The Attorney-General who introduced the Debtors Act, 1869, may surely be credited with understanding what it was intended to do. He knew well enough that his Bill was going to abolish imprisonment for debt for the rich and retain it for the poor. He pointed out that he was making bankruptcy cheaper and more stringent. It would be obviously absurd, he said, to make a day labourer a bankrupt, and that brought him to the very difficult question of County Court jurisdiction. At that time the County Court had a jurisdiction to punish for fraud as an incident of debt and also to imprison for debt. He proposed to take away the jurisdiction to imprison for fraud and to leave fraudulent debtors, both rich and poor, to the Criminal Courts. "But then," he continued, "came the other question of County Court imprisonment where a man was able to pay his debt, but would not do so. He did not regard that imprisonment as a mere punishment for a past offence _but it was a process of imprisonment for the purpose of compelling the payment of a debt_, and it was a process very analogous to the principle of the Bankruptcy Law." He came to the conclusion, after further argument, "that this power of imprisonment in the one case he had mentioned must be retained." When an Attorney-General in 1869 brings in a Bill to abolish imprisonment for debt and deliberately tells us that he retains one class of imprisonment for debt, it is inconceivable why people to-day should strive to make out that the system we are working is not imprisonment for debt, but something else. Unless it be that the advocates of imprisonment for debt know in their heads that it is an evil, out-of-date system, and they have an instinct that it smells more sweetly under some other name. From 1869 to the present there has been no further reform. Many hope that there never will be any, but for my part I have no doubt it will come along, not in my time, perhaps, but whenever the right moment may be. From 1869 until to-day over three hundred thousand English citizens have been actually imprisoned who have not been guilty of any crime whatsoever. They have been imprisoned mainly for poverty or, if you will, for improvidence--that blessed word that so insidiously describes in the poor that failure in economic asceticism, that lack of cold self-denial of luxury and extravagance, that absence of patient thrift and simplicity of life--characteristic features which are never wanting in the beautiful lives of those social classes above them that the poor must learn to look up to and to imitate. CHAPTER IV HOW THE MACHINE WORKS Roll on, thou ball, roll on! Through seas of inky air Roll on! It's true I've got no shirts to wear, It's true my butcher's bill is due; It's true my prospects all look blue-- But don't let that unsettle you! Never _you_ mind! Roll on! W. S. GILBERT: "To the Terrestrial Globe."