New-York tribune., 1870-09-12
4 LAST APPEAL FOR RESTITUTION.

a LASI AIIEHL run ALOIII CIiON'
The Railroads of the United States nearly
equal in extent and cost those of all the rest of
the world. At the close of this year. their ag-
gregate length will be nearly if not quite Fifty
Thousand miles and their total cost hardly
less than Twenty-Five Hundred Millions of
DOllars-a sum which exceeds the present
amount of our vast National Debt 1t is mar
velous that so young a country should have
been able to- raise, mainly within the last
thirty and wholly within the last forty years,
an amount so gigantic for single purpose.
But tens of thousands have risked, and many
of them sunk, their entire fortunes In the
construction of one or another OF these
Railroads, while hundreds of thousands have
invested all they could Taise-all they were
worth-in the stock and bonds of a railroad
of which some trusted uncle or cousin was a
| master-spirit, and in whose completion they
| felt local interest or patriotic pride.
! The boards of the thrifty, the savings of the
humble, the orphans heritage and the widows
DOVER have been swept sucked into this
insatiate maelstrOm, until the integrity of
railway management has become vital to us
all.
And, on the whole, the great trust has been
fairly responded to. The Schuylers and Hud-
sons who have robbed their stockholders have
been a very small per centage Of our railway
managers, and their frauds were perpetrated
| in the crude infancy of the Railroad system.
| The robberies committed in 1870 will make a
smaller aggregate than those committed
twenty to twenty-five years ago, when we had
! scarcely mile of iron track where we now
! have ten. Experience has suggested safe
guards which, if enforced by an honest and
faithful Judiciary render frauds or defalca-
tons in railway management rare and peril
Gus, while restricting them within narrow
| limits as to both time and amount.
The one conspicuous, shameful exception to
the prevalent integrity and solvency is pre-
sented by the Erie Railroad. This noble enter
prise was aided by a bonus of S30O0,00O from
the treasury of our State. 1t was constructed
where and when the right of way could be
procured at a nominal cost. IT runs through a
region where wood is and always must be
relatively cheap while the proximity of Min
eral Coal to its entire length insures it fuel at
a much lower cost than its great rival must
incur. Yet, while the Central is paying eight
per cent. annually on a capital whereof at
least half is water, the Erie pays and for
years has paid nothing, even ON its preferred
stock and while the fearfully diluted
stock of the Central sells nearly at par, that
of the Erie has long ranged between 25 and 20,
and would hardly command the lower figure if
largely pressed upon the market.
Other great railroads have passed through
period of depression and gloom. New roads
are subject to this ordeal. Trade has we'll
worn ruts, which it is reluctant to leave each
track runs through uninhabted swamps and
ravines where nothing marketable grows; the
villages lie along the breezy uplands clung to,
wherever that was possible, by the old stage
roads; time was required to WOO and win
transportation and travel to the novel grooves
provided by the Iron Horse so many railroads
that, since they were twenty years old have
earned and paid regular ard satisfactory divi-
dends, at first scarcely made their running ex-
penses. The Erie, on the other hand, often
paying dividends when it had not been five
years completed, and when its total receipts
were less than Twelve Millions per annum,
now, with an income admitted by its managers
to exceed Sixteen Millions per annum, pays 10
dividends at all
The men and women who invested more
than Fifty Millions of their hard earnings in
the capital of this road did it under charter
which guaranteed them the control of their
own property, by empowering them to elect
full Board of Directors at each annual eloc-
ton. An act of the Legislature of 1869, de-
vised and pushed through by the master
spirits OF the present management, authorized
the existing Directors to divide themselves into
four classes, whereof but one should be re-
placed annually; and, under this act, the said
master-spirits-tO wit, William NJ Tweed
(chief of the Legislators who passed the Classi-
fcation act,) Jay Gould, Frederick A. Lane