return to his
poor dwelling.

And then, after that long cessation from labor, he will find it difficult
to return to his old employers. How many days will be lost in seeking for
work! and a day without employment is a day without bread!

Let us repeat our opinion, that if, under various circumstances, the law
did not afford to the rich the facility of giving bail, we could only
lament over all such victims of individual and inevitable misfortune. But
since the law does provide the means of setting provisionally at liberty
those who possess a certain sum of money, why should it deprive of this
advantage those very persons, for whom liberty is indeed indispensable,
as it involves the existence of themselves and families?

Is there any remedy for this deplorable state of things? We believe there
is.

The law has fixed the minimum of bail at five hundred francs. Now five
hundred francs represent, upon the average, six months' labor of an
industrious workman.

If he have a wife and two children (which is also about the average), it
is evidently quite impossible for him to have saved any such sum.

So, to ask of such a man five hundred francs, to enable him to continue
to support his family, is in fact to put him beyond the pale of the law,
though, more than any one else, he requires its protection, because of
the disastrous consequences which his imprisonment entails upon others.

Would it not be equitable and humane, a noble and salutary example, to
accept, in every case where bail is allowed (and where the good character
of the accused could be honorably established), moral guarantees, in the
absence of material ones, from those who have no capital but their labor
and their integrity--to accept the word of an honest man to appear upon
the day of trial? Would it not be great and moral, in these days to raise
the value of the lighted word, and exalt man in his own eyes, by showing
him that his promise was held to be sufficient security?

Will you so degrade the dignity of man, as to treat this proposition as
an impossible and Utopian dream? We ask, how many prisoners of war have
ever broken their parole, and if officers and soldiers are not brothers
of the workingman?

Without exaggerating the virtue of promise-keeping in the honest and
laborious poor, we feel certain, that an engagement taken by the accused
to appear on the day of trial would be always fulfilled, not only with
fidelity, but with the warmest gratit