"What he now desired to call attention to was the clause which followed and which dealt with the case of debtors who owed less than fifty pounds. That was the class of debtors who filled our County Courts with plaints and added very considerably to the number of the occupants of our gaols. It had always been felt to be a great hardship that while a large debtor could with ease relieve himself of all his liabilities he or his trustees might be prosecuting a poor man for thirty or forty shillings, and the latter might be sent to prison without having any means provided for him to make a composition with his creditors, and when, after satisfying the debt, he came out of gaol he was still liable in full to all his other creditors." * * * * * "But the more important provision which he had made for dealing with this subject was that under which a County Court judge might in future make an order for the payment by a debtor who owed less than fifty pounds by instalments or otherwise of all or any part of his debts. A debtor who was brought up on a judgment summons or a County Court plaint might state that he was indebted to other persons, might give in a schedule of his debts and propose an arrangement for discharging them, and, if the Court thought it reasonable, it might at once confirm it, so that a small debtor would thus be in exactly the same position as a large debtor who had succeeded in making a composition with his creditors or in arranging for a scheme of liquidation. Although he had not abolished in all cases imprisonment for debt, yet, if these provisions became law, it could no longer be said that any inequality existed as between rich and poor. The resort to imprisonment to secure payment would be much easier, and a large discretion would be vested on the judges to arrange for the relief to the small debtor by a reasonable composition." I have set this out at length because it is enormously encouraging to know that thirty years ago Mr. Chamberlain's ideal was to destroy the County Court imprisonment for debt and to give the working man who fell into debt a bankruptcy system similar to that of the rich. Why did it fail? Well, it has not been wholly a failure, but it certainly has not fulfilled all its author's generous hopes. In the first place the fifty-pound limit is too small, another reason of its non-success is that it is a voluntary system of some complication in competition with the simple, brutal method of the judgment summons and imprisonment for debt, but probably its unpopularity is chiefly due to the fact that the Treasury has always deliberately crabbed it by imposing harsh and unreasonable fees.