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to be made. When the dividend day comes round, they think the money will be forthcoming too.

But there is one kind of Joint Stock Company, namely, Banking Companies, which some will remind us, have had extraordinary success.

Still, even Joint Stock Banks form no exception to our rule-that something more than a large capital is essential to success; though it is certain that in banking, a Company has a peculiar advantage, because credit turns to money, and credit it certainly commands. The huge capital which often runs to waste in other schemes defies all rivals in a Bank, especially as now-a-days the ventures are so large, that few men of business feel comfortable in trusting any but the very first private firms with the proceeds. Besides, Banking is a routine business. If its rules never relax to oblige any customer, a Bank may be all the richer in the long run; though it is the very rigidity of Company management that brings any other business to the ground.

But at the present day men seem to think that when a Joint Stock Banking Company is formed, and first calls paid, all the rest will go right of itself.-Yet, it is one thing to open wide your doors, and to display a costly array of desks and of officials, eating into your capital at the rate of hundreds of pounds a week, and another thing to draw customers from old-established firms, to trust you with their cash. Any banker will tell you that a new bank is the chosen mark of every man of shaky credit, and of every artful knave; and that safe business is so long in coming, that you tremble for your out-goings. Not only is it new to the customers, but the customers are also new, and strangers to the bank. This is the ordeal of all banks at first starting. One of the very first Joint Stock Banks in London, some thirty years since, was called 'The Thieves' Bank,' from the rogues who practised on its inexperience!

The dangers of new Companies, so far described, are simply those dangers which are inseparable from

all Company management, however good the directors; but remember we enunciated that Companies are rarely promoted, although sometimes afterwards joined, by men of the highest standing. As to the malpractices on which you ought undoubtedly to calculate and guard against, the following are specimens of what may be looked for in some combinations:

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1. The promoters deem themselves entitled to promotion money or to so many shares; and more shares they offer certain men to act as decoy ducks, by joining the committee-which gifts of shares mean a charge of thousands of pounds on the shareholders' money before any business is done! friend of ours was once asked to join an Iron Company. But I know nothing of the business.' 'Never mind that-your name will draw subscribers, and we will give you a salary of three hundred a year as a managing director!' This Company was the ruin of hundreds.

2. The promoters agree that no shares shall at first be sold under a certain premium. Thus Jones sells to Robinson enough to register a sham quotation in the share list. If thus tempted to buy, you learn the real price to your sorrow when you credulously think to realize.

3. The promoters issue only part of the stock at first. If this limited quantity of stock rises to a premium, the market is soon swamped with a flush of unexpected shares.

4. If you apply for an allotment of shares, the promoters may leave your letter unanswered to see if shares rise. If they rise they sell them for their own benefit; but if the shares fall you are bound by your own letter to take the bad bargain.

Men of suspicious character, to say the least, live by getting up Companies. We remember one of the class. He lived fashionably, no one knew how. But the dash he made in society placed him on high vantage ground as a disinterested man (?) to recommend new Companies; and with what he fleeced from these Companies he maintained his status in society. Of the Com

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panies lately started, two at least were got up by a man well known to us as a banker in the City of which he left after a series of frauds deserving transportation!

Of course, however common, it is absurd for any one who opens a prospectus to ask, Is not this a good thing? Nothing is so good a thing that it can stand jobbery and mismanagement, if such exist. A gold mine is a good thing in one sense, but thousands have put more gold into it than they ever got out.

As to a Prospectus, it is now well understood in the City that the prospectus of a Company is a thing manufactured to order, to pay or promise to pay (which is the same thing) any dividend according to the greed and gullibility of the public, -just as, too often we fear, the Balance Sheet is prepared to follow— when it bears only the signature of one or two highly respectable' Auditors;' but when it has not passed through the hands and received the stamp of those whose profession and experience qualify them for detecting, and whose reputation is at stake, to deter them from passing mis-statements, intentional or unintentional, and in whatever form.

To be Director of Companies is not less a business than to originate them. Joint Stock direction is quite a trade for men of a certain stamp--men often addressed in advertisements as 'not brought up to business, but wanting a genteel occupation.' There are needy, greedy lords and baronets who extract substance from their very titles, so ornamental and

so useful to a prospectus; though the said title proves an alibi of all commercial experience. Gentlemen who have no title before their names want, at least, some good address after them. So Hyde Park 'Gardens,' or even 'Square,' becomes the residence of men who, with a view to Company directions, rent to let again what they have not the least pretension to live in beyond the dull months of the year.

Who does not know how vanity and caprice, private hobbies and pet schemes from a desire to seem original, are often more powerful motives in committee than the stake of any member in the concern?-In a Club Committee every man pushes forward his own wine merchant; and as to economy, an innkeeper would live on what is wasted in the kitchen. So in a Company; no wonder if the committee become the very focus of self-interest, and the puppets of which designing men out of doors are ever pulling at the strings. Members not bribed by money are yet bribed by influence; especially by interest made for their families. The large dealings of a Company enable directors to vote contracts worth thousands to the parties preferred; and patronage so valuable, though ostensibly given, is, however indirectly, almost certain to be sold.

