And an enormous evil, the extent and results of which can only be guessed, is that the power to send a fellow citizen to gaol for debt, the power to issue or not to issue a warrant for his arrest at any moment after he is in default, places a man and his family so entirely at the mercy of his creditor that, if the creditor be a man of bad character, terrible results may follow. Few of us probably have not heard stories of an evil-minded creditor using his power to seduce the virtue of a wife in her husband's absence. There is certainly truth in such stories. Human nature is the same in narrower lanes than Park lane. The tally-man plays on the wife's love of finery, she gets into debt, her husband knows nothing of it. As long as the wife is complacent nothing is heard of the debt. I do not say such scandals are common, but I have heard enough of such stories to know they are not fairy tales. Human nature being what it is the wonder is that these dramas are not more often enacted. When the poor have their Divorce Courts no doubt the evidence of them will be forthcoming, meanwhile they rest mainly on the complaints of women of insults offered to them, which may be fabrications, but are not always so. What a responsibility rests on a State that maintains a system which leads to such evils. Another and less terrible affair is the political influence wielded by a grocer or draper over the free and independent voter whom he can put in gaol for twenty-one days if he fails to see eye to eye with him at election times about Disestablishment or Tariff Reform. Yet this is one of the minor evils of the working of the Debtors Act of 1869. In a hard-fought Lancashire election which ended in a tie there was a great flutter and to-do caused by the arrest on the eve of the poll of some earnest debtor of one colour by an equally earnest creditor of another colour. It may, of course, have had nothing to do with the election--but one never knows. Anyhow, it happened, and it was certainly not a desirable incident from the point of view of the losing candidate.