JUDGMENT SUMMONSES.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7392, 19 February 1902, Page 2

JUDGMENT SUMMONSES.

(Mercantile Gazette.) The amendments which were made a couple of sessions ago to the Imprisonment for Debt Abolition Act have ' worked out very badly for a large section of the retailers, as the effect has been to practically destroy any chance , they had of collecting their accounts '> from those of their customers who will not pay unless under compulsion. The amendments were of course not passed at the instance of the creditor class ; i why they were ever introduced at all ' it would be difficult to 3ay, as certainly i no cause was shown pointing to any abuses of the Act, nor to cases of hardship ever inflicted by • its operations, unless, occasionally, a man of doubtful notoriety was compelled to pay or go to prison. We can understand the righteous indignation of a person of limited morality, who has under such an alternative to put his hand into his pocket and pay his butcher or his grocer, but we cannot understand the reflex movements which produced legislation encouraging such men to pursue a policy of dishonesty. A man who tarns three or four pounds per week who receives credit, because he discloses his position, and upon the promise that he will pay at the end of the mouth, and who then refuses to do bo, and cakes advantage of the law which permits him to defy his. creditor, is from our point of view as little deserving of sympathy as is tbe man who picks a till, or forges his employer's name to a cheque. The moral obliquity is identical in each case, the underlying sentiment is the same- Want of opportunity, absence of temptation, fear of detection, combine to postpone the actual psychological moment which favours full development of the criminal instinct. It is quite a common thing \ now for the collector to be told by men well able to pay that the law has been altered expressly for their benefit, and that the collector and his master or employer can do what they please. The idea that swindling debtors have legislative sanction for tbe position they now take up in refusing to discbarge their bills, or to deny themselves anything in order to pay their debts, is a most pernicious one, but it is believed, and that most generally, by the class who consider the amendments were made for I the purpose of relieving them from the pressure of their creditors. It seems to us that debtors who are earning good money, who could with a little self-denial reduce their liabilities, and ultimately extinguish them, should be made to do so, and that the law instead of encouraging them to defraud Sheir creditors should be so altered that it would pay them better to be honest than to accept the alternative which would then be offered to them.