It was not, indeed, until the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria, a time of great hope for the poor and distressed, a period which has not inaptly been called "the springtime of social reform," that any practical movement was made. I myself keep March 31st as the birthday of the movement for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, but anyway it is a red-letter day in the history of English literature and worthy of great honour. For on that day, in the year 1836, the first number of "Pickwick," appeared and there is no doubt that the account of the Fleet prison in that volume has made it the popular text-book of legal reform in these matters. If "Pickwick" in 1836 was not the _causa causans_ of Lord Cottenham's Bill to amend the law of insolvency which was introduced in December, 1837, there is no doubt that Dickens' stories of the cruelty of imprisonment for debt supplied the motive power necessary to pass it by rousing the public conscience to insist upon something being done. The point of particular reform aimed at by the Bill was to abolish what was called arrest on mesne process. It is an absurd term, and it was a still more absurd thing. The wonder is that it had survived as long as it did. Mesne process, translated into English, means middle process, and the idea was to lock a defendant up in the middle of the trial and keep him there in case it turned out at the end of the proceedings that he owed the money. It was as popular with the sharks of the eighteenth century as the present imprisonment is with the moneylenders and tally-men of to-day. Any person who would make an affidavit that another owed him twenty pounds or more could lock him up pending the trial and, unless the victim could find the money and pay it into Court, he remained in the sponging house until the trial came on. Harry Warrington was served so, if you remember. Two gentlemen came from over the way, "one of them takes a strip of paper out of his pocket and, putting his hand upon Mr. Warrington's shoulder, declares him his prisoner. A hackney coach is called and poor Harry goes to sleep in Chancery Lane." Certainly Harry owed the money and had been reckless and extravagant enough, but even then the method of arrest strikes us to-day as a little high-handed. Nor was it always made use of with honesty. To bold rascals it was a very perfect machine for the wickedest blackmail. An affidavit of debt--and eighteenth century affidavits were no nearer the truth than those of the present century--was all that was required, and if in the end the affidavit was found to be false, the only remedy was to prosecute the swearer of it--if you could find him.