During this act of the drama the creditors, real or pretended, come forward to select the provisional assignees, who are often, as we have said, the final ones.  In this electoral assembly all creditors have the right to vote, whether the sum owing to them is fifty sous, or fifty thousand francs.  This assembly, in which are found pretended creditors introduced by the bankrupt,—­the only electors who never fail to come to the meeting,—­proposes the whole body of creditors as candidates from among whom the commissioner, a president without power, is supposed to select the assignees.  Thus it happens that the judge almost always appoints as assignees those creditors whom it suits the bankrupt to have,—­another abuse which makes the catastrophe of bankruptcy one of the most burlesque dramas to which justice ever lent her name.  The honorable bankrupt overtaken by misfortune is then master of the situation, and proceeds to legalize the theft he premeditated.  As a rule, the petty trades of Paris are guiltless in this respect.  When a shopkeeper gets as far as making an assignment, the worthy man has usually sold his wife’s shawl, pawned his plate, left no stone unturned, and succumbs at last with empty hands, ruined, and without enough money to pay his attorney, who in consequence cares little for him.

The law requires that the concordat, at which is granted the bankrupt’s certificate that remits to the merchant a portion of his debt, and restores to him the right of managing his affairs, shall be attended by a majority of the creditors, and also that they shall represent a certain proportion of the debt.  This important action brings out much clever diplomacy, on the part of the bankrupt, his assignees, and his solicitor, among the contending interests which cross and jostle each other.  A usual and very common manoeuvre is to offer to that section of the creditors who make up in number and amount the majority required by law certain premiums, which the debtor consents to pay over and above the dividend publicly agreed upon.  This monstrous fraud is without remedy.  The thirty commercial courts which up to the present time have followed one after the other, have each known of it, for all have practised it.  Enlightened by experience, they have lately tried to render void such fraudulent agreements; and as the bankrupts have reason to complain of the extortion, the judges had some hope of reforming to that extent the system of bankruptcy.  The attempt, however, will end in producing something still more immoral; for the creditors will devise other rascally methods, which the judges will condemn as judges, but by which they will profit as merchants.