The Law and the Poor

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at in the merry days of Henry III. there was no imprisonment for debt at all. If Godfrey the garlic seller or Hogg the needier owed Rose of the small shop a tally for weekly purchases and would not pay, Rose, poor woman, could not get an order to send them to gaol. Yet there is no ev

lic scandal, and show how in the last hundred years little by little its evil influence and extent have been abated with good results, we shall be ma

enth century, puts it very clearly when he says: "But there was no Capias for the Debt or Damages of a Common Person, because the party having trusted him only with personal Things his remedy was only on the pe

ghting part of his body belonged to the king, the labouring part of his body belonged to his lord, and the king and the lord were not going to have their rights an

in nature to that given to the ox or the ass or anything that was his, into a state of freedom, so-called, in which they had given up their rights to food and protection without getting any certain rights of wages or the equivalent o

is to proceed to execution; that is to say, the judge having given you judgment a writ is granted to you whereby you get the sheriff to take your part and seize for you either the goods or body of your opponent. The history of these ancient writs is full of amusing folklore for those who love such things, and we still call them by their old dog-La

as, affectionately alluded to as the fi. fa. by attorneys, bailiffs and others who have the handling of the fellow, is still with us. I agree that without him the delivery of judgments in courts of law would be mainly of academic and rhetorical interest. For as Gilbert-not William Schwenck, but Sir Geoffre

owed to seize a man's body for debt, but only his goods. And I am glad to find myself setting forth high Tory doctrine and asking my fellow citizens to return to the earliest common law of the land, for this seems clear that originally, unless the action was for trespass vi et armis, which was in th

his body for goods. Body warrants only issued against criminals or in actions of a semi-criminal character. It will be reassuring to those conservative minds who fear the abolition of imprisonment for debt to remember that there was a time in England when it did not exist, and that if we abolish it to-day we are working on old-fashioned and con

ebt-so-called-of 1869, would be out of place here. It is enough to know that little by little the principle of the right of one man to seize the body of another in an execution f

y. It will be seen that there have always been two schools of thought among politicians. One school was clear, that to tamper with imprisonment me

lsea and the City Compters, are pages of the story of our law that no one can read to-day without shame. Yet the Howards and Frys who called attention to the facts met with just as little encour

s Jackson, "that a few days after our adventure I found means to be married to that same fine lady you speak of and passed the night with her at her lodgings, so much to her satisfaction, that early in the morning, after a good deal of snivelling and sobbing, she owned that far from being an heiress of great fortune she was no other than a common woman of the town who had decoyed me into matrimon

debtor's prison himself, and very likely had heard the story at first hand,

ds, who took a deep interest in the career of an industrious shoemaker's apprentice and made him presents of clothes and a watch and lent him ten pounds. When he was out of his articles and was about to go home to Leicestershire and settle down there, he was arrested for the loan and the attorney's bill of costs an

sweep this horrible system away, so blind are people to the wrongs they see every day, so dull are ears to cries of pain and distress that are continuous and never cease. It would seem as though the conscience of

creatures was slopping over into the saucer of despair. Timid reformers began to think something might be done. The arguments then, as now, were all one way, but then, as now, there was no one to listen to them. Good men had raised their voices to point out the wrong-doing that was going on, and the unnecessary wretchedness that was being caused, but nothing much came of it. There were a few desultory and ineffective movements towards discharging poor debt

debt, but anyway it is a red-letter day in the history of English literature and worthy of great honour. For on that day, in the year 1836, the first number of "Pickwick," appeared and there is no doubt that the account of the Fleet prison in that volume has made it the popular text-book of legal reform in these matters. If "Pick

rs and tally-men of to-day. Any person who would make an affidavit that another owed him twenty pounds or more could lock him up pending the trial and, unless the victim could find the money and pay it into Court, he remained in the sponging house until the trial came on. Harry Warrington was served so, if you remember. Two gentlemen came from over the way, "one of them takes a strip of paper out of his pocket and, putting his hand upon Mr. Warrington's shoulder, declares him his prisoner. A hackney coach is called and poor Harry goes to sleep in Cha

e his release. He afterwards recovered in an action for malicious arrest heavy damages, but he never received a penny of them, nor is there any record that the false witnesses were punished for perjury. There are many stories of this kind, and it was an obvious result of the system of arrest on mesne process. One would have t

