The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-05-28

the president at the time of his death of Brook
lyn bank and to use the stereotyped phrase,
enjoyed the fullest confidence of the STOCK
holders and the public"
The unhappy man was crushed almost out OF
the semblance of humanity, and his mournful
end was duly commented on in the press and
from the pulpit. His successor has since taken
possession of the chair vacated by him in the
parlor of his bank, and the conviction has been
slowly forced upon that successors mind that
the esteemed and valued financier in whose seat
he enow sits had, in one way and another during
his presidency, contrived TO misuse, appropriate,
and imperil several hundred thousand dollars,
the property of the bank or OF its deposltors.
In all this, we repeat, there is nothing new
nor surprising. The striking and peculiar
feature of the case is, that these dismal tacts
should have been made known only through
a catastrophe, itself the result of hducary
infdelty of another sort. Had the Long Island
Railway been kept in proper order and properly
administered, the chances are that the detalca-
tions of the President of the Atlantic Bank OF
Brooklyn might never have been known of men.
This president was man still in the vigor of
life. His conversions or malversatons of the
bank funds appear to have been made in the
interest of variety of speculative operations in
which he was engaged either as principal or
as an associate, and which were still working
out ut the moment of his sudden and doorous
death Had he lived, those operations, it is
true, might have resulted disastrously, and
so forced him before the public gaze as a
NlAhllllbls bul lutlls JAGN UllGlb ulbO uilNt
resulted prosperously, in which case he
might have gone on, full of years
and hOnOrs, to a green old age, and died. leaving
an example to all the young Whittingtons
and Greshams of his town and time. 1t will
hardly do to claim that his sudden destruction
was n special visitation of Heaven to punish his
intidelity to his trust for in that case we should
be forced to conclude that Heaven may makela
railway director careless about the murder of his
passengers in order to make bank director
careful about the money of his depositors
Without involving ourselves in moral problems
at once so intricate and so insoluble as are thus
suggested, however, let us but consider
how painfully probable it is that there
may be among us scores, if not
hundreds, of conspicuous financial and
commercial magnates whose regulations
might be just as dismaly compromised as
this of the Brooklyn bank president, were
they, like himself to be peremptorily hurled
out of their accustomed spheres by the breaking
of rail or the collision of II couple of trains.
The fevering influence upon all mems minds the
world over of the vast and sudden increase in
the worlds wealth and commerce which has
taken place since the discovery of California and
Australia, and the development of sounder prn-
ciples of trade in the policy of the worlds
greatest mercantile State, Great Britain; and the
special Generalization of mems minds i'm this
country by the passions and the crimes of great
civil war, have conspired, we fear, to make but
too sadly just the recent declaration of Il bitter
English writer, that 'thieving is the rule, hon
esty the exception, in the modern world of COM
merce and trade"