Page:Facts, failures and frauds- revelations, financial, mercantile, criminal.djvu/17

FACTS, FAILURES, AOT) THAUDS. 9 institutions—was a blot discovered where it was least expected, and, as might be anticipated, occasioned proportional surprise.

The Englishman may find a melancholy consolation in the reflection that the complicated tale of imprudence and its results, of crime and its punishment, is not confined to his own country. America has her corresponding infamies in the shape of the Schuyler delinquencies, and the lengthened chain of fraud and dishonesty reaches as far as remote California, with the notorious defaulter Meiggs, and the Antipodes, where the system of false letters of credit has again been brought into vogue.

In this prefatory chapter it is intended merely to indicate the cases of guilt that, in the course of this work, will be attempted to be described in detail. The closeness with which one crime follows upon another, and the similarity of motive that lies at the bottom of them all, will sufficiently show that they do not represent the simple perverseness of individual natures, but are so many indices of a depreciated, and apparently bad, moral atmosphere that has of late pervaded the whole of the commercial world. The fact stands self-evident that the ruling passion is the grand desire to make money expeditiously, for the purpose of gratifying luxurious propensities, or of indulging in an imposing ostentation. The artificial necessity for expenditure comes first, and the beginning of financial crime is the attempt to make an appearance which the legitimate resources of the adventurer in the game of fortune will not justify. Other resources must, therefore, be found, and thus fraud, forgery, and misappropriation are called into existence, with all their frightful and heavy legal responsibilities. Indeed, unless the extravagant and pretentious habits of the age are brought within more restrained limits, the volume now presented to the public, full aa it is of the painful records of dishonesty, will be only as a single page in a vast and ever increasing history of the decline and fall of mercantile morality throughout the civilized world.