Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/337

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serfdom were recognized institutions, so long a man's person was part of his prop erty and a realizable asset; and probably the idea never occurred to members of such a primitive community that the debtor should not pay his debt with his person. The human-chattel view is, of course, very shocking to us, with all its attendant misery; but it requires no particular stretch of ima gination to picture such a state of society. We have only to go back a century — hardly that, indeed — to find in our own country, with its boasted freedom and merciful laws, the same thing, slightly modified, — debt, that is to say, expiated by life-long imprison ment with or without the tortures of damp dungeons and fetters (see 17 State Trials, 298-618), an imprisonment involving not only the debtor, but his family. A trum pery matter of a few pounds might lodge a man in the Fleet, or King's Bench, and over their portal was written more unmis takably than that which Dante saw, — "AH hope abandon ye who enter here."

History teems with examples. The comic poet Wycherly languished for seven years in the Fleet for want of £20. Sheridan, in the person of Sir Charles Surface, could flash his brilliant jests at the Jew; but he had to endure the final ignominy of being dragged from his bed, a dying man, to a sponging-house. The scenes of " Little Dorrit," as everybody knows, were no fanci ful creations of Dickens; but the veritable picture of his father's and family's own "Micawber " experiences. One bright ex

ception to the blighting influence of the debtor's gaol is on record. The King's Bench prison made the fortune of ChiefJustice Pemberton; for, having squandered his substance in riotous living, and being consigned to "durance vile," he fell to at his law books (hitherto neglected), and established such a reputation for learning as induced his Jew creditor to let him out (not from any weak motive of compassion, but that he might work out his debt by legal practice), and led ultimately to his attaining the highest honors of his profession. From undue severity the law has now passed to an almost too easy tolerance of indebtedness. The so-called imprisonment for debt under the Debtors' Act is not imprisonment for debt, but for dishonesty, as the late Lord Bramwell pointed out in Stoner v. Fowle (13 App. Cas. 28), for it is only when a man has had the means of pay ing and has not done so that he can be imprisoned. The Bankruptcy Act, 1883, has for the first time struck the right note in recognizing that there are debtors and debtors, and in discriminating between insol vency induced by misconduct, such as extravagant living or reckless speculation, and insolvency induced by misfortune with out misconduct. But it may be noted that the withholding the discharge is in the interests of the commercial community, not redress according to the creditor. The creditor's " sole remaining joy," now that whips and fetters are denied him, is to "heckle " his debtor at the public examina tion. — Legal Gazette.