Some time ago I made a careful examination of some 460 judgment summonses taken consecutively. The figures were from the Manchester Court. I found the following were the trades represented:-- Drapers 154 General dealers 130 Jewellers 60 Grocers 35 Moneylenders 24 Doctors 10 Tailors 5 Miscellaneous traders issuing less than four summonses 42 --- 460 General dealers, it must be remembered, are traders in a large or small way of business who will sell furniture, drapery, clothes, cutlery, or anything you like, on the instalment system. Their methods of trading are tally-men's methods. If this list be looked at, it will be seen that the general public make very little use of imprisonment for debt. The substantial shopkeeper and ratepayer is scarcely represented at all, the grocers and a few of the big general dealers being the only people who pay rates. Some of these general dealers it should be remembered are limited companies having numerous agents paid by high commissions and spending large sums in advertising. Their prices are apparently low, but the quality of their goods leaves much to be desired. Now what worries me is, why should the State keep Courts going for men of this class? The only creditor in that list for whom one can have the least sympathy is the doctor, and the National Insurance Act has now put him on a cash basis, so that in a list taken to-day he would not appear so often. It is clear from these figures that at a cost to the general body of taxpayers you are encouraging a bad class of parasite traders to choke the growth of thrift among the working classes. For unless you make it ruinous to the creditor for the credit to be given you will never stop it. How can a man at work hinder credit being given through the agency of the wife when the law permits it and caters for it by providing the trader who lives by it with a special debt-collecting machine without which this class of trader were impossible. I have known cases where a working man's wife was dealing with nineteen different Scotch drapers. What wages can satisfy such an orgy of drapery as that? How often, too, do men and women buy watches to pawn them for drink or a day at the races? What is this but an evil and ruinous form of moneylending? And what makes these things possible among our poor people? The law siding with the knave against the fool; the saving clause for the imprisonment of poor debtors in the Act of 1869.