The Law and the Poor Part 2

But no. The poor are worse off now than they were then. The bailiffs come for their bodies on behalf of their creditors still. And they look down the road in vain. There is no Elisha.

And when you come to the New Testament the matter is laid down even more clearly. Matthew vi. 12 has the actual words of Our Lord's Prayer to be, "And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors." If the forgiveness of our debtors is a condition precedent to our own forgiveness, most of us are in a parlous state. But is it too much in this Christian country of ours to suggest that, even if the highest ideals of the Master are beyond our attainment, we need not insult our belief by continuing a barbaric pagan system of cruelty which has been singled out for special disapprobation by the Word that we cannot shut our ears to?

You remember the parable of the king that took account of his servants which Matthew sets out in his eighteenth chapter. How a servant owed the king ten thousand talents and, as he had not wherewith to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. Note that in those days the wife and children were actually sold into slavery. We do not do that: we remove the bread-winner, only, to gaol and care for his wife and children in the workhouse. It is encouraging to find this much reform after nineteen Christian centuries.

The servant, you will recollect, pleaded with the king, saying, "Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all." Debtors have not altered much since that date, and the text has a familiar ring in the ears of a County Court judge. The lord of that servant, being moved by compa.s.sion, released him and forgave him the debt. This is important to remember, for the servant being forgiven his debt was without excuse for his subsequent contemptible conduct. And, indeed, I have often found that men who have been most leniently treated in their own failures by those in a better position, are themselves most greedy in extorting the uttermost farthing from their smaller victims. Speaking generally, it is not the most desirable cla.s.s of trader that makes use of the debt-collecting system of the County Court.

The servant of the parable was the meanest of curs. He "went out, and found one of his fellow-servants, which owed him a hundred pence: and he laid hold on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay what thou owest." Here, again, we may flatter ourselves on our superior procedure.

If this had happened in Lambeth, the servant would not have been allowed to go for his fellow servant with such jubilant audacity. Nowadays everything would be done in legal decency and order. The debt being for a hundred pence, and, therefore, being within the jurisdiction of the County Court, a summons would have to be issued, fees would have to be paid to the Treasury and the Court officials, and a lot of money spent and added to the debt before imprisonment followed. Still the rough-and-ready methods of the earlier centuries were certainly cheaper, and the result was much the same. For we read that, though the fellow-servant pleaded in the same formula, "Have patience with me, and I will pay thee," the creditor of the hundred pence stood firm for his rights and cast his fellow servant into prison till he should pay his due.

And if this had been a repertory drama and not a parable, the curtain had fallen on that scene and one would have come away depressed with the abjectness of human nature and with a cold feeling that the world was a drab uncomfortable place. But the ancient dramatic stories always have a happy ending. There is more of the spirit of the old Adelphi than of the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, about the parables. The lord hears of his servant's scurvy behaviour and, to the delight of all sane men of child-like and simple faith, the wicked servant is delivered to the tormentors till he shall pay all that was due.

I confess that my legal mind has been haunted with the thought that, the lord having forgiven the servant his debt, it was rather a strong order for him to go back on that forgiveness. Doubtless there was no consideration for the forgiveness, it was _nudum pactum_, or there may have been an implied contract that the servant should do unto others as he had been done by, but I rather expect the lord and his advisers only considered the justice of their act rather than its technical legal accuracy. But one thing we can rejoice in. There is the dramatic story, and no one can construe it into approval of any form of imprisonment for debt.

I know that many who do not regard the Bible as an authority will not be troubled about this testimony; probably many more who do read the Scriptures for guidance will be pained that anyone should make use of holy words to upset a system that they find so useful in the commercial weekdays of life. Moreover, some will shake their heads and remind me that "the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." That is true enough. But it will be a very clever devil who can cite any Scripture in support of section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869.

And I will pa.s.s away from scriptural precedents to others which, though to me they possess a less compelling sanction, will perhaps have more weight with men of the world. In the history of ancient Greece the debtor played an important part. Let me remind you what the Archon did.

The particular Archon I refer to is Solon.

Solon knew all about imprisonment for debt, and his evidence on the subject is most convincing. It is well to remember, too, that Solon was a business man--I have this from Grote, who got it, I fancy, from Plutarch.

