The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-06-25 00:00:00

11D J. NODDER,
_IA). HATTER,

81, CHURCH.STREET,

Begs respectfully to inform the Nobility and Gentry of Liver-
pool that his NEW STYLES for the Season are NOW READY
for Inspection.

THE ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION TO THE NORTHERN
DAILY TIMES p; TWO GUINEAS PER ANNUM.

E4e

rtherti trutpFi

WEDNESDAY, JUNE. 25, 1856

Now that folly and flash have exhausted them_
selves with regard to the recent proceedings in the
Irish Court of Chancery, in JOHN SADLEIR'S affairs,
we may be permitted to direct the attention of
mercantile men to the extraordinary importance of
the decision of the MASTER of the ROLLS. Few

men are capable of ariving at a sounder opinion
than the honest and independent lawyer who
presides over the Irish Rolls ; and we can scarcely
persuade ourselves that the Lord Chancellor,
BRADY, will venture to reverse the learned
MASTER'S decision in a matter of such notoriety.

The law, as laid down by the MASTER of the ROLLS,
will, therefore, be confirmed, in all probability, by
the Court above, and with that confirmation the
last security depositors and creditors of joint
stock banks and insurance companies have will be
wholly swept away, as far as Chancery is concerned
The new doctrine is, that the contract, i e., the
liability of the shareholders may be vitiated,
where fraud on the part of the agents or directors
of a bank or company can be proved. Should this
logic be acted upon by other courts, and
by juries, the public would have no security
against dishonest agencies or directories under the
law of unlimited or limited liability. All that
shareholders will have to do henceforth will be to
prove that they were induced, by false pretences,
or some other species of fraud, to join a concern, to
shake off their responsibility to creditors

No deed of settlement, registry of names and
amounts subscribed on other arrangements inter se
or between themselves, will give the public the
least hold upon the shareholders, if the decision
of the Irish Rolls Court should be confirmed and
sanctioned in this country. All JOHN SADLEIR has

said or written about the very ingenious manner
in which the balance sheets of English Joint Stock
Banks are manufactured ought to be received
by the British public as the professions of
PALMER'S innocence were received when the
wretched man was about to face the scaffold. The
Joint Stock Banks of these realms are the greatest
ornaments of this age, whether we view them as

the types of the frugality of the community or as
the creations of the genius, industry, and integrity
of the comparatively few individuals who have been
intrusted with their management. Without those
institutions what would Liverpool, London, or
England have done ? and is it because one

rascally black sheep has been discovered in such
R fold, that the confidence of the nation is to be
shaken in one of the greatest and most enduring
monuments of moral rectitude. That there was
fraud and conspiracy, of alarming magnitude, in all
that JOHN SADLEIR did will be
readily admitted.
No one will dispute the finding of the Irish
Courts on that head, but every honest man will
repudiate with scorn the idea, that the Share-
holder, whose duty to the public is to see that his
Director are honest, proper men to be placed at
the head of such an establishment as a bank, is to
be released from his liability to those who have
been plundered, by means of the money ho has
placed at the disposal of a gang of swindlers. We
must admit no such loose red tapeisrns in this
commercial country. If the liability of share-
holders in banks and insurance companies is to
be unlimited, be it so, but without any reserva-
tion whatever, and if it is to be limited, let the
limit be unmistakeably set forth, and the amount
made recoverable by a process as summary as the
wants of creditors in such cases are urgent.
Where fraud has been practised by. Directors
the shareholder should be left to prosecute, and
not the ruined depositor of a bank, or the repre-
sentatives of the deceased, whose life may have
been insured for years. No accounts can be

FvNle:l44cfcessfully as to avoid detection of
-
shareholders looking carefully after them. JOHN
SADLEIR saw this, and trembled at the certainty of
detection, which stared him in the face.

Shareholders, then, are mainly to blame, where
systematic fraud is carried on for any length of
time ; and the general impression is, that Parlia-
ment has not armed the shareholder, as the party
really responsible to the public, with sufficient
powers for the detection of delinquencies on the
part of directors. If the man who holds a share
in any concern is to be made liable for all the acts
of those the law makes his partners, he should
have all the rights and privileges of a partner, for
his own protection as well as that of the public.
If the English shareholders had had the
power of getting at the books of the Tippe-
rary Bank, they would soon have known what
SADLEIR and his brother directors were about,
The Joint Stock Companies' Act was SAD.
LEIR'S shield. He could have done nothing
if the Legislature had not shut out the share.
holders from the Director's room. It appears
from SADLEIR'S letter to his brother that his Irish
shareholders never received a balance sheet, and
that his English dupes would have been kept in
equal darkness if he could have obtained their
money without giving them a statement of ac
counts. It only requires a popular and clever
rogue to carry on a monster swindle where such a
state of things prevails, and the great wonder is,
that with all the facilities open to them, a much
larger amount of mischief is not done. Still,
lax as the law may be, and cruelly as the share-
holder may suffer when he falls into the traps of
such arch knaves, the public must protest against
the validity of a legal opinion, which would relieve
Shareholders from all liability in cases where
Directors are found to have dealt fraudulently with
them, as tolerating such a notion would put a
stop to the whole joint stock business of the
country.