LONDON LETTER.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1513, 21 December 1878, Page 2

LONDON LETTER.

[from otjr own correspondent.] London, November 7. If I begin again with a reference to, followed by some particulars about, the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank, it is because that event is still a daily and a, leading subj ject of interest to all classes at home, besides ' which the name of New Zealand is brought up at almost every turn taken by this extraordinary case. Its leading features up to the present time have been —first, the report of those who were appointed to investigate the affairs of the Bank; secondly, the arrest of all the directors, the manager, and the secretary immediately after the publication of that document; and, thirdly, the voluntary appointment by the shareholders of liquidators who at once made a call of £SOO per share, or five times the capital of the concern. As soon as the failure of this Bank occurred a firm of Glasgow accountants was appointed to prepare a statement of its affairs, and in this mighty labor they had the professional assistance of a firm of solicitors. Speedily the work was so far advanced as to admit of the drawing up of a balance-sheet. I need not go into the details of that formidable document. It will suffice to say that the investigators found that besides the original capital of the Bank, which amounted to about one million of money, upwards of five millions more had been lost in propping up speculative concerns. Amongst these, and most likely the one on which the shareholders will not incur a heavy loss, was the Australian and New Zealand Land Company, which bought a large estate in your North Island. Indeed, so large was the investment that I believe it was locally understood that the land belonged to a Scotch Bank. That was not so, though the Bank held a large number of shares, as to which the investigators say its position is not so satisfactory as might bo desired, many of the transfers of shares not being completed, though it is believed that their right to the whole can be vindicated. They add the following explanation : "We have dealt with the Bank as holding £210,052 of A preference stock, and £912,079 of ordinary stock. The preference stock being 4 per cent, stock, we have taken it at £BO, equal to £175,242. As to the ordinary stock, wo have had some difficulty. It yields at present only 3 per cent.; but its main value is prospective, and we do not believe that voluntary sellers would be disposed to part with it under par. If held for a period of years, it will in all probability realise a much higher figure ; but, again, were so large a. quantity forced on the market at once, it is difficult to say what, on an average, it might bring. On the whole, we have thought it reasonable to value the ordinary stock for the purpose of the present statement, at £BO, like the preference, which gives £729,662, or in all £901,904." The investigators, it will be observed, dealt only with the commercial value of the stock as a security for the advances, but beyond that we have to look at the actual value of the landed property, which the shares represent, and as to this there seems to be no two opinione. Indeed the many correspondents who hav'e written assuring letters on this topic only seem to vie with one another in eulogising the estate, and the manner in which it lias boon maintained and cultivated. I need not dwell on what must be better known (o those for whom I am writing than it can bo to any one at home, so I close this part of the subject with the remark that Mr Davidson, the manager of the property in New Zealand, is now on his way home, and he will be able to cive the parties who ave interested the fullest and the latest information. Much more important is it to know that the directors who have plunged many households into ruin, and the pevereat dislress arc to be prosecuted by the Government. Mist of these malefactors lived in or near Glasgow, but two resided in Edinburgh, where the Bank had carried on a lucrative business. In this caso the arm of the law did not take long to strike home. The report was printed in the morning newspapers on a Saturday. The same morning the Lord Advocate, who I may remind you, is practically the whole governmerit as far as the affairs of Scotland arc concerned, saw the Procurator Fiscal. Warrants were at once issued and placed in the handi

of the detectives, who, before the evening was over, had all the delinquents lodged in prison. There they still remain with the exception of one for whom bail in £15,000 has been accepted. The others havo been unable to satisfy the Lord Advocate who seems to have the whole power of the criminal law vested in him.

