Without making too much of my own small experience, it bears out my theoretical expectation, and I am satisfied that a conciliatory court for trade disputes is a live business proposition, calculated to save employers much unnecessary woe, and that if Jeremiah had thought of it, he would have proposed to set one up as a practical step towards the living wage.
Until, then, we have established a living wage for the worker, the question of his bankruptcy is in a large measure academic. At present bankruptcy, like divorce, is rightly regarded as a luxury for the well-to-do. I know that to some minds the word “bankruptcy” connotes poverty, but if you look into the facts and history of the matter, you will find that, though bankruptcy may on occasion lead to poverty, a poor man never does, or can, become a bankrupt.
People fail to the tune of five or six million pounds a year, but when you analyse the list of the insolvent you will not find many poor folk among them. There are lords and gentlemen, solicitors and stockbrokers, merchants and manufacturers, builders and farmers, and butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers.
But the nearest you will find to poor people are lodging-house keepers and coffee-house and fried fish shop proprietors. These are precarious trades, and the working man, being a good sportsman, likes to have a gamble in them with his savings. In this way he joins the aristocracy, and becomes an eligible bankrupt. But the labourer and artisan, the real working men, have no more chance of bankruptcy than they have of election to the Athenæum or the Carlton.
Bankruptcy is a legal status jealously guarded by the caste to which it belongs. The poor man reads in the paper of builders and merchants failing for their thousands, of well-paid accountants carefully investigating the history of their financial fall; he puts his head into the Registrar’s Court and hears an amiable official receiver sympathetically tracing the career of the well-groomed bankrupt in front of him; he sees the judge present the unhappy fellow with a clean slate, from which all his debts are wiped away, and hears him announce to the unfortunate insolvent the date upon which the law will allow him to start becoming insolvent again.
And the working man thinks to himself of the twenty or thirty pounds that he owes, and how pleasant it would be if an accountant would add it up and a judge tell him that he need not worry any more about it; but when he begins to inquire further into the subject he finds that bankruptcy is one of the good things of this world that he cannot afford.
Bankruptcy, successful bankruptcy, is not so easy of achievement as you might think. It is not everyone who knows how to become a bankrupt. There are a lot of big, expensive law books written on this subject by clever fellows who spend their lives soothing the bankrupt’s last hours and winding him up according to law and order, with costs out of the estate, but you need not study these to learn how to become a bankrupt. Most bankrupts are pig-headed fellows, and achieve bankruptcy in their own foolish amateur way. They read the books about it afterwards.
To begin with, you certainly want money, or at least an overdraft and plenty of credit. Intending bankrupts generally wear very good clothes; especially are they particular about the shine of their silk hat. Bankers and intelligent business men have, in all ages, given credit to top hats, white waistcoats, and gold watch chains. The poor man has none of these, and therefore cannot obtain that overdraft which is one of the first essentials of bankruptcy.
The bankrupt has a curious affection for jewellery. He buys large quantities of this commodity, and sells it again at a loss to stave off the evil day and add to his deficiency. I read in the Board of Trade reports of a failure due to gambling and extravagance, in which the debtor purchased jewellery for £40,000 and sold it the same day for £10,000. If he had been a poor man I think maybe the police would have tried to find a law to give him a rest cure for a few months in one of His Majesty’s gaols, but he failed for over £70,000, and the probable value of his assets was £175.
Perhaps he was a bit of an aristocrat. Anyhow the police left him alone. I cannot even tell you his name, for the kind Inspector-General in Bankruptcy, fearful of causing pain to the sorrowing, never tells you the names and addresses of the people whose history he writes. He speaks of him as “No. 1512 of 1911.” The poor fellow had no occupation, his cruel father only allowed him a miserable thousand a year, so what could No. 1512 do but run into debt? The wonder is that he failed for so little as £70,000.