“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.”