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 brass 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 titles. 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.