238 MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 



which may well strike the ignorant with surprise. It was 

 proposed to establish in London a society for ensuring the 

 integrity of clerks, secretaries, collectors, arid all such func- 

 tionaries as are usually obliged to find security for money 

 passing through their hands in the course of business. A 

 gentleman of the highest character as an actuary spoke of the 

 plan in the following terms : " If a thousand bankers 1 clerks 

 were to club together to indemnify their securities, by the 

 payment of one pound a year each, and if each had given 

 security for 500/., it is obvious that two in each year might 

 become defaulters to that amount, four to half the amount, 

 and so on, without rendering the guarantee fund insolvent. 

 If it be tolerably well ascertained that the instances of dis- 

 honesty (yearly) among such persons amount to one in five 

 hundred, this club would continue to exist, subject to being 

 in debt in a bad year, to an amount which it would be able 

 to discharge in good ones. The only question necessary to 

 be asked previous to the formation of such a club would be, 

 may it not be feared that the motive to resist dishonesty 

 would be lessened by the existence of the club, or that ready- 

 made rogues, by belonging to it, might find the means of 

 obtaining situations which they would otherwise have been 

 kept out of by the impossibility of obtaining security among 

 those who know them ? Suppose this be sufficiently answered 

 by saying, that none but those who could bring satisfactory 

 testimony to their previous good character should be allowed 

 to join the club ; that persons who may now hope that a 

 deficiency on their parts will be made up and hushed up by 

 the relative or friend who is security, will know very well 

 that the club will have no motive to decline a prosecution, or 

 to keep the secret, and so on. It then only remains to ask, 

 whether the sum demanded for the guarantee is sufficient ?" ( 96 ) 

 The philosophical principle on which the scheme proceeds, 

 seems to be simply this, that amongst a given (large) number 

 of persons of good character, there will be, within a year or 

 other considerable space of time, a determinate number of 

 instances in which moral principle and the terror of the con- 

 sequences of guilt will be overcome by temptations of a deter- 



