Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 429

year of the nineteenth century, it was stated that in the preceding twelve months there were 4653 new companies registered, while the number that went into liquidation was 1745.1 As to the actual sums lost, the figures complete as far as two years previously were given. They revealed what a daily journal described as “the appalling fact that in that year, on companies representing a total capital of 464 millions, the public lost no less a sum than 21 millions sterling.”* That fraud and misrepresentation must have been rampant on every hand is taken to be obvious. The journal significantly adds: ‘“‘What is most menacing to the interests of the investor is the utter lack of commercial morality in every department of business connected with company promotion. If an individual buys a business, or a mine, or a brewery, for five thousand pounds, and goes to a capitalist and asks him to buy it of him for thirty thousand pounds, and to work it as well, he is very properly treated as a lunatic. But if the same individual asks the public to buy his bargain of him on the same terms his impudence is not only condoned, but justified by the company-promoting world on the ground that the public must look after itself... . Then it is considered a fair thing for seven or more men, themselves perfectly solvent, to embark in a particular enterprise, involving great risk, which is floated on the credit of their individual reputations, and to incur liabilities on the strength of the same reputations; then, if the enterprise

} Eighth Annual Report by the Board of Trade under sec. 29 of the Companies (Winding-up) Act. 2 Pall Mall Gazette, 7th Dec. 1899.