THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
RECKLESS speculators, when their bills were about to fall due, have been known to draw other bills for larger sums, discount them at a loss and meet the present liability by incurring a greater at no distant period. Financial operations of this kind have generally been understood to indicate the desperation of men whose career was near a close.
If this symptom has been rightly interpreted, there is good ground to apprehend that the general Railway crash, which has been anxiously looked forward to by many, cannot be far distant. Theparties who have speculated in "shares" beyond their means are devising plans to raise money for present use at the risk of in- creased liabilities for the future—if not, indeed, plans for drawing their own necks out of the noose and leaving others dangling as Punch leaves the hangman.
Some ingenious Scotchmen are about to open new joint-stock banks or loan companies, for the purpose principally of making advances to assist railway speculators, which the more cautious established banks refuse ; and in the prospectuses of some of these eompanies, the names of gentlemen who occupy conspicuous posi- tions in the list of parties holding railway shares to the amount of 20001. and upwards figure as Directors. This is not all : the prospectuses intimate that the interim Directors are to retain the absolute management in their hands for the first year; and that, as most of the shares are already appropriated, offers for those that have been reserved will only be received from capitalists of unquestionable solidity.
The conception of this scheme for raising the wherewithal to pay inconvenient calls does honour to the ingenuity of the con- trivers. But the delicate conception is spoiled by the bungling execution. The hint that none but parties with plenty of cash will be received into the copartnery, and that the management is to be left entirely in the hands of the present partners, is rather too broad. Jeremy Diddler's "Sam l you have not such a thing as half-a-crown about you ?" was a refined finesse in com- parison.
The private blower of wind-bills and flier of kites does harm within a very limited sphere : but joint-stock banks, when the speculation mania is rife, have a Warner's "long range" of mischief in them. It is consoling to reflect, that in the present instance recklessness of consequences is not combined with ade- quate skill of execution.
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