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made to suffer, until we see him what he is to-day—not a very ill-used martyr, perhaps, but the victim of an utterly out-of-date system, the remnant of the cruel laws of the Middle Ages.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.