The tally-men, the moneylenders, the flash jewellery touts, the sellers of costly Bibles in series, of gramophones and other luxuries of the mean streets, these are the knaves the State caters for. For these businesses are based, and soundly and commercially based, on imprisonment for debt. The game is to go forth with a lot of flash watches, persuade a workman in a public-house or elsewhere to sign a paper that he has bought one--he always says, silly fellow, that he thought he had it on approval--and when he fails to pay his instalments put him in the County Court. I have known a pigeon-flying working man earning thirty-five shillings a week buy a watch priced eight pounds which had a second hand and a stop movement for timing that momentarily overcame his better sense of economy. Without imprisonment for debt it would not have paid the servant of the Evil One to have led him into the temptation. To these traders the County Court is of real value. They issue their plaints in bundles, they take out judgment summonses in batches of thirty, fifty, or a hundred at a time, they can afford to have a skilled clerk well versed in the procedure of the Court to fill up the papers, and can run the machine which a complacent State puts at their disposal with very good results to themselves. I remember a firm starting in Manchester with the sale of some sort of horse medicine--good or bad is really no matter. The method of business was delightfully simple. The proprietor travelled round in Herefordshire and Devonshire and persuaded the farmers to try some of the horse medicine. A form was signed which was a contract of sale and a promise to pay in Manchester. This gave the Manchester Court jurisdiction to issue the summonses, which were for sums of under two pounds. Letters came complaining that no contract had been intended, that the stuff was worthless, etc., but no one turned up and judgment went by default. The success of the business was its ruin. The plaintiff, tired of filling up the forms of the Court and well knowing that none of his customers would pay without process, actually had affidavits of his own ready printed, and this cynical admission of the fraudulent nature of his trade--for an honest man would not expect nearly all his customers to refuse to accept goods ordered--led to his undoing. Inquiries were made, one or two farmers were induced to appear and give evidence, and his business career came to an end. I am not, of course, saying that the County Court exists only for those who have the courage and effrontery to make the full use of the machine as an accessory to shady trading. But it can be demonstrated that imprisonment for debt is the mainstay of such trades as moneylending and credit drapery and all those low trades that make their profits by foisting shoddy luxuries on to working men and their wives.