The Sun.
London, England, 1848-03-31 00:00:00

IMPRISONMENT FOR FORT

DAYS.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN.
SIR,—I am glad to find that the iniquitous power
vested in the Judges of the new County Courts, of com-
mitting debtors summoned before them, and who either
do not attend, or are unable to pay their instalment as
ordered, for forty days to prison, there to be subjected
to all the rigows reserved only for the criminal, is be-
ginning to attract the public attention, and that the
Legislature has been appealed to, in the hope of obtain-
ing a speedy repeal of the unjust provision.
See how easily a man may be dragged from his
home or place of business —nay, more, from a bed
of sickness—under the authority of this obnoxious
provision, and consigned for forty days to the
very diet and treatment of the felon. If a
man is ordered to pay a debt by instalment,
and fails to do so from illness or any other cause which
may altogether prevent him from doing so, however
honest may be his intentions, he is liable at any moment,
without being again summoned to state the reason of his
default, to be taken to the debtors' gaol ; to have his
hair cropped, gruel for his breakfast and supper, coarse
soup for dinner, locked up at six o'clock in summer and
four in winter, barred in his cell at ten, and be kept, not
only rigidly away, but out of the sight of the other
debtors there, who being less inclined to be honest,
have managed to get into debt for more than 201.
Let me illustrate this by an actual case :—I was com-
mitted to Maidstone gaol, under the Small Debts Act,
for contempt, because I discontinued paying the
instalments I had been &judged to pay. I did it
for this simple reason, that I found the person who bad
proceeded against me had done so under a false name
(he was a Jew, and, like many of his tribe, had adopted
for occasional use the name of a Christian). Although
able to pay, I refused to do so, on this ground, and I had
a right to do so, believing that I should be again sum-
moned to state my grounds of refusal; but nothing of
the kind took place. I lived at Greenwich; but I was
taken to Maidstone gaol, a distance of 56 miles from my
residence, and there subjected to the felon treatment
I have enumerated for four days, the distance from
London having prevented me from getting the matter
settled, even at great expense, in less time, though
the money was ready. The horrible treatment to which
I was subjected would have extorted any amount of
money from me by any means of payment, for had I
stopped longer, I believe I should have become insane!!
The whole debt, though the whole of the instalments
were not due, was thus extorted from me with of course
enormous costs. The sufferings of those who cannot
pay (and surely the Court ought to inquire a second
time into this before the order for committal is made
out) must be agonising in the extreme.
If debtors are to be treated worse than the
convicted murderer, for his hair is not shorn
off, and if a forcing process, second only in
brutality to the injunctions of the Star Chamber,
is to be resorted to in a civilized country, to compel the
wretched debtor to pay, why let the power I complain
of continue. But if not, if the law is to be tempered with
mercy, the sooner the clause is repealed the better.
Surely more indulgence ought to be shown to the man
who owes-less than 201. than to the one whose debts
count by thousands; and, by the way, whilst I was sub-
jected to the diet I have named, and compelled to quench
my thirst with water, a rich debtor, on the other side,
had some dozens of wine sent in to him.

J. I. S.

The church decorators of the olden time did all
in their power to destroy the coldness and monotony of
blank walls. Hence fresco, or more properly distemper
painting, was a common internal decoration, and the
walls were covered with pictures of the lives of the
Saints, or the history of the Saviour; the Last Judg-
ment, &c. Many of these have been laid bare when
the process of new plastering church walls has destroyed
the whitewash with which they have been covered; and
so long a list might be given of churches which have
bee❑ thus decorated, that it would go far to prove this
practice universal. Where pictures did not exist, a
pattern in diaper work was stencilled, and the pillars
and arches thus decorated, or the flutings painted in
♦arious tints. The windows, in the same way, exhi-
bited in glowing tints the fathers, martyrs, or saints
their acts and legends. The ceilings were frequently
painted; and the floors brilliantly glowing with coloured
tiles, and thickly interspersed with monumental brasses.
—Art Union Journal.
TSIRTY-SIX HOURS IN A Sawaa.—Yesterday
morning one of those extraordinary beings who gain a
precarious subsistence by penetrating into the sewers of
the metropolis, in search of coins or other valuables that
may be washed into them through the drains, was taken
out of the main sower, in Broad-street, Golden square,
in a very exhausted state, having been thirty-six hours
endeavouring to find his way out, which, from having
advanced further than was his custom, to recover some
silver that had been dropped down a grating near the
Seven Dials, he was unable to accomplish. Fortu-
nately, his cries were heard by Mr. Tickle, cheese-
monger, at the corner of Berwick-street and Broad-
street, opposite whose house there is a man-hole, which
he had contrived to climb; and, assistance being pro-
cured, he was liberated.
VOTERS IN THE METROPOLITAN BOROUGHS.—
room official returns made to the authorities of the
county of Middlesex, it appears that in the following me-
, tropolitan boroughs and the county, there aro 80,037
voters on the register, viz., Marylebone, 16,512; West-
, minster, 14.125; Tower Hamlets, 19,361; Finsbury,
15,822; OW Middlesex, 13,917.