CHAPTER XXII - LORD NIDDERDALE'S MORALITY


It was very generally said in the city about this time that the Great
South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway was the very best thing out.
It was known that Mr Melmotte had gone into it with heart and hand.
There were many who declared,--with gross injustice to the Great
Fisker,--that the railway was Melmotte's own child, that he had
invented it, advertised it, agitated it, and floated it; but it was not
the less popular on that account. A railway from Salt Lake City to
Mexico no doubt had much of the flavour of a castle in Spain. Our
far-western American brethren are supposed to be imaginative. Mexico has
not a reputation among us for commercial security, or that stability
which produces its four, five, or six per cent, with the regularity of
clockwork. But there was the Panama railway, a small affair which had
paid twenty-five per cent.; and there was the great line across the
continent to San Francisco, in which enormous fortunes had been made.
It came to be believed that men with their eyes open might do as well
with the Great South Central as had ever been done before with other
speculations, and this belief was no doubt founded on Mr Melmotte's
partiality for the enterprise. Mr Fisker had 'struck 'ile' when he
induced his partner, Montague, to give him a note to the great man.

Paul Montague himself, who cannot be said to have been a man having
his eyes open, in the city sense of the word, could not learn how the
thing was progressing. At the regular meetings of the Board, which