The physiological tutor will take his pupils into the laboratory and cut up a rabbit to show them where their livers ought to be, the microscopist will choose a newt to exhibit to you the circulation of the blood, and in like manner, for my purposes, the debtor seems to me to possess all the necessary legal incidents in him through which one can give an excellent object lesson on the law and the poor. There is no legal mystery about a debtor; he is a common object of our legal seashore, as ancient of lineage as the periwinkle and sometimes almost as difficult to get at. Everyone has in his life at some time or other been a debtor, though not all of us have attained to the dignity of a co-respondent, a mortgagor, a garnishee, a bankrupt or a _cestui que trust_. It seems to me that to demonstrate to the man in the street the unfairness of our law of imprisonment for debt is such a feasible proposition, that I have come to regard the subject as very fitting for the citizen's kindergarten education on legal reform. Once understand the history, and the causes of the continued existence, of imprisonment for debt, and its evil effect on right action, conduct and social life, and you will find it easier to diagnose the more obscure legal diseases which are partially the outcome and partially the cause of much real distress among the poor. Carlyle tells us to "examine history for it is philosophy teaching by experience," and, if we take his advice in this matter of imprisonment for debt, we shall, I think, be bound to admit that what is going on among us day by day in the County Courts of this country is in historical fact a relic of a very ancient barbarism. It is the more extraordinary to me that this relic should still be venerated, since history also makes it clear that teachers, prophets and law-givers of all ages have testified to their sense of the cruelty and injustice of the law which thrusts a man into prison because he does not pay his neighbour what he owes him. I propose, therefore, before I set down exactly what we are doing to-day, to trace the pedigree of our present system of dealing with debtors and show you historically and cinematographically, as it were, how the world has treated its debtors in the past and what the saner men of different ages thought about it at the time. In this way the man in the street of to-day will have the material for forming a sound judgment on the question of what we should do with the poor debtor.