with May. We publish in another column th annual report of the China Shippers' Matual Steam Navigation Company, annual meeting held in London on the fourteenth of April. Shanghai is so largely interested in the Company, its founders and directors are so many of them old Shanghailanders, that the progressive success of the Company is of, special interest to us, The little knot of these mien in the City of London,' from wont the directors of the company are drawn, have generally been suecessful in the enterprises that they have. undertaken, and they have kept up_ worthily the fame of the Settlement which they still regard with affectionate interest. According to a recent writer in the China Mail, the collapse in Hongkong is due to the pleasant habit the colony's financial magnates have of starting companies with flowery prospectuses, running the shares up to! ridiewlous premiums and then selling out themselves on the quiet, and leaving the public in the lurch; while our financial magnates at home have been wary and cautions in the starting of companies, have stuck to them when started, and carried them on shrewdly and carefully to solid success.
The China Shippers' Mutual Company is a good illustration of this busiuesslike process.. It began in a small way, the annual meeting that has just been held being only the eighth, but it built ships of the highest class, secured the best men to command them, and had its shareholders to provide them with cargoes. It has met with un-} doubted good fortune, but it has deserved the success which the poet tells us that mortals cannot command. With a paid-up capital amounting on the Bist of December last to only £165,000, and a floating debt of £48,000, on which it pays a very much lower rate of interest than the dividend it returns to its shareholders, it owns steamers of the value of £309,000, It had locked up £52,000, now increased to £70,000 or nearly the value of two steamers, in Depreciation Boiler and Reserve Fund, and £6,000 in its Insurance Fund, leaving nearly £35,000 as balance of profit and loss after paying an interim ivideud of eight shillings per share. "his profit and loss account is an interesting one, for it shews how econo-tically the company is administered. Who general expenses, including remus noration to directors and auditors, rent, salaries, income-tax, stationery, etc., were only £5,418, and the interest on the floating debt £2,316; while the profit realised un completed voyages during the past year was £43,755, or about 25 per cent. on the paid-up capital. The directors might, no doubt, have made a still more striking display, indeed to see on our register, and if they had put down the steamers, that register now records 377 pro-regi most of which were contracted for at prietors." In winding up his " plain. the lowest point of the market, at! unvarnished account" of the share-the current value of the day; but in} holders' property, the Chairman was taking them at cost they are, under the able to speak with thorough satisfaction circumstances, well within the mark. of the past, and every confidence for Phe profit of 25 per cent. which was; the future: and if the company is made in 1889 was not due to its being managed in the future as it has been Limited, and the speech of the Chair-' a better year than the average; in fact in the past, this confidence Will not be nian, Mr. Albert Deacon, at the eighth the Chairman mentioned in his speech misplaced. that 1889 had been a year "of extreme depression in the Chinese freight trade, more so than in avy other section of our
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.