240 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



1. Receivers' certificates should only take rank as a lien preced- 

 ing the class of creditors on whose app'ication the receivers are ap- 

 pointed, and should only be issued to raise money to conserve the 

 property, and iiotfor betterments. 



2. As soon as receivers are appointed, the court should call a meeting 

 of the mortgage creditors, to learn if the receiver selected is satisfactory. 



3. The court should see that all proceedings under which receiv- 

 ers are appointed are prosecuted to an end with the utmost diligence, 

 and, failing this, at once discharge the receivers. 



4. As it is evident that our courts, as at present constituted, have 

 neither the time nor the ability to manage large corporations, and 

 hence must rely on their officers, the receivers, there should be a new 

 court, part of whose judges should be business men, to whom all such 

 applications should be made. 



5. The protection of this court should extend to collaterals of the 

 insolvent debtor which are pledged for loans, as there is no good reason 

 why this class of creditors should be allowed to sacrifice the property 

 of the debtor when all others are stopped. 



It is not intended in this article to reflect on the judiciary, who 

 probably have done the best they could under circumstances really 

 foreign to their training and duties, and who have naturally left mat- 

 ters pretty much to their officers, the receivers ; nor is it meant to im- 

 ply that, in some cases, the timely protection of the court has not been 

 of great advantage to the creditors ; but when, as in the case of the 

 Logansport, Crawfordsville, and Southwestern Railroad Company, we 

 see the first-mortgage bondholders deprived of the management of 

 their property, and it so loaded with receivers' certificates that when 

 it is sold they swallow up every cent ; when, as in the case of the 

 Vicksburg and Meridian Railroad Company, we find the receiver not 

 only buying new rails, but changing the gauge of the whole line ; 

 when, in cases nearer home, we find receivers using the bondholders' 

 money to pay leased lines, and issuing car-trusts to increase the equip- 

 ment, is it not time to call a halt, and ask both the courts and the peo- 

 ple to consider what they are doing ? 



Gexeral Tillo has pointed out, in " Petermann's Mittheilungon," liow the 

 idea of a great world-water-parting may be worked out from a consideration of 

 the earth's surface. He has laid down on a polar projection-map, showing both 

 the Old and New World Continents, in illustration of his proposition, a single 

 continuous line, broken only by Bering Strait, extending from the south point 

 of America north along the west side of South and North America, in an irreg- 

 ular diagonal across Asia to the Isthmus of Suez, and down Eastern Africa to 

 the Cape. General Tillo, however, admits that there are special continental 

 water-partings which do not quite conform to the line of the great parting, al- 

 though, as a matter of fact, nearly all the great rivers of the world are divided 

 by this parting into two directions. 