preferred imprisonment to paying his debts, the law afforded the creditor no other remedy. There were instances of debtors remaining in prison for over twenty years well able to pay their debts, but preferring to live in luxury within the rules of the priso

and buried him in prison-he was no fiction. His heart was broken when his child died and he could not kiss him in his coffin. There he remained living a solitary lingering death, lonely amid the noise and riot of the

that, judging from the petitions, he should be within the truth in saying that the Bill was very unpopular. The petitions were at least ten to one against the Bill. There was no more enthusiasm about mitigating imprisonment for debt then than there is to-day. The history of these things is

what they do owe, but who pay the dearer in proportion to the bad debts which the tradesman is led to let others contract with him. Further, he emphasised the wrong done by clothing an insolvent person with an appearance of credit by lending him more goods which serve as a bait or decoy

social reform, but may be fairly described, perhaps, as a worthy effort. The brightest reading in its history for us to-day is the debate in which Lord Brougham, with savage eloquence, rubs it in-the modern slang expresses Brougham's method so accurately-and jeers at the opponents of imprisonment for debt now that all their Cassandra prophecies over the abolition of imprisonment by mesne process have proved themselves to be worthless. Abolition of th

d poor people who are in debt, placing them as it does in conjunction with the Bankruptcy Laws in such a wholly inferior position to that of t

r should not. If a means could be invented to carry out this principle no one would utter a word against it. A fraudulent debtor is, I take it, a man who, having ample mean

e on his furniture and everything in his wife's name. But he is the curled darling of the law. He makes use of the law to protect himself and his frauds, and the D

llent aim of making it hot for the naughty and wicked debtor who has cheated or defrauded his creditors. Why is such a person punished? asks the Master of the Rolls. I give the answer in his own words. "Simply because he is a dishonest man. He need not perhaps be called a t

the County Court may fairly be described; but if a day of judgment audit could be carried out, and a balance struck on the item of "honesty" as between the working-men debtors and the class of traders who give them credit, I m

it is best to set down the actual enactment. We must remember then that the Act, being an Act for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, had begun by enacting in the fourth section that "with the exceptions hereinafter mentioned no person shall be ar

mall debts." It might have been better described perhaps "as a saving power to imprison poor debtors." This is the famous section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869, over which so much controversy has since arise

a judgment." That, of course, is plain sailing imprisonment for debt. Then, however, follows the sub-section-I again apologise for troubling you with all this, but it is really a good citizen's duty to understand it-which causes all the worry. It is enacted in sub-section (2) "that such jurisdiction

t, although he has no present means to pay a debt, he has had since the judgment means to pay which he has spent on the maintenance of his

. They deal with proof of means of the person making default, allowing such proof to be given in such manner as the Court thinks

id by instalments, he may also make continuous committals on each unpaid instalment, he may vary and rescind the order, and the imprisonment when s

iven to argue that the men who drafted the Act called the Act an Act for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, called section 5 a saving clause for continuing imprisonment for

tions readily granted were cases of fraudulent trusteeship and the like. This was not enough for the old gang, so the promoters of the reform threw in poor persons owing small debts. The poor had as few friends in Parliament as the fraudulent and they were huddled together into the same bundle of exception

act from a speech of Mr. McMahon shows that no one at that time was under any delusion about what was going to be done. "When," he said, "arrest on mesne process was abolished shortly after the passing of the Reform Bill it was then said that credit would be disturbed, and that traders would not be able to carry on their business. But these forebodings were purely imaginary, and in the same way

y were deliberately retaining imprisonment for debt for the poor. I want to insist on this point because one of the stumbling blocks in the way of reform to-day is the strange belief, fostered by the tally-man and his f

he very difficult question of County Court jurisdiction. At that time the County Court had a jurisdiction to punish for fraud as an incident of debt and also to imprison for debt. He proposed to take away the jurisdiction to imprison for fraud and to leave fraudulent debtors, both rich and poor, to the Criminal Courts. "But then," he continued, "came the other question of County Court imprisonment where a man was ab

inconceivable why people to-day should strive to make out that the system we are working is not imprisonment for debt, but something else. Unless it be that the advo

sh citizens have been actually imprisoned who have not been guilty of any crime whatsoever. They have been imprisoned mainly for poverty or, if you will, for improvidence-that blessed word that so insidiously describes in the poor that failure in economic asceticism, th