CO129-331 - Public Offices - 1905 — Page 31

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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

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