BANK PARSIMONY.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 17, Issue 1010, 6 May 1871, Page 3

BANK PARSIMONY.

[from THE EVEXING POST, APRIL 24. ] It was discovered a few weeks ago that ft young man, a junior clerk in one of the Banks, had been helping himself to the funds. The amount of defalcations at first traced to the delinquent was small .—some .£40 —but it has since been found out that other sums have gone in the same way, and possibly the Bank is a heavier loaer than it is at present aware x>f. We cannot avoid saying that this and other cases of defalcation which have occurred uuder similar circumstances in this Cojony are in a great measure due jto the ill-judged parsimony of the Banks themselves. They put young men into situations of trust and responsibility in which very strong temptation lies in their way, and expect them to keep up a respectable appearance and maintain the highest integrity of character, at the same time only paying them a miserable pitlance. The defaulter whose case we have mentioned was receiving some .£125 annually, an amount certainly not adequate fur a person who was trusted with the handling of large sums of money, and the result has been that he has perhaps cost the Bank two or three times the amount which would have remunerated him well, and kept him honest. Not so long ago a case occurred in another Province, in which $ youth who was paid £95 a year appropriated .£3,000 of the money of the Bank which employed him, none of it being recovered. We certainly think, on the score of economy alone, that the Banks ought to pay these junior employees on a scale which would remove them above temptation, for it cannot be questioned that the temptation to appropriate money passing through their hands in great profusion, aud of which they have so little, is very strong. Society at once brands the unfortunate youth who yields to the temptation, as a villain, and casts him out to herd with those who will soon make him so, but has not a word of reproach for the directors or managers of banking companies who, in receipt of large incomes themselves, cannot see why their employees should not remain satisfied with a wretched pittance. Adequate remuneration would do much to lessen the number of defalcations by junior .clerk?, wl ile those who employ and put them in the p.ath of temptation on the present system are, in reality, responsible ifor the crime which often results, and the destruction of young men, who, in different circumstances, might have proyed useful members of society.