And when the supporters of this wretched system tell you that very few people actually go to gaol, that is, in a sense, true. There are only about six or seven thousand, say, who go to prison on a hundred and odd thousand warrants issued. The number too, is decreasing. This is not, however, to the credit of the law, but because, as I shall show, the law is not strictly administered, and also because the public conscience, what Lord Haldane so graphically described under the German title _Sittlichkeit_, is against it. The habit of mind, custom, and the right action of good citizens do not sanction enforcing debt by imprisonment. It is only the greedy, low-down citizens who deign to use it. But the matter is lightly regarded. A few thousand poor people doing time for trumpery debts cannot, anyhow, be allowed to trouble the sleep of the middle-class voter, and what am I but an untaught knave to bring their slovenly, unhandsome corpses betwixt the wind and his nobility? It is not only the very poor who are dragged to gaol that suffer. The system is really one for blackmailing the poor man's friends and relations. You ask a debtor when he comes before you on a second instalment of a debt: "But you managed to pay the first instalment?" "Yes," he replies; "but I had to borrow it from my brother-in-law, and I have not paid him back yet, and he can ill-afford to lose it." I have heard that story hundreds of times, and I know it is often a true one. Bailiffs will tell you that on the road to gaol a prisoner will ask to be allowed to call at various houses, looking for an Elisha, and if he cannot find anyone to work miracles nowadays he does very often find someone with five and ninepence and a kind heart. The poor are very good to one another in distress, and it is better that a brother man should be saved from gaol and restored to his home and children than that the landlord should have his next week's rent. In the bad old days a County Court judge openly said that he found it better to commit to prison for six weeks rather than any shorter period, for he found that the longer the period for which he committed people to prison the shorter the term served, "because when they were committed for the whole six weeks they moved heaven and earth among their friends to get the funds to pay." Friends of the system of imprisonment for debt call this "putting the screw on." I think "blackmailing" is the straighter English--but any dirty old phrase will do.