While this subject was being agitated, some awkward cases arose to startle the mercantile world and depress the feeling of security so necessary to the perfect fruition of assurance. Several companies--founded by authority of the Joint-stock Registration Act--had arisen and fallen to the ground. One deed of settlement after another had been proved to be as worthless in effect as that of the West Middlesex. One series of promoters after another had published elaborate prospectuses, and failed to meet their liabilities. The directors of these had been from that class which supplied Quirk, Gammon, and Snap with their business, and the managers had arisen among those whose names had graced the bankrupt list, or been arraigned at the Old Bailey. The following will prove that the law, since 1845, any more than prior to it, has not been effective, and that it is as easy to establish fraudulent companies now as it was before the passing of the act. One director had been keeper of a gaming-house. Another, calling himself a knight, acted as travelling commission agent. A list of shareholders, which was published for the benefit of the public, proved that, though one was a holder of no less than 20,000 shares, the locality assigned to him was ignorant of his whereabouts. Two others had been bankrupt, another had been insolvent, others were clerks to the company, one declared his name had been forged, while another had been dead for many years. The institution had been enormously puffed, and the result was that many insurances were effected. But when it became known[28] that a proprietor of 2000 shares in the company was also a petitioner in the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, and that at the very time he was advertised as a proprietor of these shares he had hardly a coat to his back, the premiums became less. In this awkward position the claims for losses were met by credit notes at fifty-three days’ date, which of course were duly dishonoured, and, as a natural consequence, the company was heard of no more. The following will tend to satisfy the reader that no exaggeration has been used. “I have,” says Mr. Hartnoll, “from among the worst cases of assurance companies brought into existence under the facilities for forming such companies by the Registration Act, exhibited to you the history of one whose robberies amounted to 60,000_l._ I have dissected another of these companies, composed of a low set of vagabonds, whose signatures as shareholders were procured at a pot-house for pints of beer. I have given you the name of a third, whose secretary was brought, most wrongfully according to the verdict, to the bar of the Old Bailey, on a charge of conspiring to obtain money under false pretences; and of a fourth whose manager is a mendicant, and whose secretary is a fellow who ought to become one, in order to prevent his becoming something worse, I have from the middle class of these companies referred to