Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 December 1875 — The Career of a Railway King. [ARTICLE]

The Career of a Railway King.

The Freie Pres»e, of Vienna, gives details respecting Dr. Strousberg, who was arrested at St. Petersburg after failing for nearly £1,000,000. Strousberg is of Jewish origin, his full name being Baruch Hirsch Strousberg. Born in 1828, in humble circumstances, at Neidenburg, in East Prussia, he went to London in 1835, after the death of his father. Here he was received by his uncles, who were commis-sion-agents, and was shortly afterward baptized a member of the Church of England. Gifted with great intelligence and energy, he more or less educated himself, and entered journalism. In 1848 he went to America, where he gave lessons in German, but finally realized some money by buying a cargo of damaged goods ana selling them at a heavy profit. With this capital he returned to London, in 1858, and founded several newspapers, but six years afterward he went to Berlin, where he was for seven years the agent of an English .insurance company. In 1864, however, Strousberg began to think of improving his fortunes and, having made acquaintances at the British Embassy, by this means came to know some English capitalists, with wnom he contracted for the construction of the Tilsit-Insterburg Railway. Within six years Strousberg was making a dozen lines, among others those of Roumania. He had over 100,000 workmen m his pay and had launched out into other vast enterprises. At Hanover he established a gigantic machinefactory; at Dortmund and Neustadt he had smelting works and iron factories; at Antwerp and Berlin he built entirely new quarters; in Prussia he bought ten estates; in Poland an entire county; in Bohemia he paid £BOO,OOO for the splendid domain of Zbirow, where he established railway carriage works which employed 5,000 workmen. Meantime he built a palace for himself in the Wilhhlmstrasse at Berlin, which in decoration, luxury and accommodation surpassed that of the Empemr himselt. In it were to be found works by the first German and French artists—Delacroix, Meissonnier, Gerome and others. Nor was his charity on a less splendid scale. In winter he caused 10,000 portions of soup to be given daily to the poor, in addition to £2,000 worth of wood. When the famine broke out in East Prussia he sent whole trains laden with corn and potatoes to his suffering fellow-countrymen. Of course such a man had his own organs in th,e press, and was chosen to represent the nation. Yet he took from the Moscow Bank, which he founded, 4,308,000 roubles', and it is hinted that his future is not altogether unprovided for. No greater collapse than that of Strousberg has probably occurred in the financial history of the country save, perhaps, that of Law.—Faria Uor. London Times. —California papers are publishing the docket of a Tuolomne County Justice of the Peace who held office in 1850. The following is an extract from his minutes of the case: “N. B. Barber, the lawyer for George Work, insolently told m& there were no law for me to roo) so; I told him I didn’t care for his book law but that I was the law myself. He continued to jaw back; I told him to shut up but he wouldn’t ; I fined him SSO and committed him to goal for five days for contempt of court in bringing my toolings and dissions into disreputableness and as a warning to unrooly persons not to contradict this court.” —The freedom with which female pickpockets ply their trade in Boston is ex citing a good deal of attention. The number of losses and the comparatively few arrests are a commentary on the carelessness of lady shoppers arid laxity of police skill. We do not doubt that from twenty to thirty pockets are picked every day when the ladies are out shopping in full force. A few arrests and sentences ot the Recorder Hackett style might be of some service.— Boston Commercial Bulletin.