THE DEBTOR OF TO-DAY.
“He that dies pays all debts.”
Tempest iii., 2.
The debtor is a slave. In the nature of things he always has been and must be a slave. The debtor of to-day is not such a direct slave as his ancestor of remote ages, but he is, in political phrase, a relic of barbarism living under servile conditions. As he has no organisation, and as, in the picturesque analogy of the man in the street, he is a bottom-dog in every sense of the word, no one worries about him. Eleven thousand of him go to gaol every year, and process is issued against three or four hundred thousand, but there is no party capital to be made out of the subject, no one statesman can abuse any other statesman for neglecting the question, and the churches and chapels are so keen about fighting over the technicalities of catechisms that they have no time to worry over the sorrows of the debtor of to-day.
It was not always so. Elisha the Prophet thought it worth while to perform a miracle on one well-known occasion in order to pay the bailiffs out. The creditor, if you remember, had come to the widow’s house “to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.” In those days you took in execution not only the debtor himself, but his wife and family. Elisha was indignant. He orders the widow to borrow her neighbour’s vessels and fills them miraculously with oil. Then he says: “Go, sell the oil and pay thy debt, and live thou and thy children of the rest.” One does not expect miracles from our clergy of to-day, but a consideration of the subject, and the discussion of its social aspects, would be a following out of Elisha’s example. I for one have never yet heard a sermon on imprisonment for debt, but the texts are plentiful, and to any intending preacher I will willingly supply the references.
As in Hebrew times, so in the days of Greece and Rome, you find the slavery of the debtor continue, and what seems to be wanting in the legislator of to-day, an anxiety to relieve his condition. Solon, the Greek law-giver, had sounder notions of the matter than any modern Home Secretary whose views I have come across. It would be interesting to trace the evolution of our poor unfortunate County Court debtor of to-day across the spacious pages of history, through the various degrees of ignominy, slavery, and misery that the debtor has been made to suffer, until we see him what he is to-day—not a very ill-used martyr, perhaps, but the victim of an utterly out-of-date system, the remnant of the cruel laws of the Middle Ages.
To Charles Dickens must be awarded a great portion of the honour that is due to those who abolished the horrible incidents of the imprisonment for debt that existed in his day.
The picture of the old debtor dying in the Fleet after twenty years of captivity must have haunted even the most callous official the Circumlocution Office ever produced. Great reforms followed, but in the usual English way, in scraps and portions by means of compromise and amendment, and by degrees. At last, in 1869, came the start of the present system of imprisonment for debt which abolished a great deal of imprisonment, but left the very poorest still under threat of the gaol if they did not pay their debts. There were many great reformers of that day who saw that the time was even then ripe for total abolition, and that the House of Commons was legislating on too conservative lines.
Jessel, a great lawyer and a sound law-giver, laid down the principle that has always been to me a statement of the true gospel on this question. “In no case,” he says, “should a man suffer penal imprisonment because he failed to pay a certain sum of money on a private contract with which the public had nothing to do.” When we have legislated to that effect we shall get rid of this relic of the barbarous ages that is still with us—imprisonment for debt.
And a word to explain what the system means. It must be remembered that the smaller debts in County Courts are generally ordered to be paid by instalments. Where a debt or instalment is in arrear, and it is proved to the satisfaction of the Court that the person making default either has, or has had since the date of the order or judgment, the means to pay the sum in respect of which he has made default, and has refused or neglected to pay, the Judge may commit him to prison for a period of not more than forty-two days. In practice the wind is very much tempered to the shorn lamb, and a period of twenty-one days is generally the maximum imprisonment ordered. In practice, also, debtors will beg, borrow, and perhaps do worse rather than go to prison, and the result is that the percentage actually imprisoned is small. This, to my mind, has very little bearing on the question whether the system is a wise one in the interests of the State and of the working-man. For it must not be forgotten that the system is in practice a system of collecting debts from the wage-earning class, and the wage-earning class only. It is, of course, incidentally used against small tradesmen and others, but the bulk of those against whom orders are made are working-men. As the late Mr. Commissioner Kerr said in 1873, “The rich man makes a clean sweep of it, and begins again, and the poor man has a miserable debt hanging round his neck all his life.”
