It was further contended, that while justice and humanity dictated the liberation from arrest of the body of the unfortunate debtor, justice inhibited the exoneration of property from going to satisfy just debts; that the obligation, wherever the ability existed, to pay just debts, was eternal, and that this law, in having a retro-active effect, was unjust. Evils infinitely greater had been inflicted by inconsiderate and fraudulent debtors taking refuge in the provisions of the bankrupt law than from all the inhumanity exercised by merciless creditors over unfortunate debtors. That the principle of the bankrupt law was also retro-active, inasmuch as it destroyed the grade of dignity existing in many of the States, by which a bonded debt obtained a preference over an open account; that it absolutely impaired the subsisting contract between the person holding and the person signing the bond. It was remarked that the principle of the bankrupt law, however good in theory, could never be carried into effect, as had been proved by a long course of British experience, without a recurrence to those sanguinary laws which they had introduced for the prevention and punishment of fraud, but which were so abhorrent to our code of laws that public opinion could not tolerate them. The expenses of going through the forms of bankruptcy constituted no inconsiderable objection to the system. The appointment of a Commissioner was understood to be in no small degree lucrative, and the various processes through which the bankrupt was compelled to go, in practice, reduced the little property he had left to a state still less. Indeed, from the practical effects of the system, it would appear that it had been made more for the emolument of the Commissioner than for the benefit of the creditor.[7] However necessary this system might be in England, who owed almost the whole of her prosperity to trade, it became not a nation, the leading feature of whose character was agriculture, to tread in her footsteps; but, on the contrary, to avert rather than to hasten the period when such a system would be rendered necessary; that, in truth, the spirit of trade in this country was sufficiently vigorous, and only required the common protection given to all other occupations, to prosper to every beneficial purpose.