London, June 1.
Mr. Horatio Bottomley was con-vided yesterday at the Old Bailey, and sentenced to seven years' penal servitude, for fraudulently converting to his own use more than £150,000 entrusted to him by the public for investment in the Victory Bond and other clubs of which he was the founder and president. That is a summary of the indictment, and only a summary; but there were % counts and in its complete form it was a massive document. He seems to have been found guilty on every count except one, which, the Judge ruled out. Presumably the jury understood the case, but this could hardly be said of the public, for both sides threw figures at each other with such airy nonchalance that not until the Judge had summed up did ths public have any very clear idea of the extent to which Mr. Bottomley had exploited the vast number of individuals who always had believed him, Put briefly, the case against him was that he started Victory Bonds originally with the patriotic idea of finding money for the Government, but when the vast sums came in he kept no proper accounts and no proper records; that he used the money for his own purposes; and that, when he was pressed by subscribers for a refund, to which he had agreed in advance, as well as very foolishly consenting to refund at the purchase price, he found himself quite unable to do so.
His final downfall is not unfairly attributed to the publication of a two-penny pamphlet by Ruben Big-land, who flooded the country with denunciations of the Victory Bond scheme as a gigantic and colossal swindle. I should prefer not to express any opinion as to Mr. Big-land's motives in so doing, but at amy rate, Mr. Bottomley, for reasons of his own and more probably because of his financial inability to take any other course, was quite unable to pacify or compromise with his critic, who seems to have passed from an old-time acquaintance into a man who imparted so much bitterness into his methods that he was actually in court to watch the scene when Mr. Bottomley was convicted. In his position, most people with a spark of decency would have kept away.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.