2 1 6 Notes for the Month. [ AUG. 



distant of paying; an dspendth rifts who become "traders," or assume the 

 title for a week, merely to be enabled to liberate themselves from their 

 obligations by an act of bankruptcy; are set free, by course of law, every, 

 day. Tt is therefore, only those who either possess property, which they, 

 prefer enjoying in prison, to paying the obligations which they have con^, 

 tracted ; or fellows whose constant course of life it is, to obtain the property, 

 of others by every means short of those which would place their lives in. 

 danger, and who are afraid to meet the inquiry of an Insolvent court, or the 

 punishment that it would apportion these arc the only persons who can 

 be placed under the necessity of spending any considerable length of time 

 in the King's Bench. That this should be the state of things, as regards 

 the quality of the people who live in prisons, there can be no ques- 

 tion ; and the slightest examination will shew that it is the state. Let 

 any one look at the locality called the " Rules of the Bench," in St. 

 George's-fields, and say if there is a vicinity in London, in which vice, 

 disorder, dirt, and idleness, and every quality that is contrary to usefulness 

 and respectability in society, are so distinctly apparent. The people whom 

 you meet in the " Rules" look like no other people in town. The quar- 

 ter displays a strange mixture of the fopperies of Bond-street, with the filth 

 and larcenous aspect of St. Giles's; and, in point-of-fact, whether with 

 reference to riot and brawl, or to common robbery and plunder, it is 

 notorious that there is not a suburb about London after nightfall, so danger- 

 ous, to pass through. 



It is not, therefore, that the punishment of imprisonment is very harshly or 

 cruelly inflicted upon persons like these. Or perhaps that their confine- 

 ment, or non-confinement for the sake of the immediate parties concerned 

 is much worth caring about : for the fact is, that between the con.finere 

 and the confined debtor and creditor there is seldom a great deal of 

 substantial justice (of justice in which the interests of society are con- 

 cerned) to do. Three fourths of the debt let the fact bo inquired into 

 for which persons are now lying in the gaols of the King's Bench, the 

 Fleet, and Whitecross-street will be found to be debt contracted, not for 

 the necessaries of life, even although indulged in at a rate beyond that which 

 the circumstances of the debtor would authorise, but for sheer impudent, 

 vagabond luxuries and impertinences. For articles of needless and often 

 senseless cost for the accounts of horse-dealers tailors coach-makers 

 hotel- keepers wine-merchants jewellers and gun-makers for commo- 

 dities which the venders utter at a profit, with which the course of fair trade 

 has no feeling in common, and the prices of which the law, in the ordinary 

 course of its arrangements, will permit them to recover, but will not travel 

 out of its way to assist them in doing so. A gun-maker, who sells a gun 

 (to a fool) for sixty guineas, which should be sold for twenty a tailor, or a 

 toyman, who parts with his wares to noodles, whom he knows cannot pay 

 for them, in the hope that some one else, who takes interest in the fate of 

 the ninny, will ; these dealers, generally, whose cupidity makes them 

 sometimes run into traps, when they think they are only going to bait 

 them, are a sort of persons whom justice will not arm with any extra 

 violent authority for the recovery of their claims although it may have 

 very little sympathy for the fate of those who stand within the scope of 

 their danger. But the view which politicians have taken in some instances. 

 has been this The great mass of the people who want to confine debtors 

 in our prisons, are worth considering very little ; the debtors themselve* 



