Excerpt from Railway Rescue: A Letter Addressed to the Directorates of Great Britain

IT is the fashion for those who imagine they have something to say on railway subjects, to address themselves to the shareholders, I prefer to speak to you, having come to the conclusion that shareholders are practically an arithmetical nil - a fluctuating body of sheep-men, here to day and gone to-morrow; now jumping through a hedge-gap into a rich pasture, and anon floundering in an impracticable marsh, without the Wit to understand that the pasture of this quarter may be the marsh of next quarter, and vice versa. In short, they merely play the game of follow my leader at the sport of chance. They are a passive and not an active body, buying when shares are up in the market, and selling when they are down. They are in short that nobody, the public, whom all active men, with intellectual faculties alert, and moral facal ties dormant, consider to be their oyster, which they, not with sword, as in the olden time - but with cunning, after modern fashion, will open.

You, gentlemen, for the most part are not sheep. You know what you want and seek it, after the most approved methods the law has left at your disposal. You want railways to prosper, but the law says they shall not prosper by direct courses, and, therefore, areyou as ill-used a body of men as any in the British Empire. And thus are railways made at double their proper cost, and from your inability to pay large dividends on wasted capital, your shareholders, who are unlucky in their speculations, conceive them selves privileged to abuse you, and none more so than those comparatively few, not sheep-men, but wolf-men, who have bought at half-price the property of the original railway makers. And with a good dividend on their real capital, represent themselves as injured innocents on their nominal holdings.

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