22nd Tan, 'UnpRoritaBLé as shipowning is reported to be, ea much so that the Shipomners' Federation recently seriously contemplated the laying up of British shipping generally, the P. & O. Company pays its shareholders five per cent. for last year on the preferred and thirteen per cent. on the deferred shares, and puts £85,000 to reserve, raising the company's total reserves to £860,000, or some 40 per cent. upon its present amount of paid up capital. This is all to be taken in conjunction with the fact that the company at the beginning of 1890 paid off £580,000 of capital, and has not a single debenture ow standing. Nor has this magnificent result been attained by any manipulation of the value of the Company's magnificent fleet, which, including new vessels entered in the books within the last twelve months, stands at the averas rate of £12 17s. per ton, while its cost did not average less than £30 a ton. The chairman of the company after making this splendid statement at the company's fiftieth annual meeting on the 9th of December, and the shareholders after hearing or reading it, must have heard with actual relief of the loss of the Nepaul, looking upon her as a propitiatory offering to the Nemesis which is always on the look-out to humble the pride that follows unprecedented prosperity.
The speech of Mr. Thomas Sutherland, M.P., to his admiring audience was as satisfactory throughout—with one trivial exception, the aunouncement of the probably total loss of the Hongkong—as was the incident he mentioned in the course of it, that during the recent three-days* panic in London, " which was certainly as severe a panic as any of us have known during the time which it continued, the only stock which showed any advance in value at that moment was the P. & 0. deferred." The shareholders must have felt that there were at least two sentences of simple truth in the somewhat inconsequent address to them by Mr. H. J. Atkinson, MP,:—* They knew the chairman was an authority, not only in London but able to auauoge shipping better than he throughout the world. No one had been
had done." It is pleasant too for us all to realise how good an education in business the Far East affords, as we remember that the eminent chairman was once the company's agent in Hongkong, ae the managing director agent in Shanghai, We give in another column a condensed report of Mr. Sutherlaud's speech. His complaints of the lowness of freights, the anxiety and disappointment which had been felt during the past. twelve months, and especially the last few months of 1890, by those who had embarked their capital in the shipping trade in connection with the Far East, were put in with the hand of an. attist,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.