, who was for eight years bead registrar over Red-
path, at a salary twice as large as that of any of the directors,
and who 11 times over certified under his own hand, as was
shown to the committee, that the register was correct,
when, in fact, it was full of annually increasing forgeries.
2. It is not true that there is spy stipulation in any
Act of the company that any of the preference share-
ho'ders should have so much dividend " per annum," as
your writer asserts there is; and the Attorney-General has
pronounced that no such claim can be maintained ; and,
if it were true, they are now attempting to get recouped
out of the ordinary shareholders' dividends of 1857 for
their loss in 1856.

3. It is not true that the directors declared " they could
not support any Bill that would throw upon the preference
stock any portion of the lose." It is true that they said
they" could not take upon themselves" to do it; and it
is also true that they were, nevertheless, required to do it
by the almost unanimous resolution of the first meeting of
the shareholders in favour of an amendment upon the
directors' own resolution.

4. It is not true the directors suppressed the " recom-
mendation of Lord Redesdale that as a penalty for their
negl( cL the directors should take the burden of the loss upon
themselves," Lord Redesdale expressed no such opinion,
and, if he had, it would have been so absurd for him to
do so without any investigation of the facts, or any legal
decision upon them, that the reading of such an opinion
could only have injured his reputation, and not ours. The
whole of what Lord Redesdale wrote, his decision as to
what the Standing Order Committee would allow, and his
own individual opinion on the case was read to the meeting
last Wednesday, when the Bill was approved by a large
majority; and the council for the Bill had before offered
to read it to the committee in the Commons, who refused
to heor it, as immaterial.

5. So far is it from being true that " many of the parties
destined to be mulcted seemed until the eleventh hour to
have no consciousness of what was in tended,":that a report
of the proceedings on the 12 h of March had been in the
hands of every shareholder for four months, and a com-
mittee had been sitting for a month before the meeting
which sanctioned the Bill before it went into the Lords'
committee, getting up all the opposition they could, by
advertisements and circulars to the shareholders.

6. The statement that " the proxies obtained by the
directors when they professed an intention to act justly by
the preference shareholders were used to carry the day
ar.rainst them" I pronounce to be a gross and deliberate
falsehood, either on the part of the person who wrote that
statement or of some one else who furuished him with it ;
for it is notorious that none of these proxies were used at
all, the meeting being so unanimous that nobody thought
of demanding a poll. Moreover, the majority of those
proxies were not from preference shareholders, as is here
and has been elsewhere insinuated, but from ordinary
shareholders: and this too was proved before the corn -
mittee on the bill, so that the excuse of ignorance cannot
be made for even this mis-statement.

7. Of course it is in one sense true that the preference
shareholders " constitute only a fraction of the entire
body of voters," inasmuch as anything short of the whole
is a fraction ; but it is as untrue as most of this writer's
other statements, that they therefore '• had little chance
at the meeting ;" for the fact is that the various classes of
shareholders interested in opposing or altering this bill
constitute a considerable majority of the entire body ; and
yet, nevertheless, as this writer very well knows, the vote
against the bill, by themselves and their proxies, only re-
presented one-ninth, and the petitioners against it less
than one-fortieth of the entire stock of the company.

After these specimens of the veracity of your City Ar-
ticle writer, I am quite content, as he proposes, to let the
public form their own opinion without further argument.