Exekestides, Solon's father, a gentleman of the purest heroic blood, "diminished his substance by prodigality," and young Solon had to go into business; in modern phrase, he "went on the road," and saw a lot of the world in Greece and Asia. I mention this because I am always told that if I knew anything of business I should understand the necessity of imprisonment for debt. Solon was emphatically a business man. Solon was also a poet, which perhaps was his best a.s.set as a social reformer, but he was no sentimentalist if, as some say, when he was a general attacking a rebellious city he ordered the wells to be poisoned to put an end to the strife.

When Solon in a time of grand social upheaval was made Archon, he found the poorer population, including particularly the cultivating tenants, weighed down by debts and driven in large numbers out of freedom and into slavery. Let me set down the condition of things in the careful words of Grote lest I appear to exaggerate.

"All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor and creditor--once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion of the world--combined with the recognition of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one man to sell himself as well as that of another man to buy him. Every debtor unable to fulfil his contract was liable to be adjudged as the slave of his creditor, until he could find means either of paying it or working it out; and not only he himself, but his minor sons and unmarried daughters and sisters also, whom the law gave him the power of selling. _The poor man thus borrowed upon the security of his body_ (to translate literally the Greek phrase) and upon that of the persons in his family."

The words I have italicised are interesting as exactly defining the principle of all imprisonment for debt. A wage earner to-day who runs up bills with tally-men and grocers obtains credit upon the security of his body.

I have heard from the wife of a poor debtor an apt but unconscious translation of the Latin maxim, _Si non habet in aere luat in corpore_.

Her allegation was that a tally-man had said to her husband, "If I canna 'ave yer bra.s.s I'll tek yer body." In the north country, among the more old-fashioned bailiffs and their victims, warrants of arrest are commonly known as "body warrants." No doubt the imprisonment of to-day is different in degree from the slavery of debtors in Greece five hundred years before Christ, but it is absolutely the same in principle, founded on the same idea, and worthy to be maintained or abolished by the citizens of this State for the same reasons that were found good by the citizens of Athens.

Thus it is that it is worth while finding out what Solon thought about it.

I wish Solon's tract, "What the Archon Saw," had come down to us, and we could have quoted actual instances of the wickedness of imprisonment for debt in his day, but at least we know what he thought of it, and, what is really important to us, what he did. Solon had a pretty wit in t.i.tles. He called his bill _Seisachtheia_, or the shaking off of burdens. The relief which it afforded was complete and immediate. It cancelled at once all those contracts in which the debtor had borrowed on the security of his person or his land; it forbade all future loans or contracts in which the person of the debtor was pledged as security; it deprived the creditor in future of all power _to imprison_ or enslave or extort work from his debtor, and confined him to an effective judgment at law, authorising the seizure of the property of the latter.

This was indeed a shaking off of burdens. For here we find, not only was imprisonment for debt abolished lock, stock and barrel, but a law enacted protecting the land of the cultivator from being seized for debt. This is akin to what in some of our colonies is called a homestead law, and I have always contended that in the interests of the State the few sticks of furniture which a poor man and his wife and children always call "the home" should be protected from arrest for debt, just as the bread-winner's body should be exempt from imprisonment. I could have got along with Solon.

And when one is told the old tale that continues to be put forward by those who wish to retain imprisonment for debt--that the workman will starve for want of necessary credit and that trade will stagnate owing to timid creditors refusing to trade--let us remember with pleasure that that was not what the Archon saw as a result of his beneficial measures. On the contrary, the testimony is overwhelming that there grew up a higher and increasing respect for the sanct.i.ty of contracts. The system of credit-giving, and especially of moneylending, a.s.sumed a more beneficial character, and "the old noxious contracts, mere snares for the liberty of a poor free man and his children"--the flat-traps of to-day--disappeared.

What happened was what will happen here when we abolish this degrading system of giving credit on the sanction of body warrants. What happened in Athens was that, although there were some fraudulent debtors, the public sentiment became strongly in favour of honesty, and it is agreed that the prophecies of Solon's failure were not made good, and "that a loan of money at Athens was quite as secure as it ever was at any time or place of the ancient world." Furthermore, it is acknowledged by the better authorities that what I expect and believe will happen in the mean streets of England when imprisonment for debt is abolished, actually did happen in Athens, and, to use Grote's words, "the prohibition of all contracts on the security of the body was itself sufficient to produce a vast improvement in the character and conditions of the poorer population."

