The Sun.
London, England, 1827-04-06 00:00:00

REPORT FROM THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE ARIGNA

MINING COMPANY.

ORDERED, BY THE HOUSE OF
COMMONS, TO BE PRINTED, MARCH, 1827.

(EXTRACTS TROU THE REPORT.)

The Select Committee appointed to inquire into the origin,
management, and present state of the Arigna Iron and
Coal Mining Company, and to report the same, with
any special matter touching the conduct of any Members
of this House, together with the Minutes of Evidence
taken before them, have examined into the matters re-
ferred to them, and now submit their Report to the
House; subjoining to it in an Appendix the evidence
both oral and documentary on which it proceeds.

(Concluded,from our Paper of yesterday.)

Of Sir William Congreve, there can be no doubt, that
by himself or his agent he was one of the principal parties
in the transaction. In fact, his name is linked with every
part of it; but whatever suspicions that circumstance may
excite, it does not necessarily follow that he is involved in
the fraud.

[The Report here comments upon the probable way in
which Sir William Congreve, had he been really innocent,
would have acted when he first learned the charge of fraud,
the indignation he would naturally have shown, and the
haste he would have used to exonerate himself from all im-
putations of fraud.] It then proceeds as follows
The Committee must with concern observe, that the
feelings and conduct of Sir William Congreve, as collected
from his own evidence, differ considerably from those of
which the outline has been just delineated. He was
strongly pressed in his examination, to state whether, on
hearing the transaction of the purchase, charged with fraud,
he had inquired of Messrs. Clarke what had been done, or

I.4,cooikuisined. £ it, oe.l.6l.....ovoqufereestawith the On
the subJect. "I do not recollect ;' are --y- tEraCT
did;"—" I dare say some discussion took place ;"—" I dare
say that I must have expressed great regret ;"—" I pro-
bably made the same request of Messrs. Clarke that Mr.
Brogden and Mr. Bent did ;"----were his answers. He
was asked whether he had conferred with any other per-
son than the Messrs. Clarke? "No," he answers, "I do
not recollect that I did." He admits that he opposed the
inquiries moved by Messrs. Bent and Brogden at the Board
of Directors, and does not deny that he endeavloured to
prevent Mr. Bent from attending the public meetcng of
December, 1825 ; and the reason he assigns is, that lie
was " in hopes that the Clarkes would be able to vindicate
themselves, and show that they had done nothing that was
intrinsically wrong." Instead of condemning the trans-
action in the shape in which it was actually carried into
effect, he even now speaks very doubtfully, if not with
more than doubt, of its impropriety ; treating its defective..
ness as a matter purely of form, and as a question of Chan-
cery-law, respecting which he is not lawyer enough to give
an opinion. _ . _

The only topic still to be noticed on this head is the al-
leged liberality of Sir William Congreve in insisting on a
distribution of great part of the 15,000/. among the friends
of himself and the Messrs. Clarke—a circumstance which
he considers as affording evidence of the purity and disin-
terestedness of his intentions, and which he, therefore,
means, it is presumed, to oppose to the imputation of the
sordid feelings, connected with fraud. It must, however,
be recollected, that Sir,William Congreve himself was to
have 2,5001.' is two agents between them, one of them
being his brother-in-taw, 2,0001., and another brother-in-
law and a nephew, hetmeerl 11levy, about 2,100/. ; making
in all, among Sir Williamongreve and his connexions,
6,6001.—a sum litile:ahort of one-half of the whole
15,000/. ; and this, alnfough the Messrs. Clarke had a
prima fucie right to two-thirds of that sum. It seems
questionable, therefore, whether so great a sacrifice was
made by Sir William Congreve on occasion of this distri-
bution as the argument supposes. The Committee are
therefore afraid that they must resolve his conduct, either
into a not unwilling suppression of scruples, which, when
once felt, could not be silenced without blame, or into an
insensibility to evident obligation, which no rule, either of
law or morals, admits to be a defence of transgression.
The Committee will next proceed to the case of Mr.
Brogden ; taking in conjunction with it that of Mr. Bent,
who, though not now a Member of the House is so inti-
mately blended with Mr. Brogden throughout the trans-
actions under consideration, that their acts can hardly be
viewed apart.
After much and careful examination, the Committee are
distinctly of opinion, that neither Mr. Brogden nor Mr.
Bent was privy to the fraud respecting the reservation of
the 15,0001. on the sale of the property to the Company.
It is, however, true, as has been before stated, that both
those gentlemen subsequently received sums of money,
which the Messrs. Clarke allege to have been portions of
the 15,000/., and their receipt of these sums forms no un-
important point of consideration.
The Messrs. Clarke state the 15,0001. to have been distri-
buted or disposed of as follows

To Mr. Beaubien £ 1,000
To Mr. John Ilinde
To Sir William Congreve, Chairman of the Di-

rectors
To the other ten Directors 1,0471. each (the share
of Mr. Schneider, jun. however, was paid to
Sir William Congreve, and that of Mr. Morgan
is unpaid, except that 100/, part of it, has
been paid to an agent of Mr. Flattery)
To sundry charges SO

