ACT FOR THE RELIEF OF DEBTORS REVIVED.

A committee having been appointed to inquire what laws were expired, or near expiring, and to report their opinion to the house touching the revival or continuation of these laws, they agreed to several resolutions; in consequence of which the following bills were brought in, and enacted into laws; namely, an act for regulating the lastage and ballastage of the river Thames; an act for continuing the law relating to the punishment of persons going armed or disguised; an act for continuing several laws near expiring; an act concerning the admeasurement of coals; an act for the relief of debtors, with respect to the imprisonment of their persons. This last was almost totally metamorphosed by alterations, amendments, and additions, among which the most remarkable were these: that where more creditors than one shall charge any prisoner in execution, and desired to have him detained in prison, they shall only respectively pay him each such weekly sum, not exceeding one shilling and sixpence per week, as the court, at the time of his being remanded, shall direct; that if any prisoner, described by the act, shall remain in prison three months after being committed, any creditor may compel him to give into court, upon oath, an account of his real and personal estate, to be disposed of for the benefit of his creditors, they consenting to his being discharged. Why the humanity of this law was confined to those prisoners only who are not charged in execution with any debt exceeding one hundred pounds, cannot easily be conceived. A man who, through unavoidable misfortunes, hath sunk from affluence to misery and indigence, is generally a greater object of compassion than he who never knew the delicacies of life, nor ever enjoyed credit sufficient to contract debts to any considerable amount; yet the latter is by this law entitled to his discharge, or at least to a maintenance in prison; while the former is left to starve in gaol, or undergo perpetual imprisonment amidst all the horrors of misery, if he owes above one hundred pounds to a revengeful and unrelenting creditor. Wherefore, in a country, the people of which justly pique themselves upon charity and benevolence, an unhappy fellow-citizen, reduced to a state of bankruptcy by unforeseen losses in trade, should be subjected to a punishment, which of all others must be the most grievous to a freeborn Briton, namely, the entire loss of liberty; a punishment which the most flagrant crime can hardly deserve in a nation that disclaims the torture; for, doubtless, perpetual imprisonment must be a torture infinitely more severe than death, because protracted through a series of years spent in misery and despair, without one glimmering ray of hope, without the most distant prospect of deliverance? Wherefore the legislature should extend its humanity to those only who are the least sensible of the benefit, because the most able to struggle under misfortune? and wherefore many valuable individuals should, for no guilt of their own, be not only ruined to themselves, but lost to the community? are questions which we cannot resolve to the satisfaction of the reader. Of all imprisoned debtors, those who are confined for large sums may be deemed the most wretched and forlorn, because they have generally fallen from a sphere of life where they had little acquaintance with necessity, and were altogether ignorant of the arts by which the severities of indigence are alleviated. On the other hand, those of the lower class of mankind, whose debts are small in proportion to the narrowness of their former credit, have not the same delicate feelings of calamity: they are inured to hardship, and accustomed to the labour of their hands, by which, even in a prison, they can earn a subsistence: their reverse of fortune is not so great, nor the transition so affecting: their sensations are not delicate; nor are they, like their betters in misfortune, cut off from hope, which is the wretch’s last comfort. It is the man of sentiment and sensibility, who, in this situation, is overwhelmed with a complication of misery and ineffable distress: the mortification of his pride, his ambition blasted, his family undone, himself deprived of liberty, reduced from opulence to extreme want, from the elegancies of life to the most squalid and frightful scenes of poverty and affliction; divested of comfort, destitute of hope, and doomed to linger out a wretched being in the midst of insult, violence, riot, and uproar; these are reflections so replete with horror, as to render him, in all respects, the most miserable object on the face of the earth. He, alas! though possessed of talents that might have essentially served and even adorned society, while thus restrained in prison, and affected in mind, can exert no faculty, nor stoop to any condescension, by which the horrors of his fate might be assuaged: he scorns to execute the lowest offices of menial services, particularly in attending those who are the objects of contempt or abhorrence; he is incapable of exercising any mechanic art, which might afford a happy though a scanty independence: shrunk within his dismal cell, surrounded by haggard poverty, and her gaunt attendants, hollow-eyed famine, shivering cold, and wan disease, he wildly casts his eyes around; he sees the tender partner of his heart weeping in silent woe; he hears his helpless babes clamorous for sustenance; he feels himself the importunate cravings of human nature, which he cannot satisfy; and groans with all the complicated pangs of internal anguish, horror, and despair. These are not the fictions of idle fancy, but real pictures, drawn from nature, of which almost every prison in England will afford but too many originals.