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 ar