Total £15,000

Mr. Bent received the 1,0471. at the meeting already
mentioned of the Board of Directors, on the 15th of Janu-
ary, 1825 ; and Mr. Brogden, at the office of Mr. Clarke,
in King's Arms-yard, a few days afterwards.
The sum of Mr. Brogden's defence as to his reception of
the 1,0471. resolves itself into these propositions:--that
he, as well a• Mr. Bent, believed that he was entitled, as
Director, to 100 shares in addition to those for which he
had subscribed ; that he was satisfied, op the authority of
Mr. Bent, after Mr. Bent himself had received the 1,047/.
that Mr. Henry Clarke had sold those hundred shares, to-
gether with shares belonging to other Directors, and that
the sums of 1,0471. came out of the proceeds; and that,
so believing, he received the 1,047/. as money to which he
bad an undoubted right. And on this defence, the Ceim-
mittee are of opinion, that Mr. Brogden, as well as Mr.
Bent, did believe that they Were respectively entitledlO,P

hundred additional shares, and that they at some period or
other conceived the sale of those shares to have produced
the 1,047/. ; but at what precise time Messrs. Bent and
Brogden distinctly and definitely adopted the idea that such
was the real source of the 1,0471., or how far this idea was
so- adopted before Mr. Brogden received the 1,0471. does not
seem to the Committee to be clear on the evidence ; and it
is, at all events, their judgment, that Mr. Brogden did not
take sufficient pains to ascertain the source of the money
previously to kis receipt of it.
On the next question—that is, at what period. Messrs.
Brogden and Bent distinctly adopted and rested in the per-
suasion that the 1,0471. was the produce of the hundred
shares which they conceived to be reserved for them, the
Committee can only repeat that the evidence does not en-
able them to speak decisively. True, it would appear
from the statements both of Mr. Brogden and Mr. Bent,
that the money was taken by them, more or less, under the
persuasion alluded to ; but, while the Committee disclaim
the purpose of imputing to those gentlemen the offence of
intentional misrepresentation, they must observe that their
testimony can be tried only by the ordinary tests ; and that,
taken as it stands, and compared both with itself and with
the statements of others, it exhibits so many marks of hasty
and imperfect recollection, as to inspire little confidence in
the precise exactness of its details.

There can be no question that the general scope and
effect of the case of Mr. Brogden is this—that after Mr.
Bent communicated to him the fact of the distribution
which took place at the meeting of the 15th of January,
and suggested to him his conjecture as to the source of the
money, an interval of doubt, of reluctance, of inquiry, of
consultation, took place before Mr. Brogden could acquiesce
in the conjecture of Mr. Bent, or make up hie mind to
follow the example of his brother Directors in receiving the
money. Such a course of deliberation could hardly be
completed within a shorter space of time than Mr. Brog-
den assigns to it, when he says that " ten days _or more"
elapsed before he went into the city ; mere especially as he
states that he was then much occupied elsewlaere than in
the city ; and if his evidence is to be constrAl with
any sti ictness at all, the interval must be farther en-
larged by allowing for the loud and frequent complaints
of the conduct of Mr. Clarke, which he represents him-
self to have made at the United Gas Office, before he
received the money ; for the United Gas Office being con-
tiguous to the office of the Arigna Company, such com-
plaints could only have been made after his attendance in
the city was resumed.
Yet, when documents were resorted to, it turned out,
and was, indeed, very fairly stated by Mr. Brogden him-
self, that he had received the money from Mr. Clarke as
early as the 20th of January. Now, the very earliest date
affixed to the communication from Mr. Bent to Mr. Brog-
den is only the 17th of that month ; and, putting these two
dates together, it thus appears that, even on the largest
supposition which the evidence admits, there could pass
but two clear days between the receipt of the communica-
tion from Mr. Bent and the receipt of the money from Mr.
Clarke. It inevitably follows, either that into this narrow
span must have been crowded all that process of conjecture,
inquiry, complaint, and conversation, at the conclusion of
which Mr. Brogden is stated to have appropriated to him-
self the 1,0471.—a difficult supposition surely—or else that
he appropriated the money while that process yet remained
incomplete. _ _

