164 RELIEF OF INDEBTED AGRICULTURISTS. 



SIR GEORGE WIXGATE wrote thus in 1852 : 



'It remains to be shown how it is that the creditor in our Provinces has acquired 

 a degree of power over his debtor which is wholly unknown in native States. This 

 power, it is clear to me has been conferred by our laws, which enable the creditor to 

 obtain a decree against a debtor for whatever may be written in his bond, and 

 enforcement of that decree by the attachment and sale of whatever property, 

 movable or immovable, his debtor may possess or acquire. * * * The iirst 

 remedy I have to suggest is as follows. * * The enactment of a law to permit 

 the Court to decree in all cases, on equitable consideration, whatever rate of interest 

 it may deem proper, but that in no case shall the total amount of interest exceed 

 the principal : and that the Court shall also in all cases be at liberty to fix the 

 amount of the principal on equitable considerations witli reference to the amount 

 which it may consider to have been actually received by the debtor, and irrespective 

 of the sum entered iu the bond or acknowledgment of the debt.' 



MR. PEDDER says : 



A bond should not be considered sufficient proof of n, debt un'less its antecedents 

 will bear the light, and show that the consideration for which it was passed was a 

 fair as well as an actual one. * 



It appears to me that some limitation of the rate of interest and some restriction 

 on grossly unfair stipulations in contracts, as contrary to justice and public policy, 

 are practicable and expedient." 



From ' The Land and the Law/ a well-known pamphlet by the 

 HON'BLE MR. JUSTICE WEST, of the Bombay High Court, I take 

 the following excerpts : 



'If, on the one hand, therefore, the State must needs lend its aid to the creditor 

 as an essential condition of material progress, it must, on the other hand, assign 

 bounds and conditions to this aid, without which it will probably become an instru- 

 ment of social and political mischief. Particular classes in England supposed to be 

 specially subject to imposition or unfair usage, as spamen and miners are protected 

 against disadvantageous bargains. The truth is recognised and acted on that there 

 is no real equality, even of the roughest kind, between them and their employers. 

 Still less can such an equality be assumed with safety in a community split up into 

 sections, divided by the impassable barriers of caste and hereditary occupations. 

 The extremes of astuteness and gullibility are thus fostered and brought into 

 contact. * * * At an earlier stage, borrowing at interest in England, as else- 

 where, was generally an appeal of helplessness to avarice. * * * There are 

 few who will deny that the India we have to deal with is much more like that 

 earlier England than the England of today. In the case of all obligations for a princi- 

 pal of not more than Es. 500, the Courts should have full power to treat any 

 interest in excess of nine per cent, as simply penal, and to cut it down to such rate 

 as should, under the circumstances, seem just. * * * Compound interest should 

 be disallowed, consistent as it is with sound commercial principles, in order to 

 make it a disadvantage to creditors to leavo obligations unsettled until the debtors 

 are involved beyond redemption.' 