Seeing therefore that jobbery, ignorance, mismanagement, and indifference enter into the beginning, middle, and end of most of the Trading Joint Stock Companies-we bid our friends BEWARE.

IN THE WATER.

CHAPTER I.

A FATAL NEGLIGENCE, WHAT IT HAS COST US, AND HOW WE HAVE SET ABOUT REMEDYING IT.

WANTED! It is the cry of the

age. The 'good old times' have gone, and in their place we have an age of a myriad wants. Everybody wants something; and if everybody does not succeed in getting the want supplied, it is from

no lack of perseverance in making the requirement known. The cry echoes everywhere. Many an artificial want is loudly clamoured for, but there are other graver oneswants upon which hang life and death: the poor wanting food, the

weak strength, and the sick health. I wish to set forth one of these; the issues depending upon it are life and death, and health and strength, so my want shall have the dignity of a line to itself, and capitals. I can put it in three words. It can have no claim to novelty, for the world has recognized the want a long time; but it is, unfortunately, one thing to have a want recognized, and another to get it supplied. My cry is:

'WANTED, SWIMMING-SCHOOLS!'

Does any reader doubt that this is a real want? The evidence which proves its reality is so voluminous that I can scarce hope to indicate it. The reports of the Registrars of Deaths are not, I admit, very interesting reading. Possibly they are all the less so, because, as we glance down those statistics, the ugly conviction that there is a needless and an awful waste of life going on in the world will force itself upon us. You will all have heard of the gloomy-minded misanthrope who cut from the newspapers all the records of murders and atrocious acts, and preserved them for his private delectation. Well, I have not such a morbid taste as that, yet standing by my desk at this moment is a box of newspaper-cuttings scarcely less deplorably sad. I dip my hand in, and bring out a dozen 'Melancholy Occurrences by Water,' as many Sad Accidents by Sea,' an equal number of 'Lamentable Deaths by Drowning;' and 'Fatal Boat Accidents' are almost innumerable. If the matter were less serious, I might be amused by this vast collection of penny-a-liner literature, in which, to use a phrase belonging to their class, they have 'piled up the agony.' But I strip away the verbiage, and take the bare facts. You, gentle reader, will not need to be told of heartrending cries upon the river-bank as the youthful and inanimate form lay there;' of' families plunged into intense grief;' of sisters, who lay on the sand, buried their faces, and moaned audibly;' of lovers bereft of sweethearts, and children left fatherless and motherless. Yet it is of such things that

this handful of paragraphs which I take from the box tell; and however written, and whatever mistakes are made in the combination of words used to describe the disconsolate and well-nigh broken hearts of the survivors of some boat excursion by river or sea, the facts remain, and will make themselves felt. Who could describe adequately the events or the anguish which attend such a catastrophe? I was once a witness at such a scene. I shall never forget the unutterable grief I, a stranger, saw and felt while the sun was shining, birds singing, and the banks of the little river, over which a boy of ten years ought to have swam with ease, glistened and shone with garlands of summer flowers.

All this because we want swimming-schools-because our boys are left to pick up swimming, if they can; our girls are never taught; and our men know little or nothing of an art which is well-nigh as simple as walking-an art which is in itself a very pleasurable one, a great promoter of health and strength and longevity, and one which to the

Saxon set in blown seas,' ;

surrounded on every hand by water, imbued with the love of travel and sport upon the water-boating and fishing-commends itself as the very first precautionary measure to be taken ere he ventures in the delicate outrigger or the swift-sailing yacht.

My subject has forced upon me a gravity I did not anticipate, and a more serious tone than that which generally pervades the pleasant pages of London Society.' But the matter is one in which the interest of the world is so great that the sin will be its own apology. Never comes a 'sea-side season' but such calamities as those to which I have referred occur, and that, too, in large numbers. Can you swim? I put the question, collectively. English men and boys were polled upon the question there would be a shocking preponderance of negatives. In the Navy itself there are hundreds who cannot swim. Until recently it was not taught; no questions were asked. Those who could swim were, I am assured, in a mi

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nority. Those who could not had, when accident occurred, to take their chance, and do the best they could. Now natation forms a part of the education going on at our training-ships. And coming across the Channel from the Isle of Wight in the early morning last April, I saw a sail slung out, and a score or two of sturdy lads-embryo marines-taking matutinal headers.' Our soldiers are not taught swimming; and what men are more likely to need it than they? This is one of the things they manage better in France, where swimming forms a part of the soldier's drill, and he is required to keep himself proficient by continual practice. But soldiers and sailors are a very little part of the English people. Do the schoolboys learn? Do mothers teach their daughters-nay, can the mothers swim themselves? I am afraid the answers must be all negatives. Bathing is too little practised. People are beginning to learn its value; but somehow it takes a long time to convince John Bull that what is is wrong; and when he is convinced it takes another long time to make him do what is right, unless a hand is directly put in his pocket, or there is an absurd attempt resulting from a blunder to interfere with his liberties. Fathers went on sending their children to schools where the supply of water was meagre, where bathing was not practised, and then were surprised that their cheeks were pale, that they were not strong and healthy. The returns of the Registrar-General do not, though they distinguish the cause of death, present materials for arriving at a true estimate of the loss of human life which is entailed by our national neglect of swimming; because the consequences are indirect as well as direct. Swimming leads to a fondness and desire for the water; as an exercise it is very enjoyable, the effect is invigorating, and the sense of a new power makes boys covet it; and, consequently, those who swim go to the bath often, and thus obtain that frequent ablution which, without endorsing all the dreams of the hydropathists for the cure of all the