Between the alternative suppositions which this state of
facts presents, the Committee are unable to make a satisfac-
tory choice, and must therefore decline pronouncing any
determination. But there is one point already alluded to,
on which they feel it their duty to deliver their opinion. It
is stated by Mr. Brogden to have been his first impression,
and it was (as the Committee before observed in the case
of Mr. Bent) a natural conclusion, that the 1,0471. had
been produced, not by the sale of any specific shares of his
own, but by that of a hoard of ;hares secretly reserved for
the benefit of the Directors in general, and improperly
issued at a premium. Where such a supposition was even
possible, nothing less than the clearest evidence that it had
no foundation in fact should have induced Mr. Brogden to
touch the sum proffered. To,take the matter on trust, to
adopt the opinion or follow the example of others, to place
any stress on evidence so loose and inconclusive as the ab-
sence of the supposed 100 shares from the share-list—for
it does not appear how that list should contain shares on
which no deposits had been paid,—in a word, to rest short
of a direct explanation on the subject from the only person
who could afford it, Mr. Henry Clarke,—was to be want-
ing in that duty which the occasion evidently prescribed;
and much more was this the case, if the enquiries of
Messrs. Bent and Brogden, such as they were, had not been
completed when Mr. Brogden received the money.
• Even supposing, however, the truth of the conjecture as
to the sale of the hundred shaCea to have been distinctly
ascertained, still the Committee cannot acquit from blame
the parties who acquiesced even retrospectively in et of
Mr. Henry Clarke.
j
Having now commented on that part ofthe c p ears.
:ram.% mod Ildarowiloo wWials.- relate. to their irespectiv accept-
ance of the 1,0471., the Committee have yet to notice their
conduct in relation to the Company, subsequently to the
acceptance of that money; if Messrs. Bent and Brogden
—and the remark in an especial degree applies to the former
—really felt a strong and indignant disapprobation of the
Messrs. Clarke, for the unauthorized disposal of their shares;
but still more, if they seriously doubted whether the pro-
ceeds had been fairly accounted for, it surely would have
become them, in justice if not to themselves, yet ..to the
Company and to the public, to ask some explanation, to call
for some account, to inspect the books, to make known in
some manner their distrust of the persons whom they bad,
by whatever accident or inadvertence, consented to join in
the commanding and responsible situation of virtual
managers both of the funds and of the operations of the
Company. Messrs. Bent and Brogden, however, instead
of pursuing such a course, continued in cordial co-opera-
tion with the Messrs. Clarke as co-directors for several
months. The arguments by which they justify their con-
duct in this respect will be found in their respective evi-
dence ; but to the Committee it appears, either that the
fact of their indignation against the Messrs. Clarke, and
especially that of Mr. Bent, has been overstated in that
evidence, or that they felt hampered by the recollection that '
their right to the produce of shares on which they had paid
no deposit might he disputed—a consideration alluded to
on one occasion by Mr. Brogden, though no where mentioned
by Mr. Bent.

The Com-mittee have given it as their opinion, that
Messrs. Bent and Brogden, really supposed that they had a
hundred shares each in addition to those for which they
subscribed ; but whatever may be the grounds for such a
supposition, it by no means follows that they had sufficient
grounds to possess themselves of the 1,0471., as the produce
of the sale of those shares. The present question, however,
is one not of right, but of conduct. Until some partial
opinion has admitted the title of Messrs. Bent and Brogden
to the money, it is perfectly evident that they cannot be
justified in keeping in their own hands that which may
possibly belong to another, merely from the apprehension
lest their placing it in safe custody should be misconstrued.

JOANNA BAILLIE.

There is something exceedingly striking in the ap-
pearance of Joanna Baillie. Though she is no longer
young, and her features have lost the glow and fresh-
ness of youth, the rays of beauty still linger about
her countenance, and over its expression the tyrant
has had no power. Her face is' decidedly tragic,
not altogether unlike that of Mrs. Siddons—and
capable of pourtraying the strongest and deepest
emotion. Her air is lofty and reserved; and if there
be a dash of hauteur in her manner, amounting, at
times, almost to sternness, there is, on the other
hand, something delightfully winning in the tones of
her deep fine voice. Her eye—l hesitated long
before I could decide its hue, and, after all, I am not
quite certain whether it be a dark blue or a hazel—
has a most melancholy expression; though time has
not quenched its fire, or bent, in the slightest degree,
her erect but attenuated form. She appeared about
50; thin, pale,
and dressed with a Quakerlike sim-
plicity; and though some might be inclined to say
she is too conscious of her powers, and to quarrel
with the precision of her manner, here is much of
the majesty of genius about her, and, in person al-
together, she is one, who once seen, is not easily to
be forgotten.
The conversation of Joanna Daillie well merited
attention. It was indeed charming.
more imagi-
native than argumentative—often highly, poitical,
and always in good taste—l should style it equi-
distant from the dogmatism and learned pedantry of
Madame de Stael, and the glitter and tinsel, and
perpetual effort to be striking, of Lady Morgan.
There was a description which I well remember she
gave us of her visiting the interior of Exeter Cathe-
dral by moonlight--,of the witching effect of the sa-
credness of the place, combined with the stillness of
the hour---of the tranquillizing feelings which per-
force st ole overnoNv tsteaezentg through the painted
as he watched the
moonbeams,
windows, now falling in rich gushes over the pre-
late; and warrior n°Ple; who, "after life's
*fitful fever, slept uelow...kovv. it seemed to blab
3

gUAViitrat