SOLICITORS' ACCOUNTS.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] 8112,—I read the article on this subject in your issue of December 22nd, 1906, with a considerable feeling of annoy- ance, and no little surprise. If the article had appeared in one of the " blood-and-thunder " halfpenny dailies that are thrust on us at every street-corner, it would have been a different matter; but one does not expect to find this sort of journalism in the Spectator. I hoped that some leader of the profession would have taken you to task ; but as no one has done so (except the writer of the letter which appeared in the next issue, with whose statement that money is hardly ever left with a solicitor for any length of time before the com- pletion of a purchase or mortgage I quite agree, but whose experience with regard to the mode of completing purchases and mortgages, I respectfully submit, must be almost unique), I enter this my protest, and at the same time ask you, with that fairness for which, to do you justice, the Spectator• has long been conspicuous, to investigate the question a little further, and let us have the benefit of your more mature opinion.
I think you will find that the statement that it is the common practice for solicitors to speculate with the aggregate floating balance made up of the balances due to individual clients (which statement was the foundation of your article) is as baseless as it is cruel. To use any part of such floating balance for his own purposes would (by virtue of the Larceny Act, 1901, which was passed at the instance of the Law Society) render the solicitor doing so liable to a criminal prosecution, and I leave you and your readers to judge whether (apart from higher motives, which, perhaps, solicitors are not expected to possess) any reputable solicitor—and there are still many—would place himself in that position.
I may add that I am strongly in favour of the appointment of the proposed Committee of the Law Society to consider again the question of solicitors' accounts, and I urge all solicitors who can do so to vote in favour of the resolution now before the Society,—not because I think that much good can be done by framing rules of conduct for the profession, but because I think it in the highest degree desirable that the question should be thoroughly threshed out. Solicitors, as a body, are not indifferent to the instances that have occurred where misplaced confidence has been abused, but they know that these cases are as nothing when compared with the enormous aggregate of well-earned confidence and merited trust reposed in them, and they should remember that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by the fullest consideration of the subject.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A MEMBEE OF THE LAW SOCIETY.
[We are astonished that our correspondent should have imagined from our article that we desired to throw doubts upon an honourable and honoured profession. In that article we insisted that defaulting solicitors constituted a " minute proportion of the whole body," and spoke of the fraudulent lawyer as "the exceptional and abnormal solicitor." In a word, the whole gist of the article was to provide a safeguard against the very few black sheep in a very large flock. To speak as our correspondent does of reputable solicitors being "still many" seems to us to minimise the position very unfairly. It would be unjust, in our opinion, not to say that the vast majority of solicitors are, and always have been, reputable men. We do not require to investigate the question any further to arrive at the conclusion which we stated, that it is only the abnormal and exceptional solicitor who speculates with his clients' money. With the latter part of our correspondent's letter we are in entire agreement.—En. Spectator.]
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