The Sun.
London, England, 1861-06-20 00:00:00

THEBANKRUPICY BILL,

(From Me Times of this Clay.)

What is to become of the Bankruptcy Bill ? Is
.t to go to the limbo of good resolutions unper-
fected ? If we were to judge from that half-smo-
thered explosion which took place in the House of
Commons some evenings since, it is to be rejected
with scorn and indignation. But the Speaker
promptly and carefully covered up that nascent, but
untimely, conflagration in a wet blanket, and the
intention of the Attorney-General as to the ultimate
fate of his ill-used offspring is yet to be developed.
If it were a mere question between Sir Richard
Bethell and the House of Lords, and no one else
had any interest in the matter, we should say that
Sir Richard Bethell had been very ill-used, and was
justified in any amount of resentment. It is very
well for people to go to the British Museum and
fall into ecstacies at the wondrous proportion of the
Elgin marbles, but we may depend upon it that if
the old Greek sculptors themselves could revisit
their great works, they would be immediately dis-
gusted to find their favourite offspring with their
noses chipped off and their limbs broken away, and
sometimes nothing left but a backbone and half a
thigh. So Lord Derby may choose to lavish his af-
fection upon the debris of the great Bethell Bank-
ruptcy statue, which, like Phidias, he laboured
at for an ungrateful people, or which, like Praxi-
teles, he showed, by clinging to it in moments of
adversity, he preferred to all his other works. But
neither Lord Derby nor any of his Law Lords can
expect Sir R. Bethell to believe that this noseless,
armless, legless thing is better worthy of the artist
than the complete work of art which, factus ad
unguern, was borne upon the shoulders of the Com-
mons for the admiration and applause of the Lords.
We are often told that Gipsies stain white people's
children dark in order to make them pass for their
own, but it has never been said that the Gipsies,
when this transfiguration has taken place, conceive
an affection for the changeling greater than that of
the original parents. This, however, seems to have
been the case with the Lords and their transformed
Bankruptcy Bill. The debate on Tuesday night,
when the Bill was sent forth from the House, was
little more than blessings upon its little head and an
endeavour to obtain for it protection from the evil
passions of the Commons, and a guarantee of re•
adoption by its original parent. Lord Derby did his
utmost to extract a promise that Lord *Granville
" would accept the Bill as it stands, and recommend
the acceptance of it by the House of Commons." Lord
Overstone, guilty of the slaughter of that half-born
Bankruptcy Judge, and who said nothing about the
mysterious disappearance of the creditors' assignees,
yet claimed the " faithful support of the Govern-
ment " for the Bill in the state to which he had
reduced it. Lords Cranworth, Wensleydale,
and Brougham, whose consciences, exercised by
long judicial work, are less liable to remorse, were
less demonstrative in their apprehensions f the
Bill dying of exhaustion from the many amputa-
tions it had suffered at their hands ; but Lord
Brougham despatched it with a blessing and with
a recommendation to mercy, and the Lords seemed
to pass it almost reluctantly out of their hands, as
if they were surrendering it to wrath and to an
almost certain fate.
The two great mutilations which the bill has
suffered are undoubtedly the extinction of the Chief
Judge in Bankruptcy and the deposition of the cre-
ditors' assignees. We are not about to dissolve in
pity at the fate of the Chief Judge and his Court.
No doubt, it is a suspicious circumstance when we
find a row of dowager Chancellors singing a chorus
of eulogy on the Chancery jurisdiction in bank-
ruptcy, and defending that admirable and popular
institution against all assaults from without. We
must, however, admit that the select committee has
inspired a doubt whether that projected Chief Judge
and his projected court were novelties of indispen-
sable necessity. If Lord Wensleydale be accurate
in his computations that the bankruptcy appeals
which this judge would have to try would not give
him occupation for more than fifteen days in every
year, we must concede that this work might be left
in the hands of the Lords Justices. The deposition,

hewever, of the creditors' assignees from all power
in the management of the estate is a very different
matter. Thirty years ago Lord Brougham found a
loose system in existence under which great abuses
had crept in; and assignees chosen by creditors
very much abused the unrestricted powers they pos-
sessed. Lord Brougham swept away that old sys-
tem, and introduced that which now obtains. The
consequence has been that for thirty years there has
been little dishonesty and no very unnecessary de-
lays; but the comparative honesty and the compara-
tive promptitude have been found so expensive that,
upon the whole, the creditors obtain little better divi•
dends than under the old system. It is the evil of
the old system which now comes so vividly before
the minds of those ancient lawyers in whose expe-
rience 30 years is but as a span. They believe that
to reappoint creditors' assignees would be to bring
back the abuses of those early days when 3,000,000
of money were found to be lying about uncollected,
or uninvested, and certainly undivided. But why
should this necessarily so recur ? Is it in all cases
essential to destroy a system because it has been
found incrusted with abuses? It does not follow,
because many years ago mercantile assignees, not
being held to their proper responsibilities, were
careless, dilatory, and sometimes dishonest, that
therefore the same vices must reappear in the same
class of persons when subjected to proper supervi-
sion, and when working under a better regulated
system. The mercantile classes are unanimous in
their desire to have the management of these Bank-
rupt estates taken out of the hands of lawyers, and
placed in the hands of commercial men of their own
chole3. We cannot avoid saying that, inasmuch as
these persons are for the most part of full age and
sound understanding, it would seem that their desires
ought to prevail against the legal doubts of Peers who
have no interest in the matter, however learned and
experienced those Peers may be. It undoubtedly does
savour somewhat of the imperative style when
Lord Derby and his friends mutilate a Bill in the
fashion in which this has been mutilated, and
then insist that the Government shall adopt the
mutilated thing as their own, and shall under-
take faithfully to support it. Still, however, the
Bill must pass. It would be a scandal if, after
all the time bestowed upon it, we were to throw
it over in a pique, as a Brahmin casts away his
dinner because the shadow of a white man has
fallen upon it. Many things, moreover, remain in
this Bill which we cannot afford to lose. The fasion
of Law and Bankruptcy is of itself a reform well
worthy of a separate Act. The sweeping away of
the classes of Bankruptcy certificates, and the pro-
visions for the punishment of fraudulent trading,
are much too valuable to be lost. W e cannot sup-
pose that the Lords will be so unreasonable as to
insist upon all their alterations, and to concede
nothing to the commercial classes, who are so much
interested in this measure, or to the House of Cora-
-1 mons, which has bestowed upon its details an
amount of labour certainly not inferior to their own.
In a few days we shall know what the Chambers of
Commerce throughout the country think of these
alterations, and how far a compromise may be
effected upon the matters of chief importance to the
commercial mind. In the meantime, however,
it is most desirable that all parties should come to
the consideration of the measure as it now stands
in a practical spirit, with the view, not of gaining a
victory or resenting an interference, but of passing a
good Bankruptcy Law. Nothing would be more
unwise than a splenetic rejection of this Bill.