Till thou canst rail the seal from off my bond, Thou but offend'st thy lungs to speak so loud. And certainly as the law stands it is necessary to have a Court of Appeal stern and unbending in judgment to uphold the sacred nature of the contract. The doubt in my somewhat sentimental mind is whether transactions of this character between knaves and fools are in any practical business sense really contracts at all; and if they are to be deemed to be contracts whether power should not be given to Courts of Justice to release the victims from the flat-traps in which they have been snared, and give them at least some of their fur back again. This has been attempted with the moneylender, but not at present with very great success. For myself I have always thought that the moneylender, if he be a real moneylender and not merely a fee-snatcher, is by no means the worst setter of flat-traps. I have an uneasy feeling that if moneylenders were Nonconformists or Churchmen, instead of being Jews, we should love them better. For if you get an actual sovereign from a moneylender you have at all events got some concrete thing that you can exchange for food and drink or clothing, and the token has an ascertained value; moreover, if you know a little arithmetic you know what you are paying for it. But if you buy clothing from a tally-man or a watch from a travelling jeweller, or a walnut suite from an instalment furniture dealer, or a family Bible in parts from an area tout, you can have no idea whatever of the value of the thing purchased or the percentage of profit on the deal. And, though I should like to see all this class of trading done away with, and know that it causes great ruin and misery, yet to my mind the moneylender and even the lower class of tally-men are angels of light compared with the directors of insolvent collecting societies, who take the savings of the thrifty poor on promises that any sensible person must know to be incapable of performance. As I have shown elsewhere, the bulk of the smaller flat-trap poachers could be quietly exterminated by the abolition of imprisonment for debt. That alone is the artificial manure which enables these social weeds to flourish. Withhold it from them and they would wither and die, and the world would be well rid of them.