And whereas I shall show you that bankruptcy and divorce are the luxuries of the rich, so it is only fair, I think, to allow that imprisonment for debt is a distinctive privilege that the law reserves for the poor. A man among the well-to-do classes is never imprisoned for debt; the wage-earners are practically the only people who are subject to it. The governor of a gaol reported a case to the last Select Commission that sat and did nothing on the subject. A labourer was sent to his custody for twenty-one days in default of payment of four shillings and costs, five and ninepence in all. How can a State for very shame prate about the extortion of moneylenders when it adds forty per cent. on to a small debt like this for costs? The man was a widower with four children, the eldest of whom was thirteen, and the youngest two or three years old. When father went to prison the children went to the workhouse. That is all part of the system. The debt was a tally-man's debt for clothes supplied to his late wife. The governor sent it as a typical case for the Commission to consider. "As I believe," he wrote, "that there is an idea of having the law on imprisonment for debt amended." The good governor was, of course, entirely mistaken about that. There is no such idea, except in the heads of dreamers and visionaries like Elisha and the good governor and myself, and we do not count. So his report ended in nothing, and remains on record as a typical result of the working of imprisonment for debt in a civilised European State in the early part of the year of our Lord 1909. I should like to leave the matter there as a horrible example, for so it is, but I am a man of truth--and, in fact, the poor labourer was not kept in gaol. It was afterwards discovered that the good governor, when he investigated the man's case at 9.30 a.m. on the morning after his arrest, had paid his debt for him and set him free. You remember that Elisha in a similar case performed a miracle by filling several jars with oil. For myself, I think the good governor's was an even nobler deed.