The Kenilworth Advertiser. — 1873-06-12 (Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England)

DEBIT AND CREDIT.  It was a crime once, a grave and heinous offence, to owe money. Saored and profane history combine to teach us that lemon. The bromic law had been mild In its treatment of the unfortunate debtor. Did he mortgage }is few acres of vineyard, his silvery olives, and green fig-trees, his little patch of wheat, or the field of millet, the inconvenience he might sustain from foreclosure was but a temporary one. The sacred jubilee would soon come round, and then the wrap of sequestered ground must be restored. Was it his cloak that he had pawned to the Mordecai of the fripser's shop, close under the careen porch of mighty baraillel the trader, of Bareillel who had a thousaed camels plying between the Holy City and heathen, oxworshipping Egypt, and whose humblest jackal and lion's provider son of Lad, was understood to be—the poor borrower must have his mantle, his heavy Arab haick of striped wool, returned to him before the hot sun of a Syrian day gave place to the frosty chill of a Syrian night; and this bemuse the Lawgiver had been osreful, more than a thousand years before, of the health of the needy. But Greeks, under the demendants of Alexander's conquering oeptaine, came into Palestipe And after Greeks came Romans. The civil law, the stern spirit of which was old when Justinian composed his pandects, was, in its crude immaturity, thrust upon the fanatic, moneygetting, perfervid people of Indies. It fared eery ill with the debtor than. Prison, slavery, the wile of wife and children, were, as we learn from Holy Writ, the doom of the defaulter. The great rick men of the wearing seats, the stiff sour Pharisees, the cold fashionable &Mums, cultured Hebrew gentlemen who would have been Grecian philosophers if they had not abating) to be born Jews, were in no danger of arrest ; the mere vulgar suffered. it was of no use to allege the inlinois of biome, for the troubles of debtor somehow were sot of the nature that could rouse an angry mob of fire-eyed enthusiasts to fling away their lives on the spears of the legionaries. Dellit and credit were in those days words of terrible signifacan ot. Rome, hard in her dealings with all persona of dependent position, was not very merciful the debtor. The spirit of classic civilisation was not lenient towards those who could not pay. From the Athenien citimm tugging at the oar of somebody's galley in aaprittanos of a debt fm which the just men of Athens had adjudgel the temporary services of one freeman to another, down to the time when Otho's desparing am for civil war was prompted by the thought that he might as well be destroyed by his enemies in the field as by his creditors in the city, the same harsh reading of the statutes held good. Our Gothic anmotors were from the very first extremely severe against the insolvent. Pay, pay, was theory of those antique German legislators whom Tacitus Wended as some of our honourable gentlemen applaud the hisori end the Chinaman, and anything in old Germany and older Scandinavia might be atoned for by money. To kill a prince cost a heavy wehrgeld. To make boot for an earl or theca was an expensive luxury. The murder of a plain freemen WAS costly, when gauged by the Talus of gold. Slaves could be killed as cheaply as pigs or oxen nowadisys, The burning of a Isom or barn cost this or that. The same compendious tariff took in every shade and variety of outrage, and a Teutonic police-magistrate of the time would simply have produced his price-list, and drawn xii his bill for presentation to the dashing young gentlem in who stood at the bar taxed with two or three breaches of the Decalogue. Those who could not pay, the debtorshopte leggy on the debit side of the book, found but scant mercy in Rome, small pity among the hardy tribes Dressing on the north-western frontiers of the great, soft, ruinous empire. To sell a Roman citizen as a slave in Rome was of course Illegal; nay, so stoutly had the tribunes fought for the popular liberties that, when Augustus wore such modem purple as he ventured to don, the old thumbscrews and dungeons for backsliding debtors were almost as much out of date as In the England of the nineteenth oentury.—Belgravia.