Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/559

 16. BOWEN: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 545 ter part of a quartern loaf of bread per day, but their friends are permitted to bring them any other articles of food while the officer is there. In case of illness there is no means of getting assistance, for, though the prisoners might succeed in making themselves heard by the inhab- itants of the neighbourhood, they could not afford any help without the beadle, who lives in a remote pajt of the town. Female prisoners, if confined there, were deprived of all sep- arate accommodation, and cannot be visited by their own sex in cases of sickness, except while the officer is there." The leading idea of the law in the case of the ordinary insolvent was to seize his person. The principle of the law of bankruptcy with reference to a trader is to confiscate his property for the benefit of creditors. But during the first thirty years of the century, the English bankruptcy law had been, and at the beginning of the present reign still was, a discredit to a great country whose fleets covered the seas and whose commerce ranged the globe. Scotland and sev- eral Continental nations were far in advance of us. England alone among her commercial rivals still kept to the mis- chievous doctrine that mercantile insolvency was to be rooted out as if it were an offence against society. The bankruptcy law down to within fifty years ago maintained, accordingly, a procedure the severity of which from this distance of time appears monstrous. The one mitigating feature about it lay in the fact that the great commercial world, alienated and scared by the divergence of the English bankruptcy law from their own habits and notions of right and wrong, avoided the court of bankruptcy as they would the plague. The important insolvencies which had been brought about by pure mercantile misfortune were administered to a large extent under private deeds and voluntary compositions, which, since they might be disturbed by the caprice or malice of a single outstanding creditor, were always liable to be made the instruments of extortion. " To the honest insolvent the bankruptcy court was a terror." To the evildoer it afforded means of endlessly delaying his creditors, while the enormous expenses of bankruptcy administrations rendered it the interest of few to resort to the remedy, except with