THE TROUBLES OF A DEBTOR.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2683, 8 June 1889, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE TROUBLES OF A DEBTOR.

The following amusing account of a dobtor's experiences is abridged from the Sydney Bulletin of a late date: —ln Darlinghurst Goal, Sydney, one day last week somebody accidentally dug up a prisoner who had been put in there aud forgotten some 17 months previously on account of a debt of £21. Imprisonment for debt, in the ordinary sense of the term, of course, has long been abolished iu most of the colonies, and any man who is shut up among common malefactors for the crime of not owing any money I can obtain his release on filing his schedule and paying the necessary fees, | but if he hasn't got the fees he is, under certain circumstances which occasionally occur, as in the present instance, imprisoned for not having them, so the ultimate result is much the same. The object of filing his schedule is to state officially that he doesn't own £5 in the world, and he ia required to hire a legal cormorant and pay him from £o to £10 for doing this. In order to force him to hire the legal cormorant the forms of stating the simple fact that he is " broke " have been elaborately complicated so that no layman can go broke by himself with any reasonable hope of ever getting there, and therefore he must either pay the hawk with the certificate money that he hasn't got for filiug a paper showing that he hasn't got any money or must Btay in gaol. It doesn't do the legal profession, or the creditor, or the debtor himself any good to stay in gaol; but ho remains there as an awful warning to men outside that they must always pay a lawyer, even if they can't do it. As he doesn't earn any money in gaol it naturally follows that ho may, in the ®rdinary or extraordinary course of thing?, remain there twenty yoars and cost the country an awful amount in food, and yet be no nearer paying the statutory vulture than he was when ho started—but that doesn't matter. Other men who have brained policemen, stamped on their wives, and crippled their mothers may come and go; but the man who hasn't the money to pay a lawyer stays on for over, unless some kind-hearted judge takes pity on hiin and fires him out. Now and then, of course, there may be a prisoner who knows how to file his own schedulo, and how to get leave to file it without hiring a high-priced outside assistant to help him in tbo onerous work of not having any property, but as he can't get out to filo it, it doesn't do him much good; and, even if he could get over tho wall and break the pedestrian rocord to the insolvency department so as to get there beforo someono overtook him and hanled him back, the department insists on u fee for impaling his documents on the office spiko and leaving them there ; and consequently ho is bowled out once more in his efforts to go broke officially as provided by the code of his native land. Tho debtor most likely applies, if he can raise the fees, to hire a barristerial raven to apply for him to tho Judge in Bankruptcy, and then ho learns, to his great relief, that if he can raise the fees usual in such cases he can summon his creditors to show cause why ho shouldn't bo released, and if somebody chances to send him notice when the case i 9 coming on, aud ho has the luck to get out to ascertain why ho shouldn't get out, and he can raise the ftes to pay another woolheaded legal fiend to appear for him, and the other side don't manage to show cause why he should remain in, a document may possibly be drawn up on payment of the necessary fees by which ho will be turned loose on society. In the present instance tho Judge _in Insolvency has cut the knot by ordering the release of the debtor, provided he gives his own security for £2o which he can't pay because he has tried for seventeen months to raise security for £21, and hasn't been successful to the extent of even sixpence ; and having deposited this bogus and valueless document, which isn't worth any more now than it would have been when he was first arrested the year before last, ho will be cut adrift. His insolvency business, however, remains just where it started, and as he is now liable for the original £21 and for tho bond of £25 as well, to say nothing of the customary fees, which will probably start again the instaul his creditor makes another attempt to recover the debt on which the whole trouble was founded, his position doesu't present so many joyous features as it might do. He has, however, acquired a lot of legal knowledge in the course of his seventeen mouths experience. He has learned that the work of stating that he hasn't any money is too intricate to be accomplished without the aid of a valuable attorney or conveyance at £5 or upwards; that it takes about I £5 more to fix the complicated document on the file at the proper department, and £') more still to hold it on, and about ano- | ther £2 to keep it from comiDg off. He has asceitained that a bankrupt is locked up so as to prevent him from attending a meeting he never oared about, unless he can lay a mentally lame and broken down statutory jaokal to go there in his stead. He has discovered that he cau't petition anybody for a hearing without employing a valuable legal mind to stump to the table and mumble something, and then bash down the document at a high figure, and then when this has been done he can't petition again for hia release without paying the expenses of another learned brother to fall forward in court with the paper in his hand so that it may come under the far-reaching judicial eye. He has found out, in short, that it costs about £30 in legal expenses and 17 months of hard work to explain to a thick-headed judicial system that he hasn't got £21, and even then his education was prematurely cut short by the Judge in Insolvency, unless, indeed, t.he want of some more necessary fees sta.-ts him on a now career of judicial research.