,The following particulars, showing the amount of solicitors' and messengers' bills of costs up to the time of the choice of assignees in the first twenty commissions and fiats removed into the district courts, and of the first twenty registered in the said courts, are taken from a parliamen tary paper (5, Seas. 1844) Solicitors' Messengers' Bills. Bills. Total.
Birmingham : Fiats transferred 56 10 66 New fiats . 36 18 54 Manchester : Fiats transferred 81 New fiats . 38 15 53 Liverpool : Fiats transferred 54 ..
New fiats . 28 12 40 Leeds : Fiats transferred .. 72 New fiats 70 Bristol : Fiats transferred .. 79 New fiats . 41 Newcastle : Fiats transferred .. .. 85 New fiats .
Exeter : Fiats transferred .. .. 98 New fiats . .. 65 The average costs under twenty fiats removed into the Court of Bankruptcy in London were as follows :—solicitors' costs 761.; messengers' 141. , And the costs ander twenty new fiats registered in the same court, after the passing of 5 & 6 Viet. c. 122, against bankrupts residing above forty miles from London, to which distance the London circuit extended, were :—solicitors' costs 441.; messengers' lot. 19s.: the totals being respectively 80/. and 551.
In the session of 1844 several petitions were presented to Parliament respecting the effect of the recent changes in the administration of the bankrupt law. The petitioners complained of the loss of time and expense occasioned by attending the district courts, the distance being sometimes eighty miles from the place where the bankrupt and the creditors lived. They also alleged that the official assignees of the district court were dis qualified by want of local knowledge from managing the bankrupt's estate and effects to the best advantage: and that as dividends can only be paid by application to the district court in per son, or by means of an endorsed war rant through an agent, creditors are involved in an expense which was not incurred under the previous adminis tration of the bankrupt law. The bank rupts themselves are also obliged to attend the district court, and to take frequent journeys thereto at the expense of the estate. The deputy-registrars of the Leeds District Court append a note to the return given above, in which they state that, "with a view to avoid the heavy charges of the petitioning creditor, solicitor, and others travelling a distance of from forty to seventy miles, and for their loss of time, the commissioners have determined to receive the proofs of the petitioning creditor's debt, &c., upon depositions made out of court, have called upon the solicitors to work the fiat through their agents at Leeds, and have directed the messengers, instead of themselves travelling to seize the effects of the bankrupts, to employ deputies in the nearest town." But most of these
objections have been removed by the new act ; and the prospective reduction in the number of Commissioners and Registrars, with other improvements, are likely to augment both the efficiency and the economy of the bankruptcy admin. stration.
The number of bankruptcies gazette! in England and Wales in 1842 was 1273, and 1112 in 1843. Of this number 321 were in the metropolis, 116 in Lan cashire, and 108 in the West-Riding of Yorkshire.
Scotland the term bank ruptcy is applied, not to the process by which an insolvent trader's avail able funds are collected and distributed among his creditors, but to the act of subjecting persons of any class to certain ordeals which publish to the world their inability to meet the demands against them. A person who is "notour bank rupt" in Scotland, bears a generic analogy to a person who has committed an act of bankruptcy in England, with this leading difference, that it is not a necessary cha racteristic of the former that he must come within the class of persons whose estates may be distributed by the process of commercial bankruptcy. In Scotland, as in England, the bankrupt, if he be within the class, is liable to the distri buting process, which is there called "se questration." It is necessary to keep in view that a "bankrupt" and a " seque strated bankrupt" are distinct terms. Every person sequestrated is necessarily a bankrupt, but every person who is a bankrupt is not a person whose estate may be sequestrated.
The criterions by which a person may become a bankrupt have been fixed by certain statutes, the earliest of which now in force is of the year 1691. Various legislative measures were passed for pre venting fraudulent alienations by insol vent persons to the prejudice of creditors, and a system for the relief of insolvent debtors who are not mercantile persons was long a branch of the common law as derived from the civilians, and has lately been remodelled by statute. [Clam BONO RUM.] It was not, however, until the year 1772 that the legislature established a process which, like the bankruptcy system in England, should collect the available assets of a bankrupt merchant into one Rind, distribute it through the hands of third parties, and, under judicial supervisance among the creditors aceord ing to the proportion of the fend to their respective olaima and in the end die.