The state of certain joint-stock undertakings has created some stir
on the Stock Exchange, in a manner likely to be not entirely without useful consequences. The Stock Exchange Committee had provisionally adopted a resolution excluding from its list the Crystal Palace Company, because that company pleaded a technical irregularity as an excuse for not recognizing trans- fers of stock duly registered by its own officer, Robson. This step on the part of the Stock Exchange may be looked upon as the initiative, taken by a high commercial body, to put some check upon those lax practices of joint-stock companies which have facilitated the recent gigantic frauds. And the Crystal Palace Company has responded by promising to recognize the shares, with a greatly improved regulation for the future.
The suspension of payments by Messrs. Fox, Henderson, and Co. is an instructive comment on the complicated speculation into which some of our most enterprising capitalists and most inge- nious inventors permit themselves to be drawn. The connexion of the firm with the Crystal Palace of 1851, and the Crystal Palace of Sydenham, is well known. They have also been dragged into losses by the execution of a losing contract in the construction of a Danish railway.
And this second fact has been used on the Stock Exchange as a warning to our capitalists against accepting the invitation of Russia to sink 40,000,0001., or more, at the rate of 4,000,0001. "and a bittock " per annum, in the construction of Russian railways,—railways which are not likely to pay very soon, and which always will be governed by the arbitrary and precarious counsels of the Russian Government. It is, we should think, not likely that much money would be sent direct from London ; but the mammoth money-dealers of all the European capitals are so closely connected that an abstraction from one part of the general reservoir draws away the golden medium from other parts. In plain terms, some more tangible guarantee appears to be demanded for the good faith of Russia, unless any of these capitalists are prepared to sink their millions in gambling with the power who has used loaded dice in similar games before.
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