Of course, I am not putting forward "What the Archon Did" as an example to the Archons who Didn't of to-day. The theory of evolution teaches us that in two thousand years the Solon type must have improved, and that the Solon that we see in the latter-day armchair of State must be a far, far better thing than anything that obtained in Ancient Greece. Possibly, the world having no use at all for Solons, the type is extinct. Be that as it may, I am more than ever puzzled since I have studied the records of What the Archon Did. If the world had got so far in the question of imprisonment for debt five hundred years before Christ, why are we where we are now nineteen hundred years since the Master set before us the true doctrine of forgiveness of debts?

The Roman laws against the debtor upon which we have ultimately modelled our own were equally harsh and would nearly satisfy the moneylender or tally-man of any age. Upon notice, a debtor had thirty days in which to discharge his debt. If he did not do so his creditor carried him off in chains. Note, however, that he was not a slave, but his creditor had to keep him in chains for another sixty days, during which time he had to bring the debtor out on three successive market days to give his friends an opportunity of paying up and releasing him. The creditor had also to provide the debtor with a pound of bread a day. In these socialist days we take that burden off the creditor's shoulder and a generous State feeds the imprisoned debtor at the cost of the community. On the third market day, if the debtor's friends were still backward in coming forward, the debtor was killed and thrown into the Tiber, or his body was divided among his creditors, which was the only dividend they received. If there was any market for him he was sold into slavery. It seems that in the very early days of Ancient Rome each creditor had a right to carve his pound of flesh from off the debtor. Portia's point against Shylock:

... nor cut thou less, nor more, But just a pound of flesh:...

was foreseen and provided for in the drafting of the Twelve Tables. It is enacted in the Third Table: "After the third market day the creditors may cut their several portions of his body: and any one that cuts more or less than his just share shall be guiltless." Unless, therefore, the laws of Venice amended or repealed the Twelve Tables, Shylock's case seems to have been wrongly decided. What is at least curious is that the ancient idea of debtor and creditor law embodied in those ancient statutes should be the foundation of one of the most popular plays in the English language.

Some good people have found a difficulty in understanding Shylock's outlook on life and cannot comprehend why a creditor should enjoy killing a debtor. But, after all, it is equally strange why a creditor should take pleasure in imprisoning a debtor. Yet to-day thousands of debtors go to prison because they have not means to pay their creditors. The difference between killing and imprisoning a debtor is a difference in degree only. The principle is the same. The object of the creditor is, perhaps, in the first place, to get repaid his debt; when he finds this is impossible the death or imprisonment of the debtor merely satisfies his desire for revenge. The ancient Romans were, in one way, a more practical people than ourselves, for they threw the costs of this revenge direct upon the creditor, whereas we throw it upon the taxpayer. If this particular impost were made upon me in any direct manner it would almost persuade me to be a pa.s.sive resister.

I am glad, however, to remind you that in historical times at all events the Romans did not carry out the law of the Twelve Tables to its uttermost cruelty. The popular way of dealing with a debtor seems to have been to sell him into slavery and then to credit him in your ledger with the price he fetched--less the out of pockets--much as we do to-day when we issue execution against chattels. In later years the slavery of debtors was abolished and imprisonment much like our own was subst.i.tuted, but the Romans never had a lawgiver as wise and powerful as Solon to get rid of imprisonment for debt altogether. And the Roman imprisonment for debt in some shape or other runs through the social systems of the Middle Ages, being harsh in one place and less cruel in another, and mitigated at one date and aggravated at another. Always we find a feeling among the more thoughtful of mankind that it is in itself a harsh and cruel system and a desire among at least a few to help the victims of it in their distress.

Fynes Moryson, who was in Rome in 1594, tells us of a practice which then prevailed in the Pope's State which might be introduced into Protestant England to-day in a lively belief that it would be in accordance with the tenets of the Christian faith and a certain hope that it would relieve many a poor wretch in misery and despair. "If," he writes, "a man be cast into prison for debt, the judges after the manner visiting frequently those prisons, finding him to be poor, will impose upon the creditor a mitigation of the debt, or time of forbearance, as they judge the equity of the case to require, or if by good witnesses they find the party so poor as really he hath not wherewith to pay his debt they will accept a release or a.s.signment of his goods to the creditor and whether he consent or no will free the debtor's body out of prison."

