Continuing Efforts To Establish The Company
The efforts to establish the company as a friendly society or as a joint stock company had foundered. The effort to collect the signatures of the shareholders was abandoned in 1848. (Later investigation showed that the required number of signatures had been reached, but the company failed to appreciate the difference between the number of shares and the number of shareholders.)
In the meantime, in April 1848, a new petition to have the NLC registered as a friendly society was produced with about 6 million signatures, but an investigating committee in Parliament found that it contained not quite 2 million bonafide signatures. This came as a shock to O’Connor since his lieutenants had not let him know that all was not in order.
O'Connor introduced a bill to legalise the NLC, with a second reading reading set for 12 June 1848. This prompted some investigation, led by Sir Benjamin Hall, which quickly turned up the fact that O'Connor was registered as the owner of all the estates, and of the associated bank. This prompted the House of Commons to set up a Select Committee to look into the NLC on 24 May 1848.
Read more about this topic: National Land Company
Famous quotes containing the words continuing efforts, continuing, efforts, establish and/or company:
“Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“It is our continuing love for our children that makes us want them to become all they can be, and their continuing love for us that helps them accept healthy discipline—from us and eventually from themselves.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.”
—Edith Hamilton (1867–1963)
“A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)