The Sun.
London, England, 1866-08-24 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—In one of the early numbers of Punch it
may be read how " On Friday last a respectable
tradesman residing in Bishopsgate-street suddenly
rushed off to the Shoreditch station of the Eastern
Counties Railway, and took a through ticket forYar
mouth. No possible cause can be assigned for the
rash act." That was 20 years ago, when a succes-
sion of mishaps and a terrible character for mis-
management had exposed the unfortunate railway to
general ridicule. The line, it must in justice be said,
outlived its follies, if not its reputation. For many
years past it has been, as far as the public is con-
cerned, a very fairly conducted line, with as few
accidents as most, and with more than average pre-
tensions to convenience-•and punctuality. If it did
not' stand so high as it should have done in popular
esteem, that was owing to the difficulties proverbi-
ally in the way of a dog with a bad name. Perhaps
the directors perceived the damage of a name. At
any rate they changed it, and the Great Eastern, in
place of the Eastern Counties, made its appearance
befor3 the public. Fairly speaking, the public has
little to complain of, but very different is the case
of the unfortunate shareholders. Financially, this
ill fated I;ne has gone on from bad to worse, until
at length its Report informs us that the Company
can hardly get half way towards the satisfaction of
the various claimants on its revenues. The docu-
ment in question, which appeared in our columns of
yesterday, affords an excellent illustration of all the
varied shapes wHch railway indebtedness may
assume. There seems to be no species of incum-
brance known to financial struggles with which the
Great Eastern is unacquainted: Originally, and in
the pure simplicity of abstract theory, it is conceived
that a railway is constructed for a certain amount
of money, representing what is termed the capital
account. When the line is opened, the expenses of
working it are first defrayed, and then the net
revenue rema;ns to be paid over as interest on
capital to the shareholders in the concern. But
all that is theory only. Such an example of finan-
cial simplicity ;,-1 real railway life is not, we imagine,
to be found. Independently of the expensiveness
of a capital account, which, somehow or other, can
never be " closed," but is perpetually open for en-
largement, there are fifty other roads to ruin on
which rsilway companies can embark. They issue
new shares at a high fixed rate of interest, and give
them prec :deuce over original shares. When they
have carried share capital in all its branches to the
utmost attainable limit, they can still put out de-
bentures, effect mortgages, or descend for the exi-
gencies of the moment to mere temporary loans.
By all these methods money may be got in, but the
day of reckoning comes at last, as it has come to the
Great Eastern ; with what results ill now be seen.
The directors inform the shareholders that the total
receipts of the company for the half-year ending at
Midsummer last amounted to the handsome sum of
£887,092. And this income, be it observed, is for
the worst six months out of the twelve. The re-
ceipts during the second half of the year usually ex-
ceed by more than £lOO,OOO those of the first half,
so that altogether the annual earnings of title Great
Eastern Railway really fall but little short of two
millions sterling. However, to deal solely with the
half-year before us, let us proceed to state that while
the public paid over the counters of the company
during the past six months the sum of £887,092,
the company expended in the service of the public
for this value received the sum of £496,128. This pro-
portion of working expenses to receipts, being at the
rate of 56 per cent., is rather high, but we are wil-
ling to suppose that it indicates, at any rate, a liberal
treatment of customers, and it leaves, after all, a net
balance of revenue over expenditure to the amount of
no less than £390,964. Now, as the capital of the
company is £23,000,000, even these large earnings
would not provide any very high interest upon the
investments of the shareholders, but, unhappily, that
question cannot be so much as entertained. Between
the shareholders and the revenue stand more than one
rank of claimanfs whose demands must firstbe satis-
fied, and even this preliminary satisfaction in the
present case cannot entirely he provided for. The
directors, as we have said, find themselves with all
but £400,000 in hand as the actual surplus of re-
ceipts over expenses for the past half-year. Out of
this they first allot about £lOO,OOO for rents due to
other companies ; then they set aside £123,000 for
payment of mortgage and debenture claims, and
then £30,000 more for interest on temporary loans.
These assignments still leave a sum of £140,000 dis-
posable ; but, unhappily, the creditors of the com-
pany are but half satisfied. We have not yet come
to the preferential shareholders, who are all to be
paid before the original shareholders, and whose
claims amount, or amounted but the other day, to a
good £250,000. As a net result, therefore, we dis-
cover, and indeed the directors announce, that the
company can only satisfy a portion even of those
preferential charges which take precedence over the
claims of the first proprietors. The Great Eastern
can still pay interest on its debentures, which is more
than the London, Chatham, and Dover can do;
but it cannot discharge all its debts, and, as a matter
of course, has no ordinary dividend forthcoming.
