CONFIDENCE IN BUSINESS MEN.
THE interest excited by the " Dimsdale Case" is easily to be accounted for. Prima facie it is a very ordinary case, an accusation against an attorney of raising money on imaginary securities, the most vulgar and common form of educated, or as it were scientific fraud ; but the position of the accused is so peculiar, that the affair may ultimately become a cause cdlebre. The theory of the Crown is that Mr. Frederick Dimsdale, a solicitor of good standing and in profitable practice, in combina- tion with his son and other persons used his professional repute-
tion to obtain money on certain leases and other documents of the like kind which were not genuine. We have no opinion, at this stage of the evidence, as to his guilt or innocence, and should not express any if we had ono, holding that the present punctiliousness of the Courts, overstrained as it is, is infinitely better than trial by newspaper ; but we are at liberty to say that the inquiry has excited quite unusual interest, and to discuss the reasons for it. The case excessively alarms the well-to-do. The proceedings are studied every day by persons with important balances and double chins, and the opinions they express at dinners, in railway trains, and in staid clubs where nothing worse than high whist is ever beard of, are of the most definite, not to say the most malignant description. Where, they ask, is all this to end ? Must we recommence the old system of hanging ? People can guard themselves against the needy, or against bad characters, or against unguaranteed persons, but if respectable solicitors can raise money on forged deeds, to what is the world coming? " Why"—and the voices drop into the farthest and most telephone-like tone of awe—" LAND itself will soon be no security ! " Title-deeds can be forged, just as well as leases, and bills of sale much more easily than bank-notes. There is actual and immediate reason, too, for this alarm, absurd as the expression of it may occasionally seem. The offence of which Messrs. Dimsdale are accused, whether truly or falsely, is the precise one which most threatens the rich, the one against which it is most difficult to guard, the abuse of confidence by persons who claim confidence not only on the ground of their characters, but on the ground that money gained by abuse of confidence would be of no particular value to them. The well-to-do are perfectly right. If it were conceivable that fairly prosperous firms, whether bankers, solicitors, or agents of any kind, could find it worth their while to use their reputable business as a basis on which to build up a criminal business, no one would be safe, commercial civilisation would be paralysed, and the whole working of European industry would be thrown out of gear. It is im- possible to get on without agents ; they must be trusted to a very large extent, and no alteration in the law could make them very much more honest. If a decently well-off man, fairly edu- euted and delighting in the amenities of life, with regular habits and easy-going temper, is not afraid of seven, ten, or fourteen years of slavery, under threat of the lash for neglecting painful or even dangerous tasks, to be performed in all weathers, on rough food, and in an irksome costume, there is no penalty which Christian men can inflict of which he will be afraid, and social organisation may as well be given up as a bad job. We might as well try to defend it against a popu- lation actuated by a passion for crime for crime's sake, or in an atmosphere which infected every one who entered it with moral lunacy. There can be no security for employers, except either the character or the interest of the employed, and if neither is sufficient security, there is simply no security to be had, and society is resolved into an association of men keeping what they can with the strong band. Union depends on confidence, and if there is none there can be no society either.
It is all true, and if the premises were correct, the alarm would be well founded ; but nevertheless, it is, as all men perceive, both exaggerated and unreal. There is no doubt whatever that rob- bery by confidential agents is the most dangerous of pecuniary crimes, and no doubt either that, in proportion to oppor- tunities, it is of all crimes the least common. The good folks who get so frightened when a banker defaults, or a solicitor absconds, or a broker commits suicide be- cause he cannot account for the money entrusted to him, forget or have never realised how entirely life is based upon a system of confidence, how utterly all men with means must re- main at the mercy of other people.. it is all very well to talk of police and laws and personal care, but every hour of every day business men of the most perfect keenness are trusting to securi- ties which are, in the first instance at all events, if character is set aside, altogether insecure. The marriage is impossible under which the wife who takes trouble about it, trouble like Wilkie Collins's heroine in " No Name," cannot ruin the husband. The partnership deed must be well drawn under which one partner cannot destroy another. The agency must be very limited which does not leave the principal at the agent's mercy. Look at the most ordinary trrnsaction of prosperous life, the payment of money into a banker's hands. You have sold an invest- ment—land, perhaps—and " pay it in" to your bankers, without thought of the risk you are incurring. There are ten £1,000 notes taken, because your solicitor advises you, " as a matter of business, and not out of suspicion," not to take a cheque ; and you hand them over the counter without a thought, except, perhaps, that you are glad they are so safely de- posited at last. What stops the clerk on £3 a week, about whom you know nothing, from putting them into his pocket, and swearing you only deposited one note ; or what stops the banker from taking them away with him in the evening, and losing them at roulette ? Very cautious and suspicious people trust whole fortunes to banks whose managers they do not know, and of whose actual positions in life, histories, and characters they