The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-07 00:00:00

The reasoning by which this legislation is
justified is not a little singular. To be indepen-
r dent, we are told, a man must be out of debt, and
to be honest he must live within his means. A
nobleman advising his son would urge the young
man to keep within his income, and would point
• out the advantage of dealing with a full purse,
kept fall by frugality; therefore the state is in
effect to say to the debtor, you shall not take credit
because that may cause you to go beyond your
wages ; and to the creditor, you shall not ,•ive credit
because your aim in doing so is to get the working
man into your thraldom, and to compel him Vs Jive
for ever after on the mortgage of his wages, that
you may exact an unreasonable profit on the goods
you sell. We hesitate to differ from such authori •
ties, but we carrot reconcile these statements with
facts sufficiently patent to everybody's observation.
Let any ono walk through a poor neighbourhood,
and discover if be can any trace of the petty shop-
keeper of Lord Westbury's imagination. If showy
shops, and tempting advertisements, and importus
nate touting are indications of severe competition,
then assuredly every tradesman in each localities is
too anions to get businsss to render an extra
charge of 100 per cent. possible in any case where
he would give credit at all. In such places of ne-
cessity cash payments are the rule, and credit is, as
It should be, the exception ; but it is going too far
to say, as the Lord Chancellor's bill does in effect,
that the retail dealer shall be debarred from the
legal means of obtaining his debt which are open to
larger traders. Between the shopkeeper in the New-
cut and the merchant in Mincing-lane the difference
is not of kind but of degree; and if it be right, as
all systems of law have hitherto held it right, to
enforce the fulfilment of contracts by legal penal-
ties, there can be no good reason why any one class
of honest citizens should be deprived of its advan-
tages. A working man is out of work for a few
weeks ; his wife has brought him a new burden ;
his eldest child wants fitting out for apprenticeship
or for service, his second has had a long illness, or
the youngest has just died, and the father's resources
have been drained to pay the undertaker's bill and
the funeral fees: where at such times must the
man go if not to those who have had his money
when there was no illness in his house and no
void in his pocket? In general he can go to
his tradesman now with the claim which his

past custom gives him; but we do not think his
condition will be much improved if the law
officiously steps in to set up an artificial barrier to
the workman's receiving and the tradesman's
affording an accommodation which the one wants,
and the other, under existing circumstances, is quite
willing to give. Should the Lord Chancellor suc•
ceed in his present attempt we feel some curiosity
to know how tar the principle of the bill is to be
applied. Is the state to become an universal Pater-
familias, compelling everybody to be frugal, by for-
bidding every one else to give him credit ? If the
law of debtor and creditor is to stand "on a foot-

ing which shall disc3urage the habit of mortgaging
wages," must we not of necessity go on in the same
direction and take away the remedies of creditors
who trust persons receiving salaries, or living by
their own professional exertions, or dependent upon
their profits in trade ? Finally, to be consistent,
ought we not to adopt the same rule even in the
case of a debtor having money in the funds or estates
in land, because the creditor can never know how
far he is laying himself open to the reproach of in-
ducing his customer to live beyond his means ? If

we are to come to this it is well that we should un

derstand it at the outset, for we altogether fail to
comprehend why the Legislature should adopt
diametrically opposite systems in dealing with
debts under and above £2O; why the creditor's
right against one class should be enforced and
ignored against another; why the small trader
should be liable to all the process which the ingee
nuity of lawyers has devised for the constraint of
defaulting debtors, but should have no such remedy
when he, in his turn, seeks to enforce precisely simi-
lar claims against his customers. Modern I'egisla•
tion has swept away the usury laws, because ex-
perience showed that they only aggravated the evils
they were intended to prevent; and on principles
of abstract justice we have abolished the immunity
formealy enjoyed by the owner of real estate from
the payment of his simple contract debts. We shall
be going back a long way if we introduce into the
contracts of our humbler fellow citizens an element

whose operation will not greatly differ from that of
the old statutes of usury, or if we confer on a dis-
honest or shuffling artisan an exemption from the
burden of his legal obligations as complete as that
which the owners of real estate formerly enjoyed.