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 ass 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 vassal 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."