The Sun. — 1869-01-13 (London, England)

CORNERS" IN ENGLAND 6- AMERICA. the value of the shares ; be met them by a sudden and unexpected move, by which the law limiting the increase of capital was evaded, and the shareholders were delighted on getting largely their holdings increased, coupled with the assurance that it was out of the accumulated earnings expended to improve their property. It so answered VANDERBILT'S i Wall-street speculations that he made four or five millions of dollars from the men who were trying to crush him, and he raised the stock from 124 to 150. It may be true, as alleged, that the accounts were falsified, as but two years agothe company asked the Legislature to increase the freight and passenger rates, as the road could not otherwise earn enough to pay dividends, and one or the other of those declarations are supposed by some to be untrue. The course pursued by VANDERBILT may also, as alleged, be a simple watering of the stock ; yet that the public do not think so is clear from the great rise in the market value of the shares. It is also undeniable that Commodore VANDERBILT has turned every line he has controlled, however ill managed and depiessed when it came into his hands into, a prosperous concern, and these facts go far to account for the rise, although such " corners" are a disgrace to Wall-street, as is the shameful jobbing of which the London Stock Exchange has been made the stage ; yet on fairly contrasting the two we find that investors in London have been made victims to a far greater extent, by nefarious transactions, and are much more likely to be so in the future than are the investors in New York.  (From the Anglo-American Times.) At present a prosecution is progressing in London against a batch of leading commercial men accused of a swindle by which the public were robbed of four millions sterling. At the same time an effort is being made to reinstate in business a man just emerged from a convict's cell, to whose " mismanagement" a sum almost as great was lost in two or three years, causing 27 premature deaths, seven of which were suicides. These " prominent merchants" have found an able advocate in the leading journal ; but it is one thing to " finance " in the city of London and another to " finance " in the city of New York. Whether the morality of American men of business would be proof, if the opportunity offered, of cheating on the gigantic scale of English men of business, as shown by the facts brought out since 1865, we do not pretend to say ; hut they never have had the opportunity, nor is it likely that they will for many generations, for the simple reason that they deal with a population whose knowledge of business differs greatly from that of the gulls upon whom the British directors preyed. The Times has given prominence to the Wall-street speculations in Erie and New York Central, and urged this shameles3 manipulation of the stock of great railway lines in the interests of cliques as a proof of the insecurity of all American investments. We do not deny a just inference ; and we freely allow that the impunity with which these transactions have been accomplished, and the sight of men rolling in wealth gained by such means, is an element of insecurity in American investment. But if there is one thing established more than another it is the conviction in the minds of those who have money that no investment is absolutely safe. Some erroneously suppose British Consols to be so ; that is, they believe this of a country overwhelmed with debt, and whose whole reliance, even for the support of its home population, is foreign trade; whose chief outlet for its energies is an Empire of 200,000,000 people, in the main hostile, and at the other end of the earth, both outside elements of insecurity, independent of an internal revolution by which political power is being transferred from a narrow and property-holding class to the masses, who hold no property at all. If the promise to pay of a country so placed is the most secure investment in the world, then it must be allowed that capitalists have good reason for their timidity. Admitting the instability of all investments, what we contend is that on a fair view of the whole field there is no country which offers such attractions to investors as the United States ; and when the leading journal in England creates distrust it most injures English capitalists. That it does systematically endeavour to lessen confidence in American finance is we are sorry to say bu t too evident. We have often alluded to it before, and those who know the subject can easily detect this in its columns, though covered by a fine gloss of impartiality. Take yesterday's paper, for instance, and the following cable news is announced :  LuNDON