The Public Trust Office.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18242, 28 November 1924, Page 8

The Public Trust Office.

In the Building section of yesterday's ('Press" wo printed a description of tho very handsomo building which has been erected by the Public Trust Office for its own uso. That it is an'admirable addition to the architecture of tho city will be generally admitted, and we may bo thankful that the "bricks and "mortar" into which the Public Trustee puts part of his profits are everywhere very well done. Until lately the average citizen, whenever his attention has been called to the goodlooking building in which the District Public Trustee in his town does his business, has probably praised the good lastc of the Office and felt that it must be doing very well when it can spend so much money on tho accommodation it roquiros. Since wo have begun, however, to throw some light upon the methods by which the Office has grown in size ami in wealth, these handsome buildings take on another aspect. They represent the toll which the Public Trust Office has levied upon the estates and moneys entrusted to its care—profits, in fact, made by methods which it was certainly not imagined by the founders of tho Office that the Trustee would ever employ. The Office was established with the object of giving absolutely perfect security, instead of almost perfect security, to those who wished to commit their estates to trustee management. Originally the Public Trustee was as strongly bound by the law relating to the administration of trusts as private trustees are to-day, but the Legislature has gradually relieved the Trustee of almost every obligation of this kind, and has armed him with powers which enable him to carry on the business of banking, to make unfair profits out of the estates of beneficiaries and out of public funds left iu his custody, to compete unfairly with legal firms and trustee companies, and, generally, to build up a business utterly unlike that for which tho Oilice was designed. The ijltimatc test of the policy and methods of the Trustee is the public interest. In xiU our own criticisms, and those of I'a'thcr Bowling and "Jurist"

and of the various correspondents who have written letters to "The Press" and other journals, there is not a word which can be construed to mean that the maintenance of a Public Trust Office which shall conform to sound principles is contrary to public interest. But the public interest is not served by those lines of policy by following which the Trustee is able to spend large sums in erecting handsome buildings to house the enormous staff and machinery of his business. It is not in the public interest that the Public Trustee is engaged in banking business, or that he levies an unreasonably high toll on the ill-in-formed beneficiaries of the private estates in his hand, or that he levies toll upon the general taxpayer in the form of an unreasonably large abstraction, for Office purposes, from the earnings of the public moneys committed to his charge. The purpose of the Office has now definitely become nothing more nor less than its own aggrandisement, and it is time that tho public realised this.