For the rich bankrupt is really rather a pampered creature. Here you have the younger son of a duke whose creditors are mostly money-lenders and tradesmen, whose downfall is due to betting, and who has known of his insolvency for a long period, owing £36,631, and his assets are £100. The Official Receiver drops a silent tear of pity over the statement of affairs, and, like the tear of the recording angel, it blots out the record and the younger son goes forth ducally to prey upon a new generation of creditors. Here, again, you have a bankrupt, an ex-Army officer, living on his wife’s income, and betting, and winding up with debts £27,741, and assets £667. These are not fancy cases, they come out of the stern, dull reports of the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy. And as long as such men are allowed to live without fear of imprisonment day by day, we cannot sit down and say with a clear conscience that we have only one law for rich and poor.
The chief evil of the present system of imprisonment for debt is the undesirable class of trade and traders that it encourages: the money-lenders, the credit drapers, the “Scotchmen,” the travelling jewellers, the furniture hirers, and all those firms who tout their goods round the streets for sale by small weekly instalments, relying on imprisonment for debt to enable them to plant their goods out on the weaklings. The law as it stands assists the knave at the expense of the fool. I was discussing with a rather slow-minded working-man and his wife why he had purchased a showy and unsatisfactory sideboard wholly beyond his means. It had been seized and sold for rent, and he had this burden of a few pounds debt to clear off as best he might.
“Why buy it?” I asked.
“My wife would have it,” he replied.
“Why did she want it?” I asked.
“She didn’t want it, but yon man (the shopman) seemed to instil the sideboard into her.”
The shopman was a clever salesman, no doubt, but does anyone suppose he would have instilled a sideboard into the workman’s wife if it had not been for imprisonment for debt. To a working-man on small weekly wages no credit can be given in any commercial sense. His only asset is character, and there are many retail traders who never come near the County Court at all, because they make it a rule only to give credit after inquiry.
Constantly one finds goods taken by women, and immediately pawned, the proceeds being spent on drink. How can a workman prevent this? He probably never hears of the matter until a judgment summons is served on him. I asked such a man the other day if his wife had had the goods, mentioning the date when they were said to be delivered.
“I don’t doubt she had the goods. Indeed, she must have got some goods that day,” he admitted.
I asked why.
“Because that day she got locked up for being drunk and disorderly, and I never knew until now where she got the money.”
This is by no means an isolated case. I have been several times applied to by quite respectable men whose wives had run up debts with as many as twelve to nineteen different drapers for relief under the power permitting of small bankruptcies. One man told me he was putting a nail in the wall, and on moving a picture he found some County Court summonses. I asked him what he did.
“I upbraided my wife,” he replied, in a rather melancholy tone, “and she ran away, and I have never seen her since.”
A creditor corroborated the fact, and it was clear that debt had destroyed that household. The man had no idea that there were any debts owing, they had been hidden from him, but he thought it right to arrange honestly enough to pay them all off. Many a man removes, or has his house sold over his head, or his wife leaves him through misunderstanding arising out of credit recklessly given for useless articles, and the law as it stands encourages this kind of thing.
Nor can it be said that the wife is always to blame. The husband finds that his wife can obtain credit at any grocer’s for the week’s food, and the necessity of carrying home his wages to the chancellor of his domestic exchequer is less apparent. The temptation to spend wages on drink or gambling is distinctly encouraged in the debtor of to-day by a system that makes credit so readily obtainable by the unthrifty and unfit.
There was a story illustrating this aspect of the matter told me by a member of a relief committee during the late war. The committee were paying women half wages whilst the men were at the front. The wife of a working-man refused a sovereign saying, “That ain’t half my man’s wages.”
It was explained that he earned forty shillings.