At all periods of time we find the same uneasiness in the minds of rulers and governors about keeping a poor man in prison for debt when he cannot pay. The governors of English gaols will tell you that 90 per cent. of the debtors lying in prison to-day for civil debt, rates, maintenance or b.a.s.t.a.r.dy orders and small fines are too poor to pay. Yet here in England our legislators cannot even get as far as the Papal State of the sixteenth century in an exercise of charity to the poor and distressed. Pending the abolition of imprisonment for debt, a Home Office visitation with power to release the really unfortunate on the lines of the practical experiment which Fynes Moryson wrote home about three hundred years ago would be something to be going on with.

This, however, is a matter which is concerned with methods of reform. But, before we deal with amendments of the law, it is necessary to trace clearly and accurately the evolution of imprisonment for debt in England, in order that we may understand how and why it exists to-day as a law that can only be put in force against the poor.

CHAPTER III

OF IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT IN ENGLAND

Oh let me pierce the secret shade Where dwells the venerable maid!

There humbly mark, with reverend awe, The guardian of Britannia's law; Unfold with joy her sacred page, The united boast of many an age; Where mixed, yet uniform, appears The wisdom of a thousand years.

SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE: "The Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse."

I am honestly sorry to have to inflict a chapter of legal history upon anyone, but for the life of me I do not see how the imprisonment for debt of to-day can be intelligently appreciated until one knows something of its lineage. To begin with, it may be news to some folk to learn that in the merry days of Henry III. there was no imprisonment for debt at all. If G.o.dfrey the garlic seller or Hogg the needier owed Rose of the small shop a tally for weekly purchases and would not pay, Rose, poor woman, could not get an order to send them to gaol. Yet there is no evidence that trade was thereby injured, or that there was any difficulty in Rose regulating her credit-giving, or in G.o.dfrey and Hogg and the rest obtaining as much credit as they deserved. The first thing to remember is that England at one period had no use for imprisonment for debt.

It occurs to me that, if I can persuade the man in the street to understand how imprisonment for debt began and continued until it became a great public scandal, and show how in the last hundred years little by little its evil influence and extent have been abated with good results, we shall be making great strides towards the restoration of that liberty in England which in the matter of debt was the citizen's privilege in the days of Henry III.

But the reason for the absence of imprisonment for debt in these early feudal days is not so satisfactory to modern ears as one could wish. Lord Chief Baron Gilbert, that crisp and accurate lawyer of the eighteenth century, puts it very clearly when he says: "But there was no Capias for the Debt or Damages of a Common Person, because the party having trusted him only with personal Things his remedy was only on the personal Estate, and the King had the Interest in the Body of his subject; and the Lord in his _Feudatory_ or _Va.s.sal_ to be called out to War or to labour for him; and therefore none but the King could imprison him."

And this seems clear, that the reason a creditor could not imprison a debtor was because in those days a debtor had only a limited interest in his own body. The fighting part of his body belonged to the king, the labouring part of his body belonged to his lord, and the king and the lord were not going to have their rights and property in his body interfered with because the subject and va.s.sal had been foolish enough to run into debt with another subject and va.s.sal who wanted his money.

You will, indeed, find that the whole history of the law and the poor seems to be a long struggling of the poor out of slavery and serfdom where they had a certain guaranteed amount of food and protection from their masters, similar in nature to that given to the ox or the a.s.s or anything that was his, into a state of freedom, so-called, in which they had given up their rights to food and protection without getting any certain rights of wages or the equivalent of wages in return. We are in the middle of adjusting these things to-day, and the story of imprisonment for debt, and why it is retained at the present only for poor people, is a page in the curious English history of social progress.

As long as the debtor was a va.s.sal having certain duties to perform for the lord of the manor his lordship thought him as much worth preserving as the game or venison within the curtilage of his park. It was for this reason you could not take his body in execution. As you may know, when you obtain a judgment in a court of law the next thing to do is to proceed to execution; that is to say, the judge having given you judgment a writ is granted to you whereby you get the sheriff to take your part and seize for you either the goods or body of your opponent. The history of these ancient writs is full of amusing folklore for those who love such things, and we still call them by their old dog-Latin names, not for any scientific purpose, but for much the same reason that the doctors write their prescriptions in hieroglyphics and priests mumble Latin or English--but always mumble--in a cathedral. It is the essence of a profession that it should be mysterious and incomprehensible, otherwise the common herd would not respect it and pay its fees.