are entirely ignorant. There is not a man in the City who does not every now and then give his solicitor, or his broker, or his man of business an opportunity of robbing him wholesale. There are very few who, as regards forgery, are not dependent upon the fidelity of relatives, friends, or busi- ness connections, and probably not one whom a combine-. tion of two or three persons could not strip bare. It is of no use grumbling, or calling for new laws, or suggesting ex- cessive precautions, for this liability is, like the liability to take cold from damp air, one of the ultimate conditions. You have to put up with your agents, as you have with your teeth. Mr. Giffen, in his recent book on the Stock Exchange, has a grim little cut at the folly of people who are always asking advice of City editors as to what is the perfectly secure investment. No such thing exists, or ever will exist while the world stands. There is and can be only comparative security, an investment which in the mature judg- ment of acute and experienced men is unlikely to be lost, and it is just the same with personal confidence. That bank is sound, that solicitor is honest, that broker is rich ; do what you will you must accept those beliefs on more or less imperfect evi- dence, and act as if you had got the evidence which would prove a mathematical proposition. Neither caution, nor experience, nor laws can help you in more than a degree, nor, except in a degree, can you help yourself. The most suspicious man no more keeps his property perfectly safe than the most confiding. It is more safe, but the difference between comparison and infinity is always infinite. The man who has land may have bolting tenants, or a leaky reservoir situated above his best water meadows. The man who has Consols may wake one morning to find Fenians in possession of the Bank. The man who has shares may read in the Times that an earthquake has swallowed the Safety Company's iron cellars. The Anglo-Indians tell a story of an officer who, fifty years ago—we believe the story is substantially true—felt all his life as an investor in mortgages will feel when he reads the prosecutors' theory in the Dimsdale case. He inherited a legacy of £10,000, and was sorely put to it to know where to keep his treasure. lie would not trust an Archbishop, and as to Treasuries, Banks, solicitors' offices, or money-dealers' chambers, they were swindles altogether, Gold could not be carried about, notes might be burnt, and no Anglo-Indian not resident on one spot will ever invest in land. It takes a regiment of police to get your rent, and you do not get it then. So ho bought a pearl or a diamond, we forgot which, with his £10,000, and had it welded into a steel-collar, which be wore round his throdt. The jewel was a good one, and when men talked of bonds the officer chuckled to himself and fidgetted at his collar. His property was perfectly safe for ten years, during which he lost half its value in interest ; and then one night he became delirious with ague, and a native dresser, removing the collar in kindness, saw the jewel, and the officer never recovered it again. His perfect security had cost him £500 a year for a third of his manhood, spent in order that the principal might totally disappear. The whole of the argu- ment based on a case like the Dimsdale story as related by some crusty, middle-aged person, with an obvious tendency about his waistcoat to heavy balances, amounts after all only to this,—that if everybody is corrupt money is never safe, and pecuniary civilisation must disappear, which unfortunately is exactly so. And moreover, there is no cure for it, except in men becoming better again ; and never will be any cure, let all the legislators, and lawyers, and policemen do everything that the highest intelligences can suggest in the way of extreme pre- caution. When every care is pushed to its logical extreme, you have to trust yourself, and you are possibly, as against yourself, the least trustworthy of them all. The conditions of civilisation are that some men can be trusted against their interest, and that all men can be trusted when it is their interest to be trust- worthy,—and if those conditions vanish, civilisation in pecuniary matters must vanish too.
We wonder whether there is in our time any ground for diminished confidence in professiOnal Agents ? People think there is, and point with a sort of triumph to this or that case as proof of professional degeneracy. And no doubt they are right upon one point, that the practice of winking at small trade swindles, such as secret commissions, has become much more general. But nevertheless, we rather doubt the main thesis. There is much greater publicity given to every case, and the scale of crime has frightfully increased, but our fathers were at least as often victimised as ourselves. One form of fraud which seems to have been nearly universal in the last century has been, if not suppressed, at least diminished in our time. Our grand- fathers were systematically ruined by their "men of business." There is not a family of consequence in the country which has not some tradition of immense losses inflicted by "agents," nor is there a district where the poor will not point to some pleasant estate, and tell you how the possessors stole it from its lawful owners. The old squires were an ignorant, drinking, thriftless race, and the attorneys and agents who found them cash recouped themselves by means which were in plain English frauds. Literature is full of this theme, and we could produce a hundred forgotten novels in which the career of the bad hero is identical with that of the " writer " immortalised in infamy by Scott, or of the attorney painted with such a sympathy of hate in that remark- able though unpopular tale which Defoe might have written, " The Goldsworthy Family." Crimes of violence rise and fall with circumstances and sentiments,but crimes of greed, we suspect, were never scarce, and wealth and population fairly allowed for, do not increase in number. Let any man who has money look round, and count up those he can trust.
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