But though all those who were arrested havo undergone several separate and for most part long investigations before tho Sheriff, and have been in the end committed to take their trial on several serious charges, including one of stealing tho bills of exchange which had been entrusted to them by customers for collection. We .really know nothing of the evidence which will be "led," as the Scotch pay against the prisoners. If the mon had been brought up at the Mansion House, or at Bow street, as they would have been if they had been English bankers, tho prosecutor would have been compelled to produce witnesses in open Court to substantiate something of the charge which was preferred, and as it i 3 the Parliamentary recess, when the columns of the newspapers are a little moro at liberty than when the Common Council of the nation is speechifying at Westminster, we should have had ample reports, giving us some idea of the respective shares of the prisoners in their fraudulent transactions. But the practice of the Scotch Criminal Courts more nearly approaches to the French system. Each prisoner is separately brought before tho sheriff, the utmost secrecy is preserved as to what takes place in this camera of justice; but from what hints are thrown out it seems that the sheriff puts questions to the prisoner, who can either decline to make any answer at all, if so advised by his counsel, or can make the fullest statement he_ pleases. It does not seem that any caution iB given to the prisoner, which is a leading necessity in England, or that any evidence or statement is reduced to writing. All wo know is, that having secured the formal committal of the prisoners for trial, the Crown authorities are now busy in getting up evidence against them. The trial may take place at any timo between now and the end of next February, and it seems likely to occupy the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh for some weeks. All the leading men at the Scotch bar —they are few in numbor, bait extraordinarily clever and learned gentlemen —are already engaged in the case; but I am. afraid the trial will be what my north country friends calL "an awfu' serious matter." Of course this failure has involved suspension of many mercantile concerns. One of these is the house of James Morton and Co., who carried on business as Australian merchants. I learn from tho "Scotsman " that Mr Morton i 3 understood to be the heaviest debtor to the City Bank, the sum due being stated at £2,300,000 and the total liabilities of the firm seem to be set down at £3,500,000. Mr Morton is the son of a farmer, was brought up at East Kilbride, andfor some years drove his father's milk cart into Glasgow. With one of his fathers's servants he came to Glasgow when a voung man, and the " Scotsman " has heard, started business in a small way as a rag merchant. Afterwards he became connected with a paper mill, and later on went into tho wool trade. During tho height of the gold fever he entered heavily into trade with Australia, and became associated with Potter, Wilson and Co. He shipped largely all kinds of merchandise, and brought home wool in return. Making one or two good speculations in land in Australia, he extended his operations in this line, both in Australia and New Zealand ; and the iloating of tho INew Zealand ar.d Australian Land Company is said to have been chiefly due to him. From the time of his earliest business connections in Glasgow he was known to be a man of great enterprise. He went through a vast amount of mentul and bodily labor with an endurance that astonished many. After going extensively into the wool trade, he opened an office in London, and at least twice a week travelled between the two great commercial centreß. It has long been ono of the myths of London that there were concealed in it manybaronets of decayed fortunes, and the popular belief was that they earned a livelihood by driving handsome cabs—those with tho best horses. We have just made the acquaintance of one of these impecunious titled ones, but I am sorry to say that he did not endeavour to earn an honest penny. This man is called Sir Heratio Henry Wraxull, and belonged to a family that has always been respectable, while somo membora have been men of mark in their day. Unfortunately the direct heir to the baronetcy died in 1865, and the title then devolved on Horatio, who, from that time, has not done any good for himself, and has been very unfavorably "known to tho police." On his trial last week they gave him a very bad character, and said he had been constantly connected with sham companies. It was one of these that brought him at length within tho clutcheo of the law, which will hold him at hard labor for the next twelve months. In this last unsuccessful plot he had taken an office in the Strand, and started the South African Trading Company. He then advertised for young men to take charge of the 'stores," and then required his victims to pay him "a deposit," which, it is needless to say, they never saw again. To show in what bad repute a title is held nowadays here, the landlord of the office hired by Wraxall said he did not know the applicant was a baronet, or he should not have let the {dace to him. The number of people who ive by their wits, and especially by the concoction of companies, is marvellous, yet they all succeed for a time, and, in many casee, for a long time, where exposure or detection is not rapid. On the very same day that saw Sir Horatio Wraxall sent to the treadmill, two men were tried at the Manchester assizes for a similar swindle. They had advertised a sham friendly society, and represented their capital at £200,000. They obtained a considerable sum aB premiums on insurances, but unluckily for them one of the " assured " died when they had not the money to pay off his policy, and so the police took hold of them. That other young baronet, Sir Capel Fitzgerald, whoso name I havo mentioned in a previous letter has escaped, through the plausability of his counsel. Having taken a " lady " to Paris for a week, he found at the end of that time that he had no money to pay their hotel bill, so ho coolly borrowed tho valuable jewellery which had been presented to her by another admirer and pawned it. Sou might wonder how it was possible to escape imprisonment for so audacious a robbery. Yet there were found in London twelve jurymen who wore soft enough to believe tiie statement of his counsel that Sir Capel did not mean to deprive tho woman of her jewellery, but only " borrowed " it, adding the insinuation that she did not want to prosecute him (although she sont the polico after him) but that the whole matter had been brought forward by the jealousy of the man who bought the diamonds! Sir Capel obtained freedom from this charge, but was immediately taken into custody on another and much smaller one, but I do not wish to follow so mean a fellow through all his dirty tricks.

