Though a man who speculates with other people’s money is not chargeable with direct robbery, he is chargeable with robbery one degree removed: he deliberately stakes his neighbour’s property, intending to appropriate the gain, if any, and to let his neighbour suffer the loss, if any: his crime is that of contingent robbery. And hence any one who, standing like a bank-director in the position of trustee, puts the money with which he is entrusted into a speculator’s hands, must be called an accessory to contingent robbery. If so grave a condemnation is to be passed on those who lend trust-money to speculators, as well as on the speculators who borrow it, what shall we say of the still more delinquent class who obtain loans by fraud—who not only pawn other men’s property when obtained, but obtain it under false pretences? For how else than thus must we describe the doings of those who raise money by accommodation-bills? When A and B agree, the one to draw and the other to accept a bill of £1000 for “value received;” while in truth there has been no sale of goods between them, or no value received; the transaction is not simply an embodied lie, but it becomes thereafter a living and active lie. Whoever discounts the bill, does so in the {134} belief that B, having become possessed of £1000 worth of goods, will, when the bill falls due, have either the £1000 worth of goods or some equivalent, with which to meet it. Did he know that there were no such goods in the hands of either A or B, and no other property available for liquidating the bill, he would not discount it—he would not lend money to a man of straw without security. Had A taken to the bank a forged mortgage-deed, and obtained a loan upon it, he would not have committed a greater wrong. Practically, an accommodation-bill is a forgery. It is an error to suppose that forgery is limited to the production of documents that are _physically_ false—that contain signatures or other symbols which are not what they appear to be: forgery, properly understood, equally includes the production of documents that are _morally_ false. What constitutes the crime committed in forging a bank-note? Not the mere mechanical imitation. This is but a means to the end; and, taken alone, is no crime at all. The crime consists in deluding others into the acceptance of what seems to be a representative of so much money, but which actually represents nothing. It matters not whether the delusion is effected by copying the forms of the letters and figures, as in a forged bank-note, or by copying the form of expression, as in an accommodation-bill. In either case a semblance of value is given to that which has no value; and it is in giving this false appearance of value that the crime consists. It is true that generally, the acceptor of an accommodation-bill hopes to be able to meet it when due. But if those who think this exonerates him, will remember the many cases in