A WISE DECISION.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 380, 21 November 1889, Page 2

A WISE DECISION.

We are glad to see that the creditors in the bankrupt J. R. Scott’s estate take a higher stand than was anticipated at former meetings, and show themselves somewhat beyond the sordid motives which the bankrupt, measuring the feelings which would actuate his creditors by a very low standard, seemed to expect. They contemptuously rejected his offer, by a large majority, and they treated the. threat of withdrawal of that offer, unless immediately accepted, with the scorn it deserved.

Quite alive, as indeed every creditor now must be, to the value of money, they yet decided, wisely and well, that there was a something higher and better, and they have by their action shown the public that a debtor must behave with something like a show of common honesty in the conduct of his business, and his relations to his creditors, to obtain so large a mark of favor as the annulment of a bankruptcy, or even the discharge of the bankrupt, The circumstances attending a bankruptcy must be beyond suspicion to induce and justify thq creditors in treating the bankrupt in such an exceptionally favorable manner, and the conduct of the bankrupt himself must be indisputably honest.

If he be suspected of anything like recklessness, or extravagance, or waste, or concealment of his property, or of withholding from his creditors property which in common honesty he should Have yielded qp tq them, then he cannot expect their favorable consideration. In the present instance we are surprised at the impudence and miscalculating effrontery of the debtor ; and we are well pleased for the commercial morality of the place, that his creditors were not the men to be taken in, or misled, by it. It augurs well for creditors when they take such a stand, and shpw debtors that it is not quite possible to live on their creditors for years, counterfeiting as a man of means', bud a somebody, and then turning out to be a mere man of straw, offering to pay at first —nothing, and then a shilling or so in the pouqd, with al! the airs and bounce of twenty. What a mercy it is that debtors cannot do exactly as they please with their creditors, or how would the latter fare? Fortunately in this case the creditors were able to take care of themselves, as well as tq establish a good precedent in future doubtful bankruptcies.