“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but the victim of an utterly out-of-date system, the remnant of the cruel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.