LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE MARCONI CASE.
[To ms EDITOR OY TRY "SPROTATOR.”J
Sin,—In common, I feel sure, with many of your readers, I am rather at a loss to understand the reason of your vehement and reiterated attacks on the Attorney-Genera), the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Master of Elihank, in respect of their purchase of American Marconis. You evidently do not assert or even insinuate that these three men plotted to buy cheap and sell dear. What, then, is the charge brought against them ? Have they been guilty of conduct without precedent in the case of men occupying their positions ? Or is it that we are now inaugurating a new standard of official purity ? I think it would be better if Ministers neither bought nor sold any shares whatever during their term of office. Their bankers would take care of any monies they might wish to put aside meantime, and allow them as good interest, or within a fraction thereof, as gilt- edged securities would produce, so that the disability would mean little or nothing financially. So long, however, as Ministers are permitted by custom and precedent to buy and sell shares as to which their official positions give them no advantages, and the holding of which would not affect their judgment, it certainly appears strange that there should be so much said as to the purchase, sale, and re-purchase by Ministers of shares in a company which could not benefit financially, even indirectly, by any transaction which might be concluded with a British company working the same patent—.
[Cannot our correspondent distinguish between a true investment such as trustees make—investments we have again and again declared to be perfectly legitimate for all Ministers— and speculative Stock Exchange transactions (made in the case of two of the Ministers on borrowed money) of the kind in which the three Ministers were engaged ? In the City, clerks and the officials of companies are not allowed to carry out speculative transactions on borrowed money—see the evidence of Mr. Campbell before the Marconi Committee on Monday. Why, then, should a greater freedom be demanded for Ministers, the officials of the nation ? The hardship of a self-denying ordinance in regard to speculative transactions would be by no means great. The charge we have made, are making, and must continue to make, is that the Ministers who speculated in American Marconis were not acting with the delicacy and discretion we have a right to expect from Ministers. If "lustitia" thinks they were, we can only say that he has a very strange standard of public duty.—En. Spectator.]
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