“The Westminster plan is full of unnecessary repetition. It is deficient in those real general accounts which concentrate the information most needed by the Commissioners, and it contains fictions which are very inconsistent with any sound system of book-keeping.
“The ledger of the Westminster Commission does not give a true account of the actual receipt and expenditure of each district.
“The Holborn and Finsbury books are still more defective than those of the Westminster Commission.... There are the same kind of fictions.... But the extraordinary defect in these books consists in the utter want of system throughout them, by keeping one-sided accounts only in the ledger, with respect to the different sewers in each district, showing only the amount expended on each.
“The Tower Hamlets books have been kept on a regular system, though by no means one conveying much general information.”
“With respect to the Surrey and Kent accounts,” says Mr. Grey, “the books produced are the most incomplete and unsatisfactory that ever came under my observation. The ledger is always thought to be a sine quâ non in book-keeping; but here it has been dispensed with altogether, for that which is so marked is no ledger at all.”
Under these circumstances, the Report continues, “It cannot be wondered at that debts should have been incurred, or that they should have swollen to the amount of 54,000l., carrying a yearly interest of 2360l., besides annuities granted to the amount of 1125l. a year.
“The Poplar and Greenwich accounts (I quote the official Report), confined as they are to mere cash books, offer no subjects for remark....
“No books of account have been produced with respect to the St. Katherine’s Commission.”
On the 16th December, 1847, the new Commissioners ordered all the books to be sent to the office in Greek-street; but it was not until the 21st February, 1848, that all the minute-books were produced. There were no indexes for many years even to the proceedings of the Courts; and the account-books of one of the local Courts, if they might be so called, were in such a state that the book called “ledger” had for several years been cast up in pencil only.
This refers to what may be characterised, with more or less propriety, as mismanagement or neglect; though in such mismanagement it is hardly possible to escape one inference. I now come to what are direct imputations of Jobbery, and where that is flourishing or easy, no system can be other than vicious.