I told you somo months ago, and I fancy I have mentioned the subject in two letters, that an unhappy difference had arisen between a iVew Zealand man named Smith and his wife respecting the removal of the remains of their daughter to your country. It may bo gecollecfad that all three came to England on a visit, and that while herj tuo daughter died, having made a last request that her remains should be taken home and buried in the church where she hud been a worshipper. Differences arose between the father and the mother, and the daughter was temporarily laid to rest in Kensal Green cemetery. When power was *o'.ight to remove the coffin thence these family disputes were brought bi fore the notice of Dr. Tristram, the Chaivellor of the Diocese of London, who wls thereby compelled to pos'pone making a>.y order. Fortuna'elythe time which haselapsed by the occurrence of the lawyers' long vacation has healed the difference, ai d this week the matter has been mentioned to the Chancellor, who was grunted his " faculty " for the removal. The domestic grievances of another New Zealand lady have this week engaged the attention of the Lord Chief B.irun and his brother Ch ashy. Tic lady is now a Mrs Kingsman, but, ihree years ago or thereabouts she was a widow, Mrs Langlois, with a grown up son. She emigrated to New Zealand, whither she also took with her a young man named Kingeman, who was about a year older

than her son, and was engaged as his companion. On the Christmas Day of 1875 the witio iv married this Kingsman, in Auckland, I believe, she being then thirty-six years of age and lie seventeen. It was not quite a case of " May and December," but if. does not need extremes such as that to produce disagreements between the married, and now Mrs Kingsman describes her husband's eonduct in extremely severe terms. The day beforo the wedding Kingsman made a wrhten agreement with the widow to assign to trustees any property she then possessed or might afterwards acquire, hut ho now seeks to set this aside by the contention that he, being " an infant" in law, though a husband in fact, the agreement was not valid. Now Mrs Kingsman has brought an action against her husband's father, who lives in England, to recover the rents of her house property which he had received while she was away on her marrying expedition. The father-in-law has resisted, but the Judges held that hi; had no reasonable ground to stop the trial. I should mention that, about sixteen months after her marriage, Mrs Kingsman obtained a protection order from the magistrates at Auckland, and this has imported some difficulty into tbe case. A famous racehorse named Musket has left London this week, by steamer, for New Zealand, being consigned to Messrs Maclean and Co., of Waikato. Possibly, some of these days, wo may have horses from the Antipodes entered at Newmarket, and carrying away our prizes. Cricketers have led the way ; perhaps some of Musket's descendants may follow. I never knew a more glaring instance of the malversation of public trust funds caused by the most incompetent overlooking than that of the recent great robbery of the money belonging to the Curates' Augmentation Fund, a society for which there is very little reason that it shoxild exist. However, it does exist, is under the patronage of both the Archbishops of the Church of England, and grants to a certain number of curates £SO a year, in addition to their otherwiso very small incomes. It had three treasurers, two of them being clergymen, and one of them the rector of one of the largest London parishes, and a man who has the control of a large number of curates employed in the churches of the district into which his original parish has been divided by modern legislation. It has also for its hon. secretary a London clergyman. But ministers of any denomination are notoriously bad men of busines', so some skilled assistance had to be procured for this society. A man named Henry Marshall originally entered its service as clerk, but in 1872 he was promoted to the post of "assistant" secretary, which means that he really did all tho work. Erom that time he systematically robbed his employers, and worse still he stole the money that should have afforded some little comtort to twenty or more curates who were much worse off than he. He had a salary of £250 a year, on which he was supposed to be respectably supporting a wife and family, the latter numbering in this present year eight children. Unbounded confidence was placed in him, for his clerical friends never suspected that during all these yeara he was stealing from them upwards of £IOOO per annum, and spending it on another establishment of a much more luxurious style than