The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-01-26


tribunals express assent.
ii. The stock aud bonds Of q railroad COM
pany should be limited to the sum honestly
spent in buying the track, building the road,
end providing the necessary equipment. They
should under no pretense be watered, and
should never be increased. even to pay for
extensions or improvements, without express
authority from the State.
III. When a railroad company, after paving
fair dividends for number of years, sud
denly suspends them and thenceforth for
years processes inability to pay dime be-
yond current expenses, including interest on
its loans, Ut should at once be taken in hand
by the State, Its management thoroughly in
vestigoted and the managers removed from
their trust, unless they shall be able to over
bear the natural presumption that they have
squandered or stolen the net proceeds that
belong to their stockholders. Should they
ask, why should the State interfere so long
as our stockholders acquiesce?' the ready
answer would be, "The public interest re-
quires the building of more railroads, so that
more people shall enjoy their benefits; and
your failure to pay dividends impedes and
postpones this consummation. You are
therefore cited to dispel the obvious pre-
sumption that you are stealing to the preju-
dice of your own stockholders not merely,
but of the entire community as well"
~. The device for preventing or suppress
ing conspiracies of railway managers against
the public veal by forbidding ths consolida-
tion of parallel lines is the merest fog
wreath. 1t isn't worth the paper whereon it
Is written. SO long as half-a-dozen managers
of diverse companies can meet in an Office
or parlor and double or treble the rates at
which they have hitherto transported pro-
duce or merchandise, without hindrauoe or
supervision, the value of every farm, the
prosperity Of every city, is virtually sus-
pended on the good pleasure of three or four
men.
Such are the new ideas now vaguely
floating in the air. They may not yet have
taken such shape as TO render them formida-
BILE to the 'rings' whereby our great railroads
are managed. But any one whose duty it is
to watch the currents Of public opinion must
realize that the times are exceedingly favor
able to their reception and diffusion. That
which is now ''a cloud no bigger than mau's
hand is liable suddenly to expand so as to
enshroud the sky, inaugurating q tempest
which shall become tornado.
RECREATIONS OF A MURDERER.
From the y. Y. Times.
Rulloff has broken the silence of his i'm
prisonment by an appeal to public criticism.
He has nothing to say about the crime of
which he has been convicted nothing of the
dark suspicious that rest upon his previous
life, and, unless by implication, nothing to
extenuate his choi,e of a career that has
ended SO sbamefullJ. To one thing only he
is true-and that is, to the memory of what
he persists in regarding as the great work of
his life, and in virtue of which he asks us to
believe that "no man this day upon Gods
earth has lived with a higher object" than
himself That Rulloff believed that his
book upon Method in the Formation of
Language" would bring him enormous profit
and reputation is beyond doubt. 1t is no
less true that he caused the boy whom he had
educated to be a common thief to share the
same conviction, and that this and other
accomplices of his crimes exercised, under
his direction, their profession of robbery
mainly that the pathological magnum
OpuS should be brought to a conclusion, and
they should be enabled to share in the golden
harvest which they felt assured would follow
its publication. more curious delusion,
probably, does not exist in all theEannals of
crime, and Judging from the samples of his
work that Rulloff has made public, it was as
baseless as it was curious. His communica-
tion to the BiDghamton Leader is a most
unique mixture of acuteness, erudition, pure
nonsense, and pretentious impudence. 1t is
hardly possible to discuss seriously either its
fundamental facts" or it's illustrative ex-
amples. The man who could 80 complacently
ignore, as Rulloff does in this production,
the best established principles of the science
with which he was dealing, while showing, at
the same time, culture sufficient to appreciate
theiy force, must either have been most
deliberate charlatan or a most hopeless
monomaniac.
Rulloff found ordinary men deceived by
sounding phrases that meant nothing; and
the average instinct of the common swindler
got so fan the better of the perceptions of the
scholar that he thought to revolutionize what
now ranks as one of the most exact of sci
ences, by formulas which are mere verbiage,
and discoveries that are but the pretense of
half knowledge What pitiful jargon, when
placed alongside of the laborious accuracy
Of true scholars is this mans talk about
a method that ''was for long time pre-
served a secret, and was peculiarly in the
possession of the priests" His jumbling
together of languages of primary and secon-
Diary formation is only equslled by the
ridiculous inaccuracy of many of his illus
trated roots, for which latter, however, the
typographical errors of the Leader may
be partially answerable. 1t is difficult to find
any satisfactory theory to explain the intel
lectual anomaly of a man who seems to have
dipped into modern philelogy, and who yet
talks about restoring the science to 'the
same exalted footing as when it flourished in
the schools of Greece and Rome, without,
apparently, having the slightest conscious
ness that he is talking the grossest nonsense.
Starting with such initial delusions, 1t is not
surprising to find our pseudo-philologist ap-
parently innocent of any knowledge of the
true place of the great mother-tongue of all
European languages-spoken on the Central
Asiatic table-land long before there is any
evidence of a sacerdotal caste having existed
at all and when amid the primitive society