We have heard lately of instances
of certain joint-stock institutions with very great capital collapsing
suddenly, bringing disgrace upon their managers and ruin upon hundreds
of families. A great deal of that has arisen, not so much from
intentional fraud, as from the fact that weak and incapable men have
found themselves tumbling about in an ocean of bank-notes and gold,
and they appear to have lost all sight of where it came from, to whom
it belonged, and whether it was possible by any maladministration
ever to come to an end of it. That is absolutely what is done by
Governments. You have read in the papers lately some accounts of the
proceedings before a Commission appointed to inquire into alleged
maladministration with reference to the supply of clothing to the
army, but if anybody had said anything in the time of the late
Government about any such maladministration, there is not one of those
great statesmen, of whom we are told we ought always to speak with so
much reverence, who would not have got up and declared that nothing
could be more admirable than the system of book-keeping at Weedon,
nothing more economical than the manner in which the War Department
spent the money provided by public taxation. But we know that it is
not so. I have heard a gentleman--one who is as competent as any man
in England to give an opinion about it--a man of business, and not
surpassed by any one as a man of business, declare, after a long
examination of the details of the question, that he would undertake to
do everything that is done not only for the defence of the country,
but for many other things which are done by your navy, and which are
not necessary for that purpose, for half the annual cost that is voted
in the estimates!
I think the expenditure of these vast sums, and especially of those
which we spend for military purposes, leads us to adopt a defiant and
insolent tone towards foreign countries.
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