But when you come to our other writ, the _capias satisfaciendum_, or "_ca. sa._" as it is written in the absurd legal shorthand of the day, or "body warrant" as it is still termed with brutal accuracy in Lancashire, then you will find that in old days different considerations prevailed. You were not allowed to seize a man's body for debt, but only his goods. And I am glad to find myself setting forth high Tory doctrine and asking my fellow citizens to return to the earliest common law of the land, for this seems clear that originally, unless the action was for trespass _vi et armis_, which was in the nature of a criminal matter, there was no remedy against the body of the defendant. The _ca. sa._ whereby the sheriff was ordered to seize the body of the defendant in execution could not issue at the instance of a successful plaintiff at common law. In other words there was no imprisonment for debt. Our forefathers recognised what we seem to have partially lost sight of, that as credit could only be given commercially to a man with goods, it was fair and just that his goods should be seized if he did not carry out his contract. But for reasons of their own--no longer sound as reasons to-day, it is true--they refused to allow a man to mortgage his body for goods. Body warrants only issued against criminals or in actions of a semi-criminal character. It will be reassuring to those conservative minds who fear the abolition of imprisonment for debt to remember that there was a time in England when it did not exist, and that if we abolish it to-day we are working on old-fashioned and constitutional lines. Imprisonment for debt has not the sanction of antiquity, and a desire to sweep it away must not be put down to the wild and wicked desires of a political futurist architect, but rather to the pious hopes of one who is in deep sympathy with the best features of the Norman and Early English social institutions of his native land. To tell the long story of the statutory evolution of imprisonment for debt from the Statute of Marlbridge, 52 Henry III. c. 23, to the Act for the Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt--so-called--of 1869, would be out of place here. It is enough to know that little by little the principle of the right of one man to seize the body of another in an execution for debt became recognised by statutes and by custom until the wrongs it caused reached such a scandalous pitch in the eighteenth century that some reform of it became inevitable. The more modern contests over its partial mitigation from time to time throw a direct light on the differences of opinion upon the matter of to-day. It will be seen that there have always been two schools of thought among politicians. One school was clear, that to tamper with imprisonment meant ruin to trade; the other held--what I take to be the true gospel--that a man ought not to be allowed to obtain credit on the security of his body.