that which legitimately belonged to him. Of course detection came at length, and then ho made a full confession. For the past seven years he has led a life of duplicity and sin ; for the next seven years he will have to make expiation in penal servitude, beside which all the money found in his possession is declared to bo forfeited, and he will have to pay the costs of his prosecution. This may seem to you, as it has seemed to some people at homo very like punishing a man twico for the same crime, but in fact it is not so, and the legislature was given to the Judges this exceptional power of making a man p::y a heavy fine in addition to a long detention in custody purposely in order to moot an exceptional case like this, for it means that in order to provont the county funds from being burdened with the expemtcs of such a prosecution, Marshall's second house will be seized and sold. In the very same week that this condemnation was passed on him a similar sentence was awarded to one Edward Clarke for a forgery and fraud on the funds of the Poor Law Union of Edmonton, near London. He had not only been a guardian for several years, but had been appointed to other offices of confidence in the parish, where, like Marshall, "he was much trusted." 13ut early in his parochial career he was detected in a forgery of voting papers, but he escaped without punishment, and this was never mentioned against him. In tho end, however, the editor of a local newspaper found out what were the real facts of the case about the erection of some parochial buildings, tho bills for which were to be paid by Clarke. Somo bills he doubled; others he wholly invented, and the money thus fraudulently obtained he put in his own pocket. He has just begun the first stage of live years' penal servitude. Another man who is certain of a heavy sentence is "William Stafford, the young man who stole £15,000 in notes from the Liverpool branch of the Bank of England. He fully acknowledges his guilt, and will give the prosecution no trouble. Yet he got clear away from this country, and might now be living comfortably in Spain if his confederate had not "split" on him. Even then, with the detectives within half a mile of him, ho had a few minutes' start, and batlled them so completely that he got clear away to the Isle of Wight, where he hired a yacht to take him to sea. The boat, however, was not equal to entering the Bay of Biscay in rough weather, so her captain put into Jersey, where Stafford was taken into custody with the greater part of the notes in his possession. He is very well connected, but the fair promise of a useful life is wholly destroyed. We have by no means come to the end of the excitement about the electric light. On the contrary, it is this week greater than ever, and so rapid have been the advances made towards producing a perfect light for many purposes besides street illuminations, that gas shares have not only continued to go down in prices, but in some cases have proved absolutely unsaleable. Edison, the American, who first produced the panic in London, has been completely put in the shade by the less clever but more speedy French and German inventors. Indeed, only last night a Gorman named Wedermann publicly demonstrated in London that he could do that which Edison has told us for a month he could do when his patent was secure, viz., subdivide the electric current so as to produce several moderate sized lights, such a 3 would bo useful to light up a factory or a workshop. Already the large room wbich contains the machinery by which the "Times " is printed, is lighted by electricity according to the process of M. Eapieff, a French inventor, and so satisfied are the authorities in Printing House Square with the results that havo been achieved that they are about to extend the process to their composing rooms, which, I need scarcely add, are protty capacious. Indeed, I think that in a very little time all tho large newspaper offices will have adopted one form or another of the electric light. All tho daily newspapers have recently undorgono a complete revolution in their printing maehinory, and they now possess such aplenty of steam power that they can easily spare a little for driving tho machinery to light their premises. The faving in ozpcn.-.o to anyone who ha. 3 a little steam to Bpare would bo enormous, not to take into account the superiority of the light and its many other advantages. We have enjoyed a wonderfully fine autumn in England, and I have written this letter on a day so fine that it, might have been May, if we had any /lowers to look at instead of piles of dead leaves. I conclude by wishing my readers a merry Christmas and a happy new year.