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Abbbdeen" effected nothing when they were in office . The Pope is engaged in a progress throughout his dominions , and as he goes he ' blesses ' the people . The process is simple . With the thumb of the hand he holds down the little arid third fingers ; the middle and ; forefingers remain extended together ; and with the hand in that condition he is competent to cast blessings upon all who kneel to receive them . It is not to be denied , then , that
Italyis blessed ; but , in the meanwhile , what do those who have endeavoured to bring substantial benefits for Italy endure ? Take the prisoners in Fort Urban , which is built on a marshy moat , entirely surrounded by ditches and stagnant water . It is a place of retreat for the worst convicts . In it at present thei'e are 800 prisoners , of whom 200 are detained without trial ; they are , in fact , imprisoned —and many of them have been many years imprisoned—for the crime of being suspected . Some of these belong to the best families of Bologna . The picked prisoners are sent to
the Collometa , in which the cells are only ventilated from , a long corridor . Here the suffocating temperature inclines the prisoners to sleep , but that tendency is checked by Germau . sentinels-, who patrol the corridor day and night . The prisoners cannot complain , except through the Governor . But there is one provision that one would little have expected in the Pope ' s dominionsthey are not allowed to attend Divine Service ; so little faith has the Pope in the efficacy of that ceremonial , that the prisoners are debarred from it , lest they should conspire in presence ! - ..
-It may be saidj = that the Italians should not endure these "things . There is great reason fo Jbelieve that the Italians would not , if it were not for the fact that , by intrigues and combinations of foreign courts , which can bring together enormous armies of alien multitudes , the Italians would throw off their governments , which are , in fact , the worst criminals and malefactors of the country . "We English assist in preventing them , by assisting to maintain the combinations against them . In diplomatic phrase , we call it ' the
balance of power in Europe , ' or ' a state of amity ; ' and one recommendation of the Prussian marriage is , that it will assist in maintaining that ' peace . ' If it is disgraceful to the Italians to endure , it is disgraceful to every country which assists in maintaining the combination ; it is doubly disgraceful when the country knows what it is doing . We English show that we know it , by continually talking- about it ; but who begins to alter the state of things ? Is there not a single man . who can begin amendments ? Where is Lord John ?
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TRUSTEES AND BANKRUPTS . Some time since , with the assistance of a pamphlet by Mr . Menzies , the original Secretary to "the Royal British Bank , we gave an account of that striking pi * oject , How we got it up , and how ifc went down . ' Our readers will remember the strange manner in which appearances wore kept up "before the public , before shareholders , before directors , while the whole thing was a sham
and a conspiracy . Even the disclosures before the Court of Bankruptcy present nothing like the cloau and consecutive story which there showed us the working of tho plan behind the scenes ; and our readei's will remember tho solemn introduction of Mr . Hugh Innds Oamebon his own most pious adjurations when he accepted * tho responsibility ; his method of letting Mr . Mvk ~ ijbns know liow MjbjNzitcb was to be disposed ofj liis plan of letting in the ¦ Newcastle people ; and , indeed ,. tho whole
method of making up the appearance of a bank , when the reality was nothing but an assemblage of gentlemen who supposed they were collecting capital , while Hugh Inkes Cameron" "was scheming away the money . Not long before " that , we had the case of StbXhak , Patjl and Bates , bankers by whom the property which other persons entrusted to them was used for their own purposes , appropriating it under false pretences . It so happened that they came within the
cognizance of the criminal law by a species of illegal pawning and other mistakes of the kind ; but if , like the members of the Hoyal British Bank , or some bankers that have failed not long since about the country , they had taken in the money of their customers t o use for their own purposes , they would have been covered by our present law of trusts , and would have
been only debtors , not conspirators guilty of a criminal offence . Again , we had the extraordinary schemes of Joseph WiiroiiE Cole , who cleverly manoeuvred more than one half million out of people ' s pockets , and still more cleverly obtained assistance in his schemes . Some of the assistants got , like himself , involved in tho criminal law ; but there were others who were not so
involved , yet nevertheless lent themselves to misrepresentations respecting the actual possession of property entrusted to their charge . Indeed , they were so lax upon the subject , that they scarcely knew to whom the property really belonged . But again , these persons—and the more respectable they are the more injurious to society is their connivance—wholly escaped any danger from the criminal law , because the most that could be-made of them was , that they held the
property in trust , or under the law of bailment . Now , it is a fiction of our law that when-a ma « i holds the property in trust-he is the owner thereof , and the owner cannot steal his own property ; so that the trustee who filches the property of the orphan is , in the eye of the criminal law , only disposing of his own property . If the wicked uncle had stopped short of the murder , the Children in the Wood would have had no remedy at law ; and ancient as the tale is , it has its parallels
