I do not want the law to mollycoddle the fool and deprive him of the birthright of an Englishman to make a fool of himself in his own way, but I should like to see the law doing more to stamp out the knave, especially—O, yes, especially—when he is a respectable, pious, well-to-do knave clothed in broad cloth and a well-boiled shirt, tempting the working man to part with his savings in the name of thrift and the preparation for the rainy day.
What misery has been caused by well-advertised and wicked schemes of investment introduced to the working man by lying promises garnished with much prayer and psalm singing!
If a chartered accountant could make out a balance sheet of the losses of the working class from frauds connected with building societies, insurance schemes, house-purchase companies, and the like, from the days of the Liberator onwards, what a terrible indictment it would be of the way in which the law permits the rich knave to rob the poor fool! And yet how few of the promoters of these schemes arrive at their proper destination—the gaol.
We open our prison doors readily enough to the poor debtor, but the rich man who lives on the stolen savings of the poor finds it as difficult to enter the gates of the gaol in this world as he will to reach the wicket gate in the hereafter.
Many societies have been formed under the Limited Liability Companies Acts offering working men facilities for buying their own houses or obtaining old age pensions or future lodgings in some glorious castle of Spain. These have gathered in for years the savings of working men, and when the directors were called upon to redeem their promises it was found that the money had been spent in directors’ salaries and commissions, and there was no provision whatever for the policy-holders.
For as the law stands you may make nearly any wild promises you like, for that is not the contract. The contract is the long-worded, obscure policy which is sent to the workman later on. The gaudy booklet with its golden promises and pretty pictures of villas with bow windows which the poor man treasures up has nothing to do with the case.
Sentimental judges may try to find a way out; juries may give verdicts returning the poor man his money; but all to no purpose. The law stands firm for the solemn contract under the seal of the company, the policy which the poor man has never read and could not understand if he did; and the sleek directors chuckle at the angry working man, and with the blessing of the Court of Appeal remind him in Shylock’s own words:
Till thou canst rail the seal from off my bond,
Thou but offend’st thy lungs to speak so loud.
And certainly as the law stands it is necessary to have a Court of Appeal stern and unbending in judgment to uphold the sacred nature of the contract. The doubt in my somewhat sentimental mind is whether transactions of this character between knaves and fools are in any practical business sense really contracts at all; and if they are to be deemed to be contracts whether power should not be given to Courts of Justice to release the victims from the flat-traps in which they have been snared, and give them at least some of their fur back again.
This has been attempted with the moneylender, but not at present with very great success. For myself I have always thought that the moneylender, if he be a real moneylender and not merely a fee-snatcher, is by no means the worst setter of flat-traps. I have an uneasy feeling that if moneylenders were Nonconformists or Churchmen, instead of being Jews, we should love them better.