A case that Lord Denman mentioned in the debates in 1837 created a good deal of uneasiness in the public mind. A certain Portuguese nobleman, the Duke de Cadaval, on landing at Falmouth, or when he was residing at Plymouth, was arrested on a pretended debt, thrown into prison, and obliged to pay a large sum of money to procure his release. He afterwards recovered in an action for malicious arrest heavy damages, but he never received a penny of them, nor is there any record that the false witnesses were punished for perjury. There are many stories of this kind, and it was an obvious result of the system of arrest on mesne process. One would have thought that there would have been no difficulty about abolishing a legal machinery that brought about such injustice, but, in truth and fact, it was quite otherwise. Indeed, the people who wanted to abolish the excellent and business-like system were regarded as very pestilent and turbulent busy-bodies by the average citizen. Another incident of imprisonment for debt at this date was that if a creditor preferred to issue a _ca. sa._ to a _fi. fa._ and took the body of the debtor in preference to the property of the debtor, he thereby discharged the debtor. If, therefore, the debtor preferred imprisonment to paying his debts, the law afforded the creditor no other remedy. There were instances of debtors remaining in prison for over twenty years well able to pay their debts, but preferring to live in luxury within the rules of the prison. _Re Pickwick_ is perhaps the popular leading case on this point. But whilst we remember with pleasure how the law enabled our dear friend to outwit for a time those wily attorneys Dodson and Fogg, do not let us forget the terrible sights he saw in the Fleet. The Chancery prisoner, the fortunate legatee whose lawyers had had the thousand pounds legacy, and who was in the Fleet, mending shoes for twenty years because the loom of the law had woven a shroud of costs round him and buried him in prison--he was no fiction. His heart was broken when his child died and he could not kiss him in his coffin. There he remained living a solitary lingering death, lonely amid the noise and riot of the Fleet, until God gave him his discharge. This and many another case was before My Lords and known to the intelligent Commons when the question of the abolition of arrest on mesne process came up for discussion in 1837.