No. 614 of 1907 was not much of a record, but he will do as another example. He, too, had no occupation except qualifying for a bankrupt and ultimately failed for £21,292 with assets nil. He started his wild career at the age of nineteen with expectations of a fortune when he got to the age of twenty-five. With that charming simplicity and cunning, characteristic of the whelps of the vulgar rich, he proceeded to moneylenders, and at the date of the receiving order had created charges exceeding £430,000 on his reversion of such complexity that every mortgagee disputed the right of every prior encumbrancer. This would not matter so much, as all these victims were doubtless moneylenders and a lot of the money would go to estimable lawyers to smooth out the wrinkled parchment muddle, but then at the back of all those were the unsecured creditors, poor tradesmen and others. They were to get nothing.
No. 1103 of 1908 was an even smaller fellow. This debtor was educated at Oxford and, on leaving the university in 1901, he was in debt to the extent of £4,500. I have a passion for statistics, and I should like to see a balance sheet showing on one side the expenses of the four thousand Oxford undergraduates during three years of residence, and on the other side the earnings of the same four thousand undergraduates for a similar period in, say, fifteen or twenty years afterwards. I fear it would not be much of an advertisement for Oxford. No. 1103’s father paid up his creditors to the extent at least of fifteen shillings in the pound, and gave him a fresh start. He was in trouble again in 1906, through betting and extravagance, and failed for £20,392—assets £1,103.
The French have an excellent system of declaring these youngsters to be prodigals and putting them under a committee as we do lunatics with property, and no doubt in money matters they are akin to the insane, and are really to be pitied and cared for. But to the poor it must be strange to see debt and the disaster of debt causing such different results in law to different classes of people, and it must be hard for them to understand why they, too, are not fit subjects for the blessings of bankruptcy rather than gaol.
And what am I to say to my friend Joseph the signalman, at twenty-nine shillings a week, when he shows me some of these spicy stories of the Inspector-General’s report cut out of the local paper.
“What has it all got to do with you, Joseph?”
“Well,” he says, “I’ve been thinking why should not I do a bit of a failure like No. 1512 of 1911? I can buy a gramophone and a watch, and a few lucky wedding rings and a family Bible, and a plush drawing-room suite on the instalment system, and I can borrow a pound or two on a promissory note. Of course betting and beer cannot be done on the nod in my class of life, but one can owe a bit of rent, and altogether I see my way to do a failure up to, say, thirty pounds. Why shouldn’t I go bankrupt?”
“Well, the answer is very simple,” I have to tell him. “The rules of the game are made by the rich for the rich, and not for you, Joseph, at all. Oh, dear, no! In the first place you must have a debt of fifty pounds.”
“Well,” replies Joseph, “I think I could bring it as high as that if I tried.”
“And next you must have a creditor to make you bankrupt, and unless he thinks there is some stuffing in you or wool on your back a creditor is not going to waste his time and money making the likes of you bankrupt.”
“But,” says my hopeful friend Joseph, “what is the meaning of a chap filing his own petition? I’ve often read of that. Why shouldn’t I file my petition?”