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though I suspected that the Corporation would have to follow its own bad precedent in the Shanghai Nanking case and abandon their Profit Certificates to the bondholders.
As for the public, I said that none of us were really in a position to forecast what the respective proportions of the local traffic would be: for my part I anticipated a considerable suburban traffic for Kowloon and any high-class prospectus-writer would quite honestly dress up as attractive a prospectus on either side and Macrae had to admit that this was so.
I insisted once more that Macrae was not giving us proper credit for what we were bringing into the pool - the cooperation of the Colonial and Imperial Governments and that these would be of more weight with the investor than the question of how local receipts were to be divided.
But apart from this I said my main difficulty was that this new proposal upset the balance of my scheme as a whole. The case of 2 associated lines in England was not analogous, for there each was master in his own house. Here the Colonial Government could be outvoted by the Chinese plus the Corporation, and it might be to the interest of the latter to foster the local traffic on the Chinese section at the expense of ours. To protect ourselves we should have to constitute a fresh board for the control of our local section and to alter the arrangement for a common ownership of the rolling stock. Thus the simplicity of my plan would be gone; the more one looked into it, the more changes seemed inevitable if the Corporation's view