Page:Facts, failures and frauds- revelations, financial, mercantile, criminal.djvu/16

4 FACTS, TAILTJEES, A>'D FBAUDS. the received tests of respectability seemed to be of no avail, and people literally could not tell whom they might trust. The extensive delinquencies of J. Windle Cole and his associates, the speculative career and suicide of John Sadleir, the failure of Tipperary Bank, the explosion of the Royal British Bank, and the subsequent liquidation of the London and Eastern Banking Corporation, with the revelations of management, shook public confidence in every direction; and through the latter even the better class of joint-stock banks were regarded with a transient suspicion, through the misdealings of their misguided and dishonest competitors.

In the deliberate forgeries of Crystal Palace shares, as committed by Robson, seem to have occurred a second, and if possible more elaborate, edition of Watts's case. A clerk, with barely an income to support a respectable station, was seized with a desire to become a gentleman of fashion and fortune—a Mæcenas to whom artists might look up with reverence. Not content with the fame of a dramatist, he assisted managers in their theatrical speculations; his style of living was of a kind that upholsterers still speak of him with admiration for his taste and powers of arrangement. As a strong and severe contrast to Hobson, who by his specious frauds forced himself into the character of an elegant man of pleasure, stands Leopold Redpath, the fabricator of Great Northern shares, which provided him the means of assuming the position of the man of heavy respectability. Serious people might reconcile themselves to the fate of the gayer delinquent, and even enlarge on the consequences of worldly dissipation; but Redpath, the model of morality and charity—the adopter of children and the dispenser of wealth to deserving