The Telephone. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JUNE 20. COMMERCIAL IMMORALITIES.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 167, 26 June 1884, Page 2

The Telephone. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JUNE 20. COMMERCIAL IMMORALITIES.

Ever since imprisonment for debt has been wholly or partly abolished, this great problem has presented itself to our legislators and to all thinking men. How to make such a law as will effectually prevent the unscrupulous debtor from defrauding (for we really can use no milder term) his confiding creditors. Of course we know that there always have been and always will be cases where a man striving honestly to do his best, has through some misfortune, been compelled to go to the wall, and with such we can commiserate; but we desire to deal openly and plainly with those from whose conduct the whole colony is at this moment suffering—those persons who have wilfully traded beyond their means, or even when discovering that they were perfectly insolvent have continued to buoy themselves up upon credit I Actually in fact using what they right well knew did not belong to them —spending other people’s money. That such a state of things should exist is unfortunately only too plainly brought before our notice in the long lists of bankrupt estates which we are called on weekty to peruse. We will give a few instances, and then proceed to point out the possibility of bringing commerce into a more healthy condition, and avoid the disastrous consequences which a continuance of such a low state of commercial morality must inevitably bring upon us. Turning to the list of adjudications in bankruptcy filed during one week (quite and more than sufficient for our purpose) we find that the total liabilities of debtors amounted to £77,330, whilst the assets taken in their most favorable aspect reach only £55,887. Here is a deficiency of nearly /"zo.ooo and this for one week only. Out of the 30 bankrupts whose liabilities we have given above, five had no assets at all, and one man with a liability of nearly £9OO shows assets amounting to £6. Now, cases of this kind occur week by week, until it is really quite distressing to peruse the reports. We now come to the main question— What are we going to do to mitigate the evil, and how is it to be done? Looking at the past career of this Colony, we are able to trace and strike at the first root of the evil, and that is —firstly, injudicious borrowing of foreign capital, and worse than that, the still more injudicious manner in which these borrowed moneys have been expended. How it has been expended is a matter of history, and need not be dealt with in our present article. It is obvious that the Colony cannot with any hope of success again go upon the London market for money, except for such a sum as would be but a .drop in the bucket, and for any tangible relief we have ourselves, and only ourselves, to look to. No one will dispute the fact that all are prone to live beyond their means, if opportunity is given, and here we find the second evil. With their coffers full of borrowed money, companies and monetary institutions have been most eager to stimulate and push trade in every way possible, their only object being to pay a dividend to the shareholders. But when you are trading on borrowed capital and paying a high rate of interest on the amount employed, it very soon melts away, and then you come to exactly the position in which we find ourselves placed, and that is that we must look amongst ourselves for relief, and every man should set his face sternly against all reckless trading, or, as it may be more properly called, gambling. Looking, for instance, at one case in the Southern Island, we see an estate brought into the Bankruptcy Court with liabilities amounting to, in round numbers, over /'60,000, whilst the debtor is trading with only Z'4,000 worth of stock. Can anything than this more plainly show that such a state of things and such transactions are not legitimately commercial, but simply, as we have said before, gambling —and gambling with other people’s money. In our small community such matters happily occur but seldom comparatively speaking, and it behoves us to keep our eyes wide open and endeavour to see that the morality of trade, its highest principle, is kept up to the highest standard.