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It is a remarkable fact that there were just TWO THOUSAND bankrupts this year; supposing the Lord Chancellor's fees to amount only to the moderate average of twenty pounds upon each bankruptcy, he must have cleared that year FORTY THOUSAND POUNDS from bankrupts; which money must have come out of the pockets of the poor creditors.
Those who wish to hear something of estates, as well as of weddings, should be told that about the same time Ormond received letters from Marcus O'Shane, and from M. de Connal; Marcus informing him that the estate of Castle Hermitage was to be sold by the commissioners of bankrupts, and beseeching him to bid for it, that it might not be sold under value.
Paris, teeming, beneath a very courtly exterior, with mordant words, in unabashed criticism of all real or suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the "Triumphant Beast," the "installation of the ass," shining even there amid the university folk, those intellectual bankrupts of the Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them, however gravely, a worthless "parchment and paper" currency.
One hears of such because they are in their way memorable; and one does not hear of the poor wretches who sink down out of the world back behind counters, and to menial work in warehouses. Of ordinary bankrupts one hears nothing. They are generally men who, having saved a little with long patience, embark it all and lose it with rapid impotence.
It cannot, therefore, be suggested, without manifest injustice, that I would with one breath prompt creditors to be easy to rogues, and to cheating fraudulent bankrupts, and with another make a proposal to have them hanged.
There were certain old bachelors, among whom were two or three decayed branches of good Boston families, spendthrifts, or invalided bankrupts. Mr. Evans was practically among the single gentlemen, for his wife never appeared in the parlour or dining-room, and was seen only when she went in or out, heavily veiled, for a walk.
He joined with two men who spent his property, and after some time they became bankrupts, so that there was not money enough to pay the workmen and some other creditors, even after all their goods had been sold. This evening brother Knabe asked me what he ought to do about the money which had been left unpaid three and twenty years; whether he was still under an obligation to pay it, if he could.
When you consider the enormous debt of above an hundred millions, the intolerable load of taxes and impositions under which we groan, and the manner in which that burden is yearly accumulating, to support two German electorates, without our receiving anything in return, but the shows of triumph and shadows of conquest; I say, when you reflect on these circumstances, and at the same time behold our cities filled with bankrupts, and our country with beggars, can you be so infatuated as to deny that the ministry is mad, or worse than mad our wealth exhausted, our people miserable, our credit blasted, and our state on the brink of perdition?
Contrast with these the arbiters of their lives and deaths, the potentates of the same quarter who issue the warrants of arrest against them, who pen them in to speculate on them, and who revel at their expense and before their eyes: these consist of the members of the revolutionary committee of the Croix-Rouge, the eighteen convicted rogues and debauchees previously described, ex-cab-drivers, porters, cobblers, street-messengers, stevedores, bankrupts, counterfeiters, former or future jail-birds, all clients of the police or alms-house riff-raff.
Cesare's contempt for the Orsini and the rest of the shifty men who formed that confederacy that "diet of bankrupts," as he had termed it was expressed plainly enough to Macchiavelli. "To-day," said he, "Messer Paolo is to visit me, and to-morrow there will be the cardinal; and thus they think to befool me, at their pleasure. But I, on my side, am only dallying with them.
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