I fear the earth will do a lot of rolling on before we abolish imprisonment for debt, but very likely I am exhibiting a somewhat senile haste in the matter which is unbecoming. To me it appears strange that, whilst in every other science the professors of it are making earnest efforts to place the result of their studies to the credit of mankind, the law seems more incapable than theology of assimilating new ideas and getting into step with the march of time. I have no hesitation in saying that the County Court, as a debt-collecting machine, is a one-horse wooden antiquity only fit for the scrap heap. If you went down to Euston and found them coupling up Puffing Billy to the Scotch Express and the engine driver dissolved in tears, you would understand the kind of hopeless feeling that oppresses me every morning when I sit down to try a hundred judgment summonses. For how can they be said to be tried in the sense in which an Englishman is supposed to be tried before he is deprived of his liberty. There is very little evidence, often the defendant makes no appearance and does not even send his wife to tell the tale for him. He cannot afford to leave his work and she ought not to be asked to leave her babies. The word, therefore, of the plaintiff, or, more probably, the debt collector--and many of these men, making it their business and dealing daily with the Court, are far more accurate and careful than the plaintiffs themselves--this is all you have to go by. The law, as I told you, left it entirely to the taste and fancy of the judges what evidence they should receive, and though nowadays all judges honestly endeavour, I think, not to carry out the law to the full extent of its cruelty, yet naturally different men hold different views of the rights and liabilities of the poor, and so there is no sort of equality in the treatment they receive in different districts.