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profits are to be derived from railways, are natural-
ly anxious to retain the control thereof in their
own hands as fer as possible; and Railway Concessions
will beyond all doubt be considerably harder to ob-
tain in the future than they have been in the past.
An additional reason why the Chinese are anxious
to get the control of the line out of the hands of
the Americans lies in the disgraceful mismanagement
of the finances that is said to prevail. If all ac-
counts are true, the amount of peculation that has
been going on could hardly have boen exceeded by a
native management; defalcations were numerous and an
expert Accountant who was specially brought out from
New York to put the accounts in order, retired in a
short time, disgusted and disheartened. There is no
reason to believe that peculation would decrease if
the Chinese controlled the management; but there
would be this advantage
from their point of view at
all events that the pickings would go into their
own pockets instead of into the foreigner's.
The site selected for the terminus of the main
line to Hankow is on the North of the harbour, a
short
3