of August 1866), Alexander had taken 792. By November 1867 £150,000 had been raised by shares and only £2,600 by debentures. In October 1868, shareholders funds were unchanged but debentures stood at £180,000, loans £17,500 and creditors at £65,000. It follows that Alexander's share investment, now lost, had been about £13,700, plus one share of £1,000 in the Mont Cenis Concessionary Company which had been formed earlier to negotiate concessions from the two governments. Work in New Zealand Towards the end of 1870 the New Zealand Government, dominated by Sir Julius Vogel, the Colonial Treasurer and soon to be Prime Minister, authorised the colony's first major railway construction programme as part of his great Public Works policy. Vogel travelled to London to negotiate loans and concluded an agreement with Brogdens to construct railways and provide plant to the value of £500,000. He also negotiated a much larger alternative contract, subject to Parliamentary approval, which would give the colony £4,000,000 of railways and 10,000 immigrants in return for transferring of land to the contractors. James Brogden travelled to New Zealand to complete them. He left Liverpool in August 1871 and returned to England early in 1873. The diary that he kept during his journey shows that he was engaged in very difficult and protracted negotiations. In October 1871 the New Zealand Parliament rejected the larger contract but allowed the ministry to negotiate an extension to the smaller one. The government started its own immigration programme and also made an agreement with Brogdens that Brogdens would dispatch up to 2000 able-bodied men plus wives and children to a maximum of 6,000 adults. For this privilege Brogdens had to pay the government £10 per adult and could take promissory notes from the adult immigrants not exceeding £16 each. Brogdens hoped for great things and, under pressure from the New Zealand government began in April 1872 to ship immigrants. These immigrants, and rail workers in general in New Zealand, gained the nickname Brogdenites. In England Brogdens were offering better terms than the New Zealand government, mainly in the sense that they paid most of the necessary costs themselves, relying on promissory notes from the immigrants, whereas the government wanted substantial payments in advance which were hard for a working man to find. For this reason the colony's Agent-General in London, Dr. Isaac Featherston directed staff to support the Brogden programme. It was not easy