What is gained by imprisoning a man for debt? Nothing that I ever heard of. It is not required to deter him from being ruined again; he probably won't get the chance, and if he did the fact of having been sold up once is quite sufficient deterrent from wanting to be sold up again. Will it deter others? People don't get ruined for the fun of the thing. It is a dreadful thing to be sold up; in itself that is quite enough. Then what good does imprisoning the poor devil do? It does none. It does harm, and nothing but harm. It hurts the debtor and prevents his recovering himself; it panders to the desire of society and of creditors for revenge. There is an idea abroad that when anything untoward happens somebody should be punished, and then society will have vindicated itself. But the duty of society is to prevent crime, not punish it, and it cannot whitewash itself in this way. It merely condemns itself more even than it condemns him it punishes. Moreover, the ability of creditors to imprison debtors is misused in a way that is almost criminal. The creditor will imprison the debtor with the hope that the debtor's relatives and friends will subscribe to save him and them from this disgrace. That is to say, the law allows a creditor to put improper pressure on totally innocent people in order to get his claims satisfied. Think of the iniquity of a law like that! And what are these claims? Are they just claims? They are legal claims, but are they just? For the most part they are claims of money-lenders. The Courts act as collecting agencies to the most oppressive system of money-lending that can be imagined. Two and a half per-cent per month is not unusual. Government has shown its recognition of this danger by creating Co-operative Credit Banks, which are a great boon. But it has not thought of revising its Civil Court procedure. As in most other matters, it recognises something wrong, but attributes it to the people, not to the Courts and the law; therefore it does nothing. But at all events imprisonment for debt should be abolished. There were eight hundred unfortunate debtors imprisoned in Burma in 1910. Do you wonder that the people dread and hate the Courts?