Arrow at the Sun

The highest building in Montreal is the dazzling white granite home of Sun Life Assurance Co. In that building, president of the company as his father was before him, sits Thomas Bassett Macaulay. Life is peaceful and secure to Mr. Macaulay. He is an important figure in Montreal's closely-knit tycoonarchy. Sometimes he lunches at the St. James or Mount Royal Club with stocky, dapper Edward Wentworth Beatty of the C. P. R. or grave Sir Herbert Samuel Holt of the Royal Bank of Canada, both directors of his company. Summers he spends at Hudson Heights, raising fine Holsteins, experimenting with sturdy strains of corn.

Because Sun is the world's biggest investor in common stocks, because Mr. Macaulay repeatedly states his belief that 1929 prices will return, much discussion, not all of it complimentary, has centred upon the company and its chief. But just as the heavenly sun has been impervious to arrows launched at it, Canada's Sun has sat serene with its $624,000,000 in assets, disregarded the yapping of critics.

Last week Thomas Bassett Macaulay was no longer serene. In a lot magazine he read things that made him boil and fume.

The magazine was the Canadian Journal of Commerce, a cheaply printed monthly with a small circulation. The October issue, which was the one that made Mr. Macaulay righting mad, bore this caption on its front page:

THE WORLD'S GREATEST CROOKS T. B. Macaulay and Ivar Kreuger of the Sun Life of the Swedish Match

A COMPLETE STORY OF THEIR SWINDLES.

Among other horrid, startling things the sheetlet said: "Both Macaulay and Kreuger won the confidence of their governments and then proceeded to swindle their people. They both faked their books and presented such balance sheets, padded with fictitious assets, as best suited their purposes and thus deceived those upon whom they preyed. They were both colossal liars. . . . Kreuger did not believe in an afterlife and was frank and honest about it. Macaulay . . . was a religious hypocrite and therefore differed from Kreuger in this respect only by being more contemptible and more dangerous.''

President Macaulay went furiously to court, charged James J. Harpell who writes and published the Canadian Journal of Commerce, with criminal libel. Publisher Harpell's lawyers would not handle the case. He appeared in Court alone and shocked everybody by screaming: "The plaintiff . . . has given to Samuel and Martin Insull and Ivar Kreuger $26,000,000 of policyholders' funds. ... I am here to swear out a warrant for his arrest.''

Attacks upon companies by stockholders who fear their dividends may be passed are not uncommon. Unusual in the Harpell attack was the fact that he was only a policyholder, fearful that when he died the Sun could not pay his beneficiaries. The Insull and Kreuger investments to which he referred were the Sun's holdings in Middle West Utilities bonds and International Match preferred. If the cost of these securities was $26,000,000 as abusive Mr. Harpell said, they would still represent a small fraction of Sun's total investment account which last December was carried at $623,000,000.

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