IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2644, 28 September 1882, Page 3

IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT.

To the Editor of the Globe. Sir, —To assert that an honest but unfortunate man can be shut up in prison, there to be kept at the people’s expense because of his inability to pay hia grooer’s, butcher’s, baker’s, or draper’s bill, will be but to ha told that such au outrage haa happily been prohibited by law—that It Is a buried barbarism. Tf such be the answer, what, it may be aaked, is the fact ? The fact of the matter, judging from a case adjudicated not long ago in one of our lower Courts, la that an old man of sixty three years of age, and who w»s suffering from the effects of an injury received while employed In the railway service, was sued for a sum of £5 due to a grocer, who, upon getting judgment, found hla debtor too poor to have in his possession as muoh household furniture as would, if sold, pay the claim. The man was thereupon brought to Court, and In face of his appeal for mercy on ac ount of hia poverty and Incapacity to lab jt, was ordered to pay the grooer within a given time, or deliver up his liberty to the gaoler. The exacting creditor, It should be mentioned, inflated upon the latter order being made, and at the expiration of the time within which payment was to have been made, he consummated his determination, and ordered hia helpless grey haired debtor to prison. The old man was duly incarcerated for 14 days in Addington gaol, and his poor old wido w a month after his release mourned his death, but under the consolation that he had passed beyond the reach of the man with the bill of £5. Such is the brief story of this particular case, but it is one out of many that could bo told were the hundreds of small debtor judgments which have come up in the Courts of the colony laid bare in their hideous history. The great cry amongst the shopkeeper* nowadays is “Increase the stringency of the bankruptcy laws,” but there exists a well grounded belief, and one daily gaming acceptance among the thinking and better informed sections of the people, that were imprisonment for debt (fraud always excepted) absolutely abolished, the indiscriminate credit system of the present would speedi'.y bo checked, the insolvency notices of clerks, laborers, and the like, speedily beoome obsolete, and the duties of the Oomts and the necessity for bankruptcy reform greatly diminished If not remedied completely. Youra, &0., AN OBSEf YEB.