Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 4.djvu/532

 S18 FEDERAL REFOBÏEK. �sions are not to be trusted, and that entriea were made to conceal, rather than to show, the actual transactions of the officers of the respective companies.- Under these circum- stances I am satisaed that it is safer for the ends of justice, and better for the rights of the creditors of the two bankrupt corporations, that I should allow matters to stand as I find them, than to transfer from one to the other so large a sum of money upon such unreliable evidence. �But whilst I have this difficulty in regard to the allowance of the claim as proved, there are facts exhibited whieh con- vince me that the carpet company is largely the debtor of the claimants. When it was put into bankruptcy the bank ■was the holder of two mortgages that it had received from the Company — one for a little less than $100,000, being a mortgage that one I. T. Eowand had given to the carpet company upon lands in Pennsylvania, to secure the payment of certain promissory notes that he had made on the pur- chase from the company of $1C0,000 worth of its capital stock, and which had been assigned to the bank as collateral security for the payment of the said Kowand's notes, which the bank had discounted for the company; and the other, a mortgage executed by the carpet company to the bank on its real estate, fixtures, and machinery in New Brunswick, in pursuance of a resolution of the board of directors passed September 2, 1873, and given to secure the payment of other notes which the bank had discounted for and was holding against the company. As both of these mortgages had been received by the bank within four months of the filing of the petition of bankruptcy against the debtor company, and were taken to secure antecedent debts, at a time when the creditors had reasonable cause to believe that the com- pany was insolvent, the authorities of the bank surrendered them to the assignee in bankruptcy, as they were advised they were required to do before they could prove their claim. Is not such action on the part of the managers of the carpet company a clear confession of indebtedness, at least to the amount of these mortgages, and does it not afford a safer ground to stand upon than any evidence of books of account, ����