in modern times . But there is a great deal of ' fun' in our law , for it creates confusion as if for the very sport . When a plan for some great scheme turns out to have been a bubble , the object alike of shareholders and creditors must be to recover as much of the property as possible , to waste as little of it as possible matter
in law expenses , and to settle the as soon as possible . There is scarcely a man of business who would not admit that statement as a simple truism . But what happened in the case of the Koyal British Bank ? Many of the contributors to that undertaking were persons of thorough respectability , and no small portion of tliem had sufficient means to meet all the liabilities . If they had been
allowed to make the necessary arrange ' meuts , they would have got together the requisite amount of money ; and , if they could not pay every farthing in full , they could have paid enough to constitute something more than an ' honourable bankruptcy . ' Tho interest of the creditors was clearly to stand by and allow this process to be comnloted . Tot , what happened ? Some of the
shareholders saw that the best plan would be to wind-up the affairs , and consequently they put the bank into Chancery — the right course . But tho creditors thought that Chancery would look more after the interests of- the contributors than of the claimants , and they invoked tho assistance of the Bankruptcy lawyers , who woro nothing loth . Lawyers in both courts immediately saw tho advantage that might bo obtained by making
law business . A few of the creditors thought that they should be able to recover their own peculiar claims , whatever the rest might do by snatching at the amount in a very summary and hurried manner ; and they brought separate suits on their own account . One man brought twenty zfive suits , another more than a hundred . Now , as tKere were nearly 300 shareholders , and about 6000 creditors ifc
Would have been literally possible for nearly 1 , 800 , 000 suits to be going on at the same time . Such a possibility is like a Munchausen fiction , yet it was the actual result of recent legislation in the construction of the Winding-up Acts ; for those Acts failed alike to give the majority of shareholders and creditors the power of settling matters , and they failed to establish a simple process .
The Bills introduced last week by the Attobnet-GenebaIi aimed to remedy both these great defects . The minor Bill dictates a simple process for winding-up , and gives the requisite power to the majorities of shareholders and creditors . The larger Bill gives a list of persons who shall be accounted guilty of misdemeanour' if with intent to defraud they appropriate to their own iise property p laced in their hands as trustees , bankers , merchants , agents , and bailees . One clause of the Bill fastens tho oft ' enee of
misdemeanour upon any conniving receiver of the property obtained under a violation of the Act . The Bill is exceedingly simple in its structure . It affords ample security against malevolent or unconsidered propositions ; in the case of private trustees , particularly , by requiring that no prosecution should bo instituted without the concurrence of ar Judge who sees probable cause for the criminal proceeding . This Bill , therefore , will fasten a criminal responsibility upon trustees and agents-of- all kinds who 'filch ^ property entrusted to their charge by fraudulent acts or
misrepresentations . , ¦ = - Let us see how it would have operated in the case of the Royal British Bank . Mr . Menzles appears , from the account in his own pamphlet , to have been very uneasy at the turn affairs were taking , long before he was so unceremoniously ousted . Ho had had the courage to face Whiteeross-street Prison and other perils , to which ingenious gentlemen in difficulties are exposed ; but with this statute in the path , it is q uito evident that , at a much earlier period , ho would have brought his own relation with the bank to a stop . Wo may doubt whether any form ot . _ . : i'i : j , ~ ,, l , l 1-wiim fiT . i'ns ^ . nd tllO
Sellrelying and pious Hugh . Perhaps there were one or two others whose confidence m their own integrity , notwithstanding the < peculiar circumstances' winch induced them to qualify tho strict rules of ordinary conduct , would have sustained them in Me belief that they could not become criminal , i i „ ., «!» flioii * conduct misriiG however unusual' their conduct ni . gic
' have been . But undoub tedly most ot tho directors would have boen startled at modularities that must have reminded thorn oi this law , and they would have stopped ; thus the crash of the Royal . Britiah Bank would never have happened , because tho consn lacy could never havo been comp leted b > iw authors , for want of presentable help , w if the email had happened , tho now W ndin ^ up Law would have como m to si « wrecks for tho proper owner * , —the dcludoa share-holders , and tho denuded croditois .
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• EMPLOYMENT OF CROTTNAl ^ . In his earned letter on secondary punu ^ inontB , Mr . Ojiauwcb Pjbabbon indicate * Unco systems of convict treatment : Tlio bunging Hystom of pnul d" )' ; nre 8 onti Tho lock-up « ntl ( lo-nothliiB « y « tom ^ t' « J P £ 8 On Tho Holl' -ttiipportlnff Avork Hyatuin of tho I " "
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518 THE LEAPjSR . [ No . 375 , Saturday
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), May 30, 1857, page 518, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2195/page/14/
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