The honest woman shook her head. “Nay, he didn’t,” she said. “Nowt o’ sort. He never earned more than twenty-five. Twenty-three he give me, and two shillings spending money.”
After some time and examination of the books, the good lady was convinced that she was entitled to a sovereign, and she went away aghast at her husband’s deceit, and murmured, “Eh, but if yon Boers don’t kill him, wait till I get him back!”
One reason why imprisonment should be abolished in relation, at all events, to amounts under forty shillings is the dangerous and slippery paths of evidence along which a Judge has to walk in dealing with small cases. Some witnesses have not the remotest idea of their duties and responsibilities. On one occasion a low-class Jewish workman was sufficiently impressed with his responsibilities to make the following demand after he was sworn.
“My lort, I cannot be a vitness in this case.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you know anything about it?”
“Oh, yes, I know all about it, but I don’t vant to speak.”
After a good deal of trouble I obtained from him the reason of his reticence.
“You see,” he said, “Moses (the plaintiff) is mine brother-in-law, and little Isaac (the defendant) he is mine vife’s nephew, and if I speak about this case, vy, I must give vun of them avay.”
I condoled with him about his family difficulties, and tried to persuade him that his duty was to speak the truth, but my only recollection of his evidence is that it was of no service to anyone, and that he certainly succeeded in giving himself away.
In a family dispute the greatest care must be taken to accept nothing as true that can possibly be prompted by hatred or malice. To do justice to the Jews they do not, as a rule, bring family disputes into court. A cynical registrar once told me that a Jew would swear anything for his brother, and a Christian anything against his brother. Without endorsing this epigrammatic exaggeration, I must sorrowfully admit that a downright North Country fight between blood relations over club money or the cost of a funeral tea or the furniture of a deceased parent is one of the saddest exhibitions of uncharitableness that I know.
The recklessness with which good ladies of unblemished character will commit what technical-minded lawyers might be inclined to consider perjury, and on occasion even stoop to something like forgery, would surprise anyone who was not conversant with it. In ordinary matters these good people are honest citizens enough, but in a family dispute honour requires that no iniquity must be left undone in order to gain the day. I remember in my early days a fat old dame of cheerful countenance suing her son-in-law, a young workman, for £2 17s. 9d. The odd shillings and pence were admitted, but the £2, which figured through two or three greasy books as “ballanse of account,” could not be traced to any particular source.
The old lady swore it was a grocery account. The young man denied it with emphasis, and said it was spite. Sarah, the old lady’s elder daughter, remembered some of the items of it, and with a great relish swore to them in detail. The young wife, who had been keeping a very lively baby quiet, and trying in between whiles to give evidence from the body of the court, at last got into the witness-box. Flinging the baby into her husband’s arms, and kissing the book with a smack, she shot out the following testimony at her mother and myself: “Look ’ere, mother, you know reet enow what that there balance is; it ain’t no balance at all—it’s my ’at and the wedding-dress, and the shoes to match, and the pair o’ greys what druv us to church, which I paid for when I was in service for three years, putting by ’arf-a-crown a month, which mother kep’ for me, and well she knows it, which it’s Sarah’s spite as ain’t got married yet.”
What was the real truth may be doubtful, but I was clear the “ballanse of account” was not groceries, and struck it out; yet, had the mother succeeded, she would have pursued her son-in-law to prison in an endeavour to collect the money.
For my part I think it is bad business for the community that homes should be broken up in order that a creditor may collect a trumpery debt that should never have been incurred, and it is because I believe it is the interest of the State to keep together the home of the working-man, and to deliver him from temptation, that I hope to see imprisonment for debt diminished, if not abolished altogether. An intelligent landlord wishing to preserve game kills off birds of prey and puts down poachers. An intelligent State, if it wishes to preserve the home of the working-man and his wife and children, should make it illegal for him to mortgage his future earnings, and to place his liberty in jeopardy in order to possess for the moment some shoddy piece of jewellery or drapery for which he has no real use.