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LONDON LEGAL LETTER. LONDON, May 5, 1900.

THE legal and the lay world has been a good deal exercised during the past month by certain unpleasant disclosures of the financial condition of various well known and heretofore highly respected firms of solicitors. It is only a few weeks since the head of a firm in the very first rank of the profession committed suicide and his partners found themselves in the bankruptcy court with liabilities of over a million dollars and assets of a few thousand. Within the past few days another Lincolns Inn Field solic itor, whose word was popularly supposed to be as good as a Bank of England note, was sentenced to six months' hard labor for ob taining by false pretence the property of a client. It must be difficult for an American to realize how any firm of lawyers can fail for a million dollars, and yet there are probably three or four hundred firms of solicitors in London who have in their possession, or abso lute control and disposition, funds or securi ties or documents representing many times this amount. In England it is considered as necessary for a family to have its solicitor as in America it is for a man to have his doctor and his dentist. The firms of solicitors practically exist in perpetuity. When one of its members dies his son takes his place, or his personal representative sells his share in the business to a new partner. Thus the firm goes on for generations. In like man ner the client from father to son entrust their affairs to the family lawyers. They make the marriage settlements, take care of the title deeds to all property, find investments and change them as they like, and do every thing that a man not accustomed to affairs would like to be saved the bother of. From time to time the client, when he visits his solicitor's office sees among the rows of tin boxes ranged on shelves around the strong

room, one or more bearing his name, and he feels a satisfaction in knowing that therein are deposited his securities and title deeds and mortgages. If he should be asked to look into the box and examine its contents he would probably resent the suggestion as one involving too much trouble or, possibly, as casting an imputation upon the good old solicitors who have faithfully served him and his ancestors for generations. He therefore neglects to make such investigations as would render any defalcation impossible. In the case where the recent disclosures have been made the solicitors relied upon the faith re posed in them by their clients, speculated with the funds and securities in their hands, paying their too credulous clients the regular remittances of interest they had been in the habit of receiving, and then when the crash came some one of the members of the firm was made the scapegoat and nothing was left for him but suicide or a bolt to some re mote part of the globe. Now after an epi demic of such failures it is rumored that yet another great firm, with a large number of good families' affairs in its office, is in such straits that a scandal of greater proportions than its predecessors, sensational as some of them have been, is on the verge of disclosure. The subject is receiving the anxious at tention of the Incorporated Law Society, which disciplines and regulates the affairs of the solicitor branch of the legal profession. The president of the society has stated that these cases of dishonesty, which are so ob viously on the increase, " are calculated to produce a feeling of humility in the profes sion," and a committee has been appointed "to inquire into the best means of protecting the profession and the public from such mal practices as have been disclosed in recent cases." The committee will consist of twelve members among whom are Sir George Lewis, the Hon. Charles Russell (a son of the Lord