nge dealings and speculations in the
loans which no Minister should have sanctioned. He was a party to the
purchase of the mahogany cargoes, and permitted the public to be misled
by the announcements in relation to them. By express contract he
authorized the 'additional drawings.' He assisted Mr. L---- to
appropriate to himself large sums out of the proceeds of the loans to
which he was not entitled." Very likely he had not a notion as to what
the whole thing meant, and only thought that he was doing his best to
finance his country along the road to wealth. But the fact remains that
by these actions he made his Government a party to the proceedings that
were so unfortunate for it and so ruinous to the holders of its bonds.

After its examination of these and other less sensational but equally
disastrous issues the Committee made various recommendations, chiefly in
the direction of greater publicity in prospectuses, and ended by
expressing their conviction that "the best security against the
recurrence of such evils as they have above described will be found,
not so much in legislative enactments, as in the enlightenment of the
public as to their real nature and origin."

If the scandals and losses involved by loan issues were always on this
Gargantuan scale, there would be little difficulty about disposing of
them, both on economic and moral grounds, and showing that there is, and
can be, only one side to the problem. But when it is only a question,
not of fraud on a great scale but of a certain amount of underhand
business, such as is quite usual in some latitudes, and a certain amount
of doubt as to the use that is likely to be made by the borrower of the
money placed at its disposal, it is not so easy to feel sure about the
duty of an issuing house in handling foreign loans. At a point, in fact,
the question becomes full of subtleties and casuistical difficulties.

For instance, let us suppose that an emissary of the Republic of
Barataria approaches a London issuing house and intimates that it wants
a loan for 3 millions sterling, to be spent half in increasing the
Republic's navy, and half in covering a deficit in its Budget, and that
he, the said emissary, has full power to treat for the loan, and that a
commission of 2 per cent. is to be paid to him by the issuing house,
which can have the loan at a price that will easily enable it to pay
this commission. That is to say, we will suppose that the Republic will
ta