‘Insolvent debtors,’ as those not in trade were distinguished, were in yet worse case. Imprisonment on ‘mesne process’ or, in plain English, on the mere affidavit of a creditor, was the leading principle of this branch of the bankruptcy law; and in prison the debtor remained until he found security or paid. The anomaly which exempted real estate from the payment of debts had been removed in 1825; and, since then, a debtor, actually in prison, could obtain a release from confinement by a surrender of all his real and personal property, although he remained liable for all the unpaid portion of his debts whenever the Court should be satisfied of his ability to pay them. Everything, moreover, depended upon the creditor. He still had an absolute option, after verdict and judgment, of taking the body of the debtor in satisfaction, and the early records of the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors show how weak and impotent were the remedies provided by the Legislature. It was not until twenty years later that the full benefits of bankruptcy were extended to persons who had become indebted without fraud or culpable negligence. Enough has already been said of the state of the debtors’ prisons. It is sufficient to add here that in the second year of the Queen nearly four thousand persons were arrested for debt in London alone, and of these nearly four hundred remained permanently in prison. It was, however, in the administration of the criminal law that the harsh temper of the times reached its zenith. Both as regards procedure and penalties, justice then dealt hardly indeed with persons accused of crimes. In cases of felony, for instance, the prisoner could not, down to 1836, be defended by counsel, and had, therefore, to speak for himself. Now think what this meant! The whole proceedings, from arrest to judgment, were--for the matter of that they still are--highly artificial and technical. The prisoner, often poor and uneducated, was generally unaccustomed to sustained thought. The indictment, which was only read over to him, was often almost interminable in length, with a separate count for each offence, and all the counts mixed and varied in every way that a subtle ingenuity could suggest. Defences depended as largely for their success upon the prisoner taking advantage of some technical flaw (which, in many cases, had to be done before pleading to the indictment), as upon his establishing his innocence upon the facts. But what chance had an illiterate prisoner of detecting even a fundamental error when he was not allowed a copy of the document? In fact, in the words of Mr. Justice Stephen, the most eminent living authority upon the history of our criminal law,’ it is scarcely a parody to say that from the earliest times down to our own days the law relating to indictments was much the same as if some small proportion of the prisoners convicted had been allowed to toss-up for their liberty.’