If the man in the street could listen, as I have had to do for the last twenty years, to tales of misery and wretchedness brought about by our absurd credit system he would understand something of my impatience at its continuance. I remember a small household that was ruined by a gramophone. A poor woman, a widow, earned twelve shillings a week, and a son was doing well at fifteen shillings a week. There were two little children. As things go in their world they were well-to-do. The Devil, in the form of a tout, came down the street one Saturday afternoon, with a beautiful gramophone. It was only a shilling a week, and all that was to be done was for mother and son "to sign just there at the bottom of the paper, and, of course, if they did not want to keep it they could send it back." However, later on, they found that they had signed to buy it; the boy fell out of work, the case was put in Court, and judgment was entered against both mother and son in default of appearance for two or three pounds. Then the son enlisted and went to India, and I first heard of the case when they brought the widow up on a judgment summons. I asked her why she had signed the guarantee, and her reply was: "Tom was such a good lad and he was in work, and he was that keen to have it I couldn't deny him." Anyone who has ever been any kind of a father or mother will not cast a stone at her for her folly. That is one of the short and simple tales from the annals of imprisonment for debt. What match are confiding folk like these for the lying scallywags who tout their inferior wares round the streets? And instead of our law remembering that we pray daily to be delivered from temptation, and playing the part of a father of the fatherless and a friend of the widows, it keeps alive section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869, in the interests of about as low a class of knaves as ever disgraced the name of English trade. I know very well that there are many good honest folk who approve of imprisonment for debt and have fears about its abolition. These should remember that in France and Germany and a great part of America there is no such thing, and yet trade does not suffer and the working classes do not starve. I should quite agree that if a man defrauds a tradesman by lying promises or cheating he should be punished, but imprisonment should be for fraud, not, as it is now, for poverty. As I have already pointed out, in America no honest man is likely to get into prison merely for the wickedness of owing money. We cannot say that is true here. In Germany the working man lives on a cash basis. Credit is not largely given, as there is no power of imprisonment for debt.