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'Professors' leads me to 'entertainments.' Were you ever at a swimming entertainment, reader, where an amphibious professor lay upon his back and read aloud, lit his pipe and smoked on the water and under it? where his family of diminutive boys and girls-and this part is generally painful, and never pleasant-made all sorts of gambols, swam backwards and forwards, and dived, and kissed their little hands at intervals to the spectators, like the followers' in the Godiva procession, or the juvenile equestrians at a circus? Society doesn't care much to see these things; but they are done, and audiences are gathered. And as for the water not being man's element, why it's sheer nonsense; if he will but give it his confidence, and aid it in the endeavour it makes to support him, it will be his friend. I have seen a man swim without an arm, then without a leg, and afterwards with both legs and hands tied. Everybody can float who can be calm. All that is necessary is to throw the head back and keep the hands straight out beyond, so that they act as ballast to the legs, the specific gravity of which is just too much for the chest without this aid.

It is not the strong who swim best. Sir William Frazer offered a gold medal for the best and quickest swimmer of a mile last summer. Twenty men, some of them immensely muscular and powerful, in the full vigour of manhood, leaped from the barge into the Thames, anxious for the honour of being declared victor in undis.' In addition to the twenty men there was a little lad about sixteen years of age, a ci-devant shoeblack of the brigade. He beat them all, went through the water at a good walk

ing pace, and swam the mile in sixteen minutes.

A portion of the Serpentine has been set apart for the use of bathers. Men and boys who live near enough to avail themselves of it find it a great boon; and there you may see morning and evening, all through the summer months, lads swimIming out and rolling themselves about like porpoises. Between seven and eight thousand bathers have in a single evening availed themselves of this open-air bath. If it were but possible to make such baths in other parts of the metropolis the benefit would be incalculable, and deaths by drowning would become fewer.

The drowning man clutching at a straw makes but a poor spectacle, but a drowning man clutching at his preserver is far worse, as in fright and fear they always do, destroying their own chance of rescue, and very often jeopardizing the life of him who attempts to save them. There would be no difficulty in bringing a man out of the water if only his hands were tied, but beware how he' clutches' you! People when suddenly immersed in the water lose their presence of mind, up go their arms (surest method of going to the bottom), they struggle, and try to call out. What better means could be devised for making the accident terminate fatally?

Speaking of people who thus refuse to be helped, I am reminded of some silly ducks which caused me an hour or two of uneasiness last winter. According to a British superstition and every-day colloquialism, the goose is popularly supposed to be the silliest bird among our ornithological tribes. I think there is a slight mistake here, and that the duck, whenever superlative folly among the feathered creatures is made the subject of a new proverb, is entitled to the first place.

Skating on a large midland country pool, after a short sharp frost last season, I found frozen in the ice a number of wild fowl. I went to their relief, actuated possibly by the hope that if I saved their lives that day I might take them with my gun the next. Well, as fast as I broke the

ice around them, they flapped their wings and dived under it to certain death. The pool is in a lone, unfrequented district, the ice was quite transparent, and I could see the frantic efforts and convulsive deathstruggles of the poor birds. After an unavailing attempt for half an hour, I left them to their fate. The speedy death by drowning might be preferable to the slower and more painful process of starvation, but it was too much to expect me to witness it. One lesson I should have learned had not previous experience taught it me: it is, when the ice gives way to remain quite passive until your head comes up above the water. Move once, and get underneath it, and you are a lost man; you cannot break the ice upward, and will never find the hole through which you sank. Ah me! a sad experience taught me this.

I have floated away from my subject. To return: England seems at last to be alive to the importance of having swimming taught to child

ren.

For boys there are opportunities, not exactly unlimited, still numerous. At Eton, Harrow, Rugby, the Universities, and the numerous charity-schools, the art is made a part of the education. The London rowing clubs and the Royal Humane Society have set themselves to work with the very laudable design of making a knowledge of the niceties of natation universal. Speedy success to their efforts! And every week, for months past, the champion, who is a wonderful swimmer, and his rival, have been paying instalments toward a large stake for which they are to swim two miles upon the Thames.

Meanwhile for the ladies--but the ladies' baths are entitled to a separate chapter.

CHAPTER II.

THE LADIES' SWIMMING-SCHOOL ON THE SEINE, AND THE LADIES' BATH IN MARYLEBONE.

How has it happened that until recently it has never been proposed to English ladies to learn swimming? To adopt the language of a lady

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