never let a debtor default whose debts were included among trustee investments." But what if the debtor could not or would not pay? The contingency may be, and is, most remote, but if it happened, does it seem probable that the Treasury would take over the liability? Trustee securities ought to be judged as severely, on their own merits, as if the Trustee Acts did not exist, by anyone except trustees who considers an investment in any of them. A trustee, seeing that the Acts have been specially passed for his guidance, may well consider that his conscience is as safe as his pocket in following their instructions, but for anyone else to think that he cannot go wrong with a trustee security is a very unsafe assumption.
Nevertheless this assumption is so general that there is a strong argument for the abolition of the dangerous delusion on which it is based by a revision of the Trustee Acts and a return to the old restriction to British Government securities. If people will insist on believing that the Government hall-marks a security as unimpeachable by including it among trustee investments, it is only reasonable for the Government to confine this hall-mark to the only debts over which it has real control, namely its own.
