asked the President of the Board of Trade whether, seeing that all bills of sale are duly registered but not hire-purchase agreements, and that there is no means of ascertaining whether there is in existence such an agreement, and since under the law auctioneers are liable for wrongful conversion of goods under hire-purchase agreements whose existence are not known, he will consider the desirability of taking steps to protect them in these cases?

The question of requiring hire-purchase agreements to be registered was considered by the Departmental Committee on Bankruptcy Law, a copy of whose Report, submitted in 1908, I am sending my hon. and gallant Friend. He will see that the Committee, after weighing the evidence on both sides, came to the conclusion that the proposal was open to many practical objections.