"No good trying to get blood out of a stone," appears as good a moral as any for those who are so unlucky as to' own Bank of Territorial Development notes. A judgement from the Mixed Court is reported to-day in another case in which the plaintiff strove to fasten responsibility on to a Chinese for some of that paper. There have been three or four attempts of the same kind, we believe, and not one has had more success than Mr. Parlani has just had. The Court is thus reduced to making more or less vague promises of what it will do if any shareholders can be caught and proved, and to suggesting that henceforward native banks "should not be allowed to issue notes in Shanghai, Which is all the Court can do. Of course the protection against native notes is simply that foreign merchants will not take them at all, and Chinese we imagine would not do so, on any large scale, without collateral security. But the Bank. of Territorial Development was different. It was believed to have an official backing, and at one time, if we remember rightly, its notes' were among those which the Race Club advertises that it will accept at race meetings. Moreover yesterday's judgement indicates that the bank is still doing business in other towns. All of which makes its position the more heinous. We do not know precisely how many of these notes there are lying in locked drawers, awaiting the chance of sonic redemption, but it must be a considerable amount. Would it not be possible to bring pressure to bear in official quarters and attach some of the next salt or customs surplus for the satisfaction of creditors, who have waited so Jong for fulfilment of the once confident promise that they would be paid in a very near future?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.