Excerpt from Securities Over Moveables: Four Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Society of Accountants in Edinburgh, the Institute of Accountants and Actuaries in Glasgow, and the Institute of Bankers in Scotland, in 1902-3

It has now come to be recognised that, from the point of view of the public interest, it is of great importance that every means should be taken to remove impediments to the growth of credit, and to encourage the confidence on which credit is based, in order that capital may flow as easily as possible into the hands of those persons in the community who are most competent to employ it efficiently in produc tive uses.

The progress of this department of law in recent times has accordingly been all in the direction of increasing the facilities for constituting security rights - in other words, the facilities for obtaining credit. This progress, dictated by public policy and rendered necessary by the requirements of trade, has to a large extent consisted in the recognition and regulation by the law (either in the form of statute or by legal decision) Of usages and customs previously existing in the mercantile community. Nevertheless, so important is credit to the mercantile community that, as the cases show, the custom of merchants in dealing with instruments Of credit is constantly apt, so to speak, to outrun, and be in advance of, the law of the land, with unfortunate results to individual merchants. Hence it is of the highest importance that all persons engaged in commerce - and in particular bankers and others, through whose agency capital is in practice largely loaned - should see to it that the form in which they take security for loans is in conformity with the law, and such as the law will recognise and enforce in a question with other creditors of the borrower.

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