BANKRUPTS CLASSIFIED.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 1887, 13 April 1892, Page 3

BANKRUPTS CLASSIFIED.

The lessons in mercantile honesty read to debtors by his Honor Mr Justice Denniston are refreshing. They are calculated to purify the commercial atmosphere by making the law an efficient means of checking rascality. In days past it was a favourite theory with a certain class of traders that the Bankruptcy Court was a species of thermal bath, iv which the phr ge having been taken, a man could rapidly and easily doff his former skin, and emerge clean and white, aud ready for a fresh start. Mr Justice Denniston declines to accept this theory. His first postulate is, that the bankrupt who seeks his discharge must be able to prove that though he may have been foolish, or incapable, or incompetent, he has been honest. That is a safe rule to lay down,and we congratulate his Honour on insisting upon its observance. Men may be unfortunate. A hundred accidents may interfere with their plans. Their best laid schemes and most reasonable expectations may be upset by contingencies they could not or did not forsee ; but they may wifchal be truthful and honest in their dealings. The law will not, says Mr Justice Denniston, afford facilities for making a fresh start on a career of , dishonesty. Bankrupts may be roughly divided into three large classes — honest men, fools, and rogues. The first may be, as we have pointed out, the victims of misfortune, and the law should always deal with them tenderly. The second are usually gifted with an extreme sense of their own importance; they over-estimate their finaucial or other abilities, and blunder on until the inevitable crash takes place; they usually receive a measure of sympathy, and. sometimes gain experience which, prevents them repeating their folly. The last class regard the public as a body made to be plundered by some people of wit ; they live on the fat of the land while they can, and when the cordon begins to close round them they fly to the Court for relief. Mr Justice Denniston says they may, by filing their schedules, obtain shelter, but, like those ancients who went to the cities of refuge, they must stay inside. In other words, dishonest persons may, by bankruptcy, avoid imprisonment under tlie judgment summons provisions of the law, but they will not be allowed to renew their mercantile buccaneering. A good rule, we say, and one which we hope all the bankruptcy judges will striotly enforce,