John's. The trust company took up their accounts, paid the losses of the
luckless pair, and, owing to a rise in prices which came too late to
benefit the latter, escaped with the comparatively trifling loss of a
little over one hundred thousand dollars. At once every banking house
and trust company upon the Street looked to its system of checks upon
the honesty of its employees, and took precautions which should have
been taken long before. The story was a nine days' wonder. Then Union
Pacific dropped twenty points more, the tide of finance closed over the
heads of John and Prescott, and they were forgotten.

Had the company, instead of putting itself at the mercy of a
thirty-five-dollar-a-week clerk, placed double combinations on the loan
and deposit vaults, and employed two men, one to act as a check upon the
other, to handle its securities, or had it merely adopted the even
simpler expedient of requiring an officer of the company to be present
when any securities were to be removed from the vaults, John would
probably not now be in jail. It would seem that it would not be a
difficult or complicated matter to employ a doorkeeper, who did not have
access himself, to stand at the door of the vault and check off all
securities removed therefrom or returned thereto. An officer of the bank
should personally see that the loans earned up to the cage in the
morning were properly returned to the vaults at night and secured with a
time lock. Such a precaution would not cost the Stockholders a tenth of
one per cent. in dividends.

It is a trite saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure. But this is as true, in the case of financial institutions at
least, from the point of view of the employe as of the company. It is an
ingenious expedient to insure one's self with a "fidelity corporation"
against the possible defalcations of one's servants, and doubtless
certain risks can only be covered in some such fashion. These methods
are eminently proper so far as they go, but they, unfortunately, do not
serve the public purpose of protecting the weak from undue and
unnecessary temptation. Banks and trust companies are prone to rely on
the fact that most peculations are easily detected and severely
punished, but the public interest demands that all business, State,
municipal and private, should be so conducted that dishonesty may not
only be punished, but prevented.

A builder who "took a chance" on the strength of a g