As Sir George Jessel said, the real intention of the Debtors Act, 1869, was to abolish imprisonment for debt for honest debtors and to retain the right of judges to punish fraudulent debtors. Many of the sections of the Act are framed, and to some extent assist, in the excellent aim of making it hot for the naughty and wicked debtor who has cheated or defrauded his creditors. Why is such a person punished? asks the Master of the Rolls. I give the answer in his own words. "Simply because he is a dishonest man. He need not perhaps be called a thief in so many words, but he is a man who takes or keeps money belonging to other people, and he is punished accordingly." Instances of such are defaulting trustees and similar misdemeanants, and, so far as the Act provides for their punishment, we have no quarrel with it. Now no one would contend that the system of imprisonment for debt as carried out in the County Courts is a system directed in the main against dishonest men. Improvident, careless, foolish and childlike these poor defendants in the County Court may fairly be described; but if a day of judgment audit could be carried out, and a balance struck on the item of "honesty" as between the working-men debtors and the class of traders who give them credit, I make little doubt which class, as a class, would show the better figures. No, we do not imprison in the County Court for dishonesty _per se_; dishonesty may or may not be a feature of any particular case, but it is not an essential. The order for imprisonment is made under section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869. That is the tally-man's charter. I am sorry to bore anyone with all these sections and statutes, but there is such a lot of inaccuracy written and talked about the matter that it is best to set down the actual enactment. We must remember then that the Act, being an Act for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, had begun by enacting in the fourth section that "with the exceptions hereinafter mentioned no person shall be arrested or imprisoned for making default in payment of a sum of money." These last words state quite clearly the true principle of what the law ought to be. Unfortunately for the poor the special exception made for them has only too truly proved the rule. The opponents of abolition were but too successful in their endeavours to make inroads upon the thoroughness of the proposed reform, and one of the exceptions was called "a saving power of committal for small debts." It might have been better described perhaps "as a saving power to imprison poor debtors." This is the famous section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869, over which so much controversy has since arisen, on the working of which two important commissions have sat and reported, and under which we may proudly claim to be one of the last civilised countries that clings to a system of imprisonment for debt.