If we are to moralise on these calamitous conclu-
sions we must trace the mischief a long way back,
and 'distribute the responsibility over a great num-
ber of years. There was hardly a time, we fear,
when the company did not suffer more or less
from either mismanagement or extravagance. The
first blow was given to the prospects. of the con-
cern when the line from Cambridge to Lincoln was
lost in Parliament, and the field opened to the
dangerous rivalry of the Great Northern. This
decision confined the Great Eastern to a compara-
tively sterile district ; and though its actual receipts,
as we see, are very large, its mileage is extensive,
and it does a good deal for its money. But the ruin
of the line has been the extravagance of expenditure
by which the capital account was first made so large,
and incumbrances to such an overwhelming extent
were accumulated afterwards. The directors pro-
mise, and no doubt with all sincerity, a pacific and
economical policy for the future; but the mischief
is done. Any reader can calculate for himself what
the earnings of the line must be to provide for the
charges, first of the mortgage and debenture debt,
then of the temporary loans, then of the prefer-
ence shares, and, after all, of the original shares
of the concern. At present, as we have seen,
an income of near a million in six months will not
suffice ; and yet it seems that the company had until
very lately fresh schemes of extension and expendi-
ture in hand. It is, of course, conceivable that a
new development of traffic may not only pay its own
expenses, but contribute a welcome surplus to de-
ficits in other quarters, and certainly we may well
wish, in the interests of the metropolitan public, that
the coal trade undertaken by the Great Eastern may
be effectually extended. But it is uphill work, in the
best of cases, to fight against debt, and the path
before the Great, Eastern must appear very steep
indeed. If there is a spark of consolation in the
report, it is in its candour and plainness. Things
are certainly not " made pleasant" now ; and if
there is a way out of the financial slough, plain
dealing offers the best chance of finding it.
- -

HERALD.—In any debated question the right of
public speech and meeting may be claimed as fairly
for one side as for the other. If those who disapprove
of the conduct of the late Governor of Jamaica, and
consider that he has betrayed the trust reposed in
him by the Crown, have availed themselves of this
freedom so far as to hold one public meeting after
another for the purpose of denouncing him ; have
published pamphlets in which his conduct is criti-
cised with extreme severity ; and have actually
formed themselves into an association, with the
avowed object of bringing him to condign punish-
ment for his imagined crimes—surely those among
us who take a more lenient view of his conduct, who
disapprove of this persecution, and consider him
worthy of praise rather than of censure, have a right
to put our protest on record in such manner as we
may choose. A banquet in their honour at the En glish
port of landing has always been a favourite method
with us of receiving distinguished foreigners and
governors of colonies. Those who organised the
Southampton banquet to Mr. Eyre had no more inten-
tion of feasting in triumph over the putting to death
of several hundreds of negroes, than our countrymen,
who welcomed Kossuth and Garibaldi had of danc-
ing over the carnage of the Hungarian or Italian
campaigns. To put the matter in this light is an
absurd misrepresentation of the motives and feelings
which actuate English gentlemen. It was the
public servant who, in their opinion, had passed
with honour through a long and arduous career ; it
was the man who had saved a colony from anarchy
and horror ; it was the Englishman who had been
ruined by a most un-English outcry, who had been
sacrificed to popular clamour by a pusillanimous
Government, who would be hounded to the death
by his enemies had he not friends to plead his cause,
that these noblemen and gentlemen at Southampton
were thus delighted to honour. Why should the
blacks have so many friends, and the solitary white
man none ? It is begging the question to assume
that he has been in the wrong, when even the report
of the Commissioners only blamed him for the
undue prolongation of martial law, awarding almost
unqualified praise to his behaviour in other respects.
It is because his friends and sympathisers do not
consider him disgraced, it is because they refuse to
believe in his " lamentable fault," because they re-
gard him as an upright and distinguished officer
who has been shamefully ill-used, that they wel-
comed him at Southampton. The dismissal of Mr.
Eyre was of a piece with the rest of the conduct of
the late Government, who, in their treatment of
public servants, as well as in their abortive scheme
of so-called Reform, truckled uniformly to the
tyrannous demands of the Radical faction led by
Mr. Bright, Eyre was recalled on account

of the misdoings of certain officers entrusted with
the suppression of the rebellion in remote districts,
why was not Lord Canning disgraced on account of
the seventies which attended the suppression of the
mutiny in India ? If the circumstances of the
Jamaica rising were to occur again, there is not a
gentleman in England who would not endeavour to
act as Mr. Eyre did, though few would carry 01.;.t
.
their intentions with his discretion and ability. It
is the almost unanimous opinion in Jamaica that
his firmness saved the white inhabitants of the island
from destruction, and the people on the spot roust
surely be better judges of what was necessary in
the emergency than any of us over here can be.
The company which met at Southampton to welcome
the ex-Goverr.or were of opinion that his conduct,.
hi
'n
these circumstances, was such as to do '
honour, and it is to insult them to call in question
their right to give expression to their opinion.