And, prior to Henry III., if you got a judgment against your neighbour for money owing by him to you, your remedies of execution were these. By a writ of _fieri facias_ the sheriff could be commanded to seize the goods and chattels of the debtor in satisfaction of the debt. This dear old writ, the _fieri facias_, affectionately alluded to as the _fi. fa._ by attorneys, bailiffs and others who have the handling of the fellow, is still with us. I agree that without him the delivery of judgments in courts of law would be mainly of academic and rhetorical interest. For as Gilbert--not William Schwenck, but Sir Geoffrey the Chief Baron--puts it, if a party trusts a man with personal things, then his remedy should be against the personal things of the debtor, and this seems a principle of common law and common sense as just as it is homeopathic. As our latter-day Gilbert would have put it, "the punishment fits the crime."

But when you come to our other writ, the _capias satisfaciendum_, or "_ca.

sa._" as it is written in the absurd legal shorthand of the day, or "body warrant" as it is still termed with brutal accuracy in Lancashire, then you will find that in old days different considerations prevailed. You were not allowed to seize a man's body for debt, but only his goods. And I am glad to find myself setting forth high Tory doctrine and asking my fellow citizens to return to the earliest common law of the land, for this seems clear that originally, unless the action was for trespa.s.s _vi et armis_, which was in the nature of a criminal matter, there was no remedy against the body of the defendant. The _ca. sa._ whereby the sheriff was ordered to seize the body of the defendant in execution could not issue at the instance of a successful plaintiff at common law. In other words there was no imprisonment for debt.

Our forefathers recognised what we seem to have partially lost sight of, that as credit could only be given commercially to a man with goods, it was fair and just that his goods should be seized if he did not carry out his contract. But for reasons of their own--no longer sound as reasons to-day, it is true--they refused to allow a man to mortgage his body for goods. Body warrants only issued against criminals or in actions of a semi-criminal character. It will be rea.s.suring to those conservative minds who fear the abolition of imprisonment for debt to remember that there was a time in England when it did not exist, and that if we abolish it to-day we are working on old-fashioned and const.i.tutional lines. Imprisonment for debt has not the sanction of antiquity, and a desire to sweep it away must not be put down to the wild and wicked desires of a political futurist architect, but rather to the pious hopes of one who is in deep sympathy with the best features of the Norman and Early English social inst.i.tutions of his native land.

To tell the long story of the statutory evolution of imprisonment for debt from the Statute of Marlbridge, 52 Henry III. c. 23, to the Act for the Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt--so-called--of 1869, would be out of place here. It is enough to know that little by little the principle of the right of one man to seize the body of another in an execution for debt became recognised by statutes and by custom until the wrongs it caused reached such a scandalous pitch in the eighteenth century that some reform of it became inevitable.

The more modern contests over its partial mitigation from time to time throw a direct light on the differences of opinion upon the matter of to-day. It will be seen that there have always been two schools of thought among politicians. One school was clear, that to tamper with imprisonment meant ruin to trade; the other held--what I take to be the true gospel--that a man ought not to be allowed to obtain credit on the security of his body.

Until the end of the eighteenth century the harshness and cruelty of imprisonment for debt received little attention. The history of the debtors' prisons, the Fleet, the King's Bench, the Marshalsea and the City Compters, are pages of the story of our law that no one can read to-day without shame. Yet the Howards and Frys who called attention to the facts met with just as little encouragement and attention from the rulers of the country as anyone does to-day who desires to put the coping stones on the completed work, the foundations of which were laid by these great reformers.

The extraordinary results that took place through imprisonment for debt as it existed in the eighteenth century are surely beyond parallel in any legal system. The plays and fictions of the time are full of instances.

You remember when Roderick Random finds himself in the Marshalsea he meets with his old friend Jackson and asks him about his _amour_ with the lady of fortune: "You must know," replies Jackson, "that a few days after our adventure I found means to be married to that same fine lady you speak of and pa.s.sed the night with her at her lodgings, so much to her satisfaction, that early in the morning, after a good deal of snivelling and sobbing, she owned that far from being an heiress of great fortune she was no other than a common woman of the town who had decoyed me into matrimony in order to enjoy the privilege of a _femme couverte_, and that unless I made my escape immediately I should be arrested for a debt of her contracting by bailiffs employed and instructed for that purpose." Upon hearing this poor Jackson escapes and serves for a few months as surgeon of a sloop, but, on his return, is arrested for a debt of his wife's and comes to live at the Marshalsea on half pay.