Everybody remembers how Pat Calhoun got control of the Central, and everybody knows how thick Clark Howell was with Pat. Wanted to put him in the Senate, you know.
Well, Pat and his Wall Street friends slapped a debt of sixteen million dollars on the Central during the gay time they had control of it.
Then the road was wrecked in the most approved Wall Street manner, and many a genuine widow and real orphan wept bitterly in their grief, for they had gone to bed in comfort and woke to poverty.
It was one of the nastiest, cruelest, completest pieces of Wall Street rascality that was ever worked upon an unsuspecting people, and Clark Howell could tell some queer things about it, if he would.
The Central fell into the Federal Courts, was put through the form of a sale, and that international scoundrel, J. Pierpont Morgan, appeared on the scene as “reorganizer.” When the Central had been properly Morganized, it was laden with fictitious capital to the tune of $55,000,000; and upon this fictitious capital the people of Georgia are made to pay revenue.
When Clark Howell stated that the Central was capitalized for less than before the war, he did not, perhaps, tell a falsehood in a strict technical sense; but, in the impression which he knew his language would make, and which he intended it to make, he was as far from the truth as when he pictured the railroads trotting down to Flovilla, promptly and dutifully to build that town a nice, new depot—“one of the most attractive and best equipped depots.”
As to the $10,000 campaign fund furnished by the railroads to elect Terrell, Mr. Howell says “it’s denied by everybody involved.” Ah, indeed? When did “everybody involved” deny it? Who are the “everybody involved”?
Will Joe Terrell go before a notary and make oath that the railroads did not contribute $10,000, or other large sum, to his campaign fund?
Joe may not be everybody “involved,” but he certainly is involved.