The accuracy of the accounts in some of the daily
papers respecting the frauds in the Customs has been called in question: Mr. Hastings has denied his participation; a brother of Mr. Rolls has put forth a similar protest ; and a newspaper has asserted the loss to the revenue to be nearer 50,0001. than 500,000/. The correspondent of the papers who furnished the accounts insists on his general and substantial correctness; but admits that where so much has been kept secret, errors of detail are unavoidable. He allows that Mr. Rolls was virtually exonerated; his fault being that he was cognizant of some frauds, but was restrained by a kindly feeling from giving information. In a second letter, Mr. Rolls himself says, "I am not charged with having been, nor have I been, cognizant of any fraud."
The former writer, however, continues his statements, and puts forth the following, as another" startling fact "—
" Within forty-eight hours of the period this article was written, and directly under the nose of the officials, an attempt has been made to defraud the revenue of from 300/. or may be 6001. A case marked V. M., brought by the Emerald steamer from Boulogne, consiqned to a party named Malhet, was entered by Mr. Sylvester, of 65, Lower Thames Street, to be landed at a legal quay, by sight ' entry. The case remained in the warehouse until yesterday afternoon. It was then lowered from the silk-floor loop-hole into the cart of a carman named Robinson. A labouring man named May, who had been formerly employed at the legal quay by Mr. Wilson, the late Customhouse-clerk of Messrs. W. and D. Cordingly, was compelled by his necessities to ask pecuniary assistancefrom his late employers : being refused, he declared he would take an opportunity of revenging himself, and this opportunity arose yesterday. In his capacity of a jobbing-labourer, he observed the delivery of the case; and suspicious being excited by a tarpauling being thrown over it, he determined upon following the cart. The carman observing this became confused ; when May, to establmh the fact that something wrong was on the tapis, called in the assistance of the Police; and the cart, with its contents, was placed under surveillance, and taken to the Bishopsgste station, being in the vicinity of theExcise Office. Information was given to the Excise-officers; and the carman then admitted that his directions were to carry the case to Mr. Wilson, Grocer's Hall Court, poultry. The instruction was, in the event of the package being delivered at the warehouse of Mr. Wilson, to have returned by the carman a' quaker,' alias dummy,' (already prepared, and since seized with the goods,) to the silk-floor of Nicholson's bonded warehouse; where an examination would have been made, and the sight' perfected." In a letter to the Morning Chronicle, Mr. Sylvester begs it to be stated that he only acted as agent.
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