THE MOST IMPUDENT MAN ALIVE.

Colonist, Issue 133, 28 January 1859, Page 4

THE MOST IMPUDENT MAN ALIVE.

(From the Times, 29^7. October.) There is a piece of composition well-known in our literature, An Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Alive. We offer a parallel of this to-day in an epistle from the most impudent man alive. The notorious and, with this letter before us, we cannot help adding the further epithet, infamous Colonel Waugh comes forward at the bar of public opinion to complain of hard usage at the hands of the 'Press. Be it so. Let the public be judge between us. The facts of this ease we draw from our own Bankruptcy reports. We have no other sources of information. There are some individual cases of woe and desolation, stories of cold hearths and shattered domesticities, wretched tales of private misery; but these are "not legal evidence, and must not be introduced to cause a prejudice against the bankrupt." We have also, it is true, a general recollection of a blazing prodigality a,nd a more than Eastern magnificence; of a palace that arose like an exhalation, and has been found too splendid to find a sober purchaser; of banquets that have passed away, and festivals that have left only the ill odours of the extinguished lamps,—all these we recollect, but these, also, are " not legal evidence," bo we confine ourselves to the proceedings in the Court of Bankruptcy. Those dull rooms in Basinghallstreet are the last scene of many a fairy tale. It is there the drawers supposed to contain the fairy coin are opened; we must not listen to stories of the brightness of the gold that was locked up in them long ago, we may only weigh and value the dry leave's we find there.

Abiding, then, by the prosaic guidance of lawyers and Commissioners, it appears that some years previous to April, 1847, there lived' one Captain Waugh, who had been, as he says, mentioned in despatches, but who has since been more noticeably mentioned in Gazettes,— -for to some eyes he has attained the ambition of Nelson," and has had a Gazette all to himself. So far as we know, his name was not quoted in the city as a great capitalist. He had made a good marriage, and possessed in the right of his wife an income of £600 a year; but our authority does not tell us, and the facts do not disclose, that he had any property whatever of his own; nor do probabilities favor the presumption that his own means were greater than those of ordinary cavalry captains whose very scanty pay is aided by some modest independence. This Captain Waugh, being thus neither destitute nor rich—being without the justification of adequate means or the palliative excuse of desperate fortunes, confederated with one Stephens to start a joint-stock bank; not with the intention, as after events showed, of initiating an honest banking establishment, but for the purpose of acquiring. access to a large heap of other people's money, in order that he might abstract and squander it. Morally speaking, it was a conception very analagous to that of furtively boring a tunnel into the cellars of the Bank of England. Waugh had, as he has reminded us, family connexions of rank and honor in the profession to which he himself belonged, and these relatives seem unconsciously to have been made the call-birds to attract the birds of their own feather to the trap which Captain, or, ,as he now became, Colonel Waugh was preparing. We

can only believe that the armyconnexions of which he. impudently boasts, formed the facilities of success in the concoction of his gigantic swindle, for among the victims it was afleiwards found that many military men connected with our Indian service were to be counted. The nefarious scheme succeeded. Mr. Stephens, a cavalry surgeon, became theManaging Director of the London and Eastern Bank; Colonel Waugh became one of its Directors; the other parties to the scheme, both Directors and Shareholders, would appear to be either innocent dupes or very subordinate and ill-paid tools. The names were so respectable that deposits flowed in, and as they flowed in so Colonel Waugh made them to flow out. Colonel Waugh how burst forth upon the town in a career of magnificent expenditure, which need not be evidenced only by our loose recollections, but may be read in the bills for trousseaux and jewels, claimed under the bankruptcy. This part of the story is soon told. Time, and fashion, and extravagance, and Colonel Waugh ran their course, and one morning the doors of the London and Eastern Bank were closed, and Colonel Waugh had absconded to the Continent. Now came the, investigation. It turned out that Colonel Waugh, in addition to all his other debts, had, -w-ith .the connivance of Stephens, obtained from the funds of the Bank £280,000,; andwwe quote the statement of counsel at tlie meeting of the 19th of November—that "the securities held were of a merely nominal value.'' An examination ol the affairs of the Bank showed a deficit of .£289,998. So that the operations of this gigantic swindler had alone broken the Bank, had absorbed a small margin of profits, and had consumed the whole of the deficit. Alone, this Colonel did it. Why, when we lightly compared him to heroic times, we did not do justice to the magnitude of his capacity. Hercules listened to the complaints of his companions in the Argo, and when they urged that he was eating up all their food and sinking the vessel by his bulk he suffered himself to be put on shore; but this more than heroic encumbrance, this Waugh, persistently held on till the last scrap was consumed, and the ship was foundering in deep water. Then, indeed, he ran away. Did he fly from the sight of the wide-spread misery he had created for the mere wanton enjoyment of a little season of riot ? We fear not. He had committed a crime, and was amenable to the criminal law. He travelled through Spain and France, and wrote false letters home, accompanied by what the Bankruptcy Commissioner so very temperately called "unsatisfactory" certificates of illhealth, and he deplored the impossibility of pushing his travels nearly to England than Marseilles or some other frontier town of France. Meanwhile the property which is the only substantial residuum of his swindle, and which he has the double audacity to speak of as a positive property, justifying his expenditure, and as a security of sufficient value to justify his abstractions, was put up to sale last month, and no bidder was found to offer £50,000 for it. "If any one has a fancy for a picturesque island and a gorgeous palace, which have stood security'"for £280,000, and were late the property of William Petrie Waugh, of Branksea Island, brick and tile maker, limeburner, dealer and chapman, formerly a director in the London and Eastern Banking Corporation, he can enjay all the princely advantages of this great estate by paying down the sum of .€50,000. The late owner is a fugitive and an outlaw, with the wail of widows and the tears of orphans upon his head, but he has been a man of fashion in his day, and he is demanding readmission to his country and to society as an ill-used man.

This is the man who dares to sign his name to a public letter, and to complain to his countrymen of wrong done him by animadversions upon his crimes. When a collateral subject called the facts of his grievous iniquities generally and rather vaguely to our memory we spoke lightly and jestingly of the man's career, for our object was rather to indicate a warning than to scourge a culprit. But the necessary reference to documents which Waugh s letter occasioned is destructive of all humour for levity. The cruelty and heartlessness of the man's conduct, the absence of all those palliative motives which often tempt men to sharply punished crimes, the comfortable impunity he enjoys, and his audacity in braving the world's scorn, come upon us in their full force as we read, and require that we answer him with something more serious than a i'ew phrases of irony. We are sorry that the task devolves upon us; if, like his brother swindlers in kindred enterprises, he had expiated his misdeeds in a gaol, he had been safe from us. But this is riot so. He is safe from his victims' pursuit, and evidently indifferent to their misery ; he is in the enjoyment of the distraction of continental travel and the comforts of opulence; he is an ill example to men of weak principle of how much money can be dishonestly acquired without very disagreeable consequences. Ours is the only hand that can reach him, and mere^ disgust at the office may not hinder the discharge of the duty.