No system of this kind will be successful without compulsion and some clerk of the Court in the position of an official receiver to advise the poor how to go about the matter and to see that the order made is carried out. Such a system is in vogue in some Courts and has proved a success in mitigating imprisonment for debt and holding out a helping hand to those who were drifting into insolvency. But the system as it stands depends too much on the initiative of the County Court judge or the registrar. Thus we find on a working-class circuit like Oldham, Rochdale, etc., there will be over six hundred orders made, whereas in Whitechapel only two orders are made in the same year. Systems favourable to the working classes flourish more vigorously in the North than in the South. You must not suppose the working man is allowed to cast off his debts in the wholesale way in which the thorough-bred, blue-blooded bankrupt does. Not a bit of it. The order made against him is that he shall pay his debts to the extent of so many shillings in the pound at so many shillings a month. If he does not carry out the order there is prison for him for every instalment he fails to pay if the judge so orders, or at the best his order is rescinded and all his creditors are down on him again as before. But the main drawback to the business is the extortionate fees charged by the Treasury. Here is a poor devil with twenty-five shillings and a wife and family and, let us say, thirty pounds of debt, and the judge gives him an administration order to pay ten shillings in the pound at five shillings a month. The Treasury are at once down on him. Their fees are always calculated, not on the dividend paid, but on the total amount of the debts, and they insist in every case on two shillings in the pound. Thus, in the case of the man with thirty pounds of debt, the Treasury want three pounds money down before the creditors get anything. In 1911 the Treasury took no less than L13,000 in these fees. In this matter we cannot acquit the law of the offence of grinding the poor. Imagine a wealthy country like this squeezing the insolvent poor out of their weekly pittances instead of helping them to pay their debts. I call it a wicked policy for the State to throw impediments in the way of a working-class man who is struggling out of the back-waters of debt into the fairway of solvency. Do not let us shut our eyes to what it means, for the Treasury is only our servant and ought to be doing our will, and the responsibility is yours and mine. For we know that every penny of that L13,000 comes out of the mouths of hungry women and children or, at the best, robs them of so many boots and so much clothing.