The time for prating of the purity of our public life, and for thanking the Divinity that in financial as in other matters we are not as other men, has gone by. When disasters like that of the Liberator group are possible, when examples of financial unsoundness are matters of everyday occurrence, when the very name of ‘trust company Opens up visions of incapacity, deceit, and fraud, it is quite certain that things are pripe for stringent inquiry and reform. Of course the cleansing of the Augean stable of finance 1n this country will prove a Herculean labour but al though ‘callous Governments and legislators may postpone and shirk it, the task remains before them, ever threatening, ever calling for attention, and each day’s delay in dealing with it only adds to the evil. We are overrun with rotten limited liability companies, flooded with swindling ‘bucket-shops,’ crashes and collapses rain upon us, and the ‘promoter’ and the guinea-pig still and ever enjoy impunity. It is becoming more and more impossible to burke the issue. It stares us in the face. Even if the various measures of political and social reform, about which we have heard so much of recent years, should yield all that their partisans declare they will, it is doubtful whether there would be much national improvement. For the rottenness of our social system must still remain the same; the fabric must still repose upon as unsound a basis as it does now if the brigands of Finance remain free to plunder the community and to pave their way to ephemeral wealth and splendour with the bodies of the thrifty and the credulous
