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touch a single stiver. There is no bankrupt law in the United States, and no appeal, in these matters, to the Federal courts; whence in every state the insolvent acts operate as a general jail delivery of all debtors, and a permanent scheme, by which creditors are defrauded of their property. The British merchants and manufacturers, who have trusted our [our ?] people, doubtless understand this."

He adds, "that in a single city, New York, more than six thousand of its inhabitants were declared insolvent in one year."

Now in the first place, almost every matter of fact, asserted in this paragraph, is stated incorrectly and untruly. It is not true, that in every state the insolvent laws operate as a general jail delivery of all debtors; there being, in a majority of the states, no insolvent law at all.

It is not true, that there is no appeal in these matters, to the Federal courts: on the contrary, there is an appeal, in all cases, from decisions in the state courts, on the insolvent laws of the state, to the Supreme Court of the United States; an appeal, which exists not only theoretically, but practically, and has been resorted to often, and with effect.

It is not true, that the number of insolvents, meaning such as have been discharged under statute provisions, is prodigious in every state, and increasing. In most of the states, as we have observed, there are no such laws, and of course no 'prodigious numbers,' who have been, or who can be discharged under such laws. Having now shown how destitute of all correctness and all truth is the foregoing paragraph from Mr. Bristed's book, we proceed to describe the real state of the case.

At the formation of the present government in 1787, it was provided by the national constitution, that Congress should have power to establish uniform rules on the subject of Bankruptcy throughout the United States. This power was not exercised until 1798, when a uniform system of Bankruptcy was established by act of Congress. It met with great opposition, arising in a great variety of motives, and was repealed four or five years afterwards. It is, no doubt, to be lamented that a fair experiment was not given to this law. It is a subject on which it seems necessary that there should be some legislative provision; and notwithstanding the frauds which will be, and are committed under bankrupt laws, even well administered, and which have led such men as Lord Eldon, and Sir Samuel Romily to express doubts of their general utility, yet we know not any other mode of providing for the cases continually arising in commercial societies, and which call loudly for some provision. After the repeal of the law, however, individual states, acting upon the supposition that as Congress had not exercised the power, or had discontinued its exercise, of establishing a general law, for the whole country, they had a right to provide insolvent laws as a part of their own local legislation, enacted such laws, and gave them operation. Among others, the state of New York passed an insolvent law, in the year 1811, and, as was to be expected in the first year of its operation, many discharges were obtained under it. It was found that this law not only gave too great facilities in obtaining discharges, but that it led also to fraudulent applications from debtors coming from other states. The law was

repealed, we believe, within a year after its enactment; and it was, we suppose, during the period of this very short and extraordinary act, that Mr. Bristed finds his six thousand discharged in one year. Here then is a single act, from which a general law, and a general practice, is unhesitatingly inferred. The British merchants and manufacturers who have trusted our people doubtless understand this.' Does Mr. Bristed mean that the credit of American merchants is not good, in England? It would be new to us, indeed, to hear such a remark. Surely never was, not only all due credit, but all undue credit more easily obtained, than by the American merchants, for British manufactures.

The flippant and off-hand remark, that the laws of this country generally favor the debtor, at the expense of the creditor, is grossly incorrect, and can hardly be pardoned. There may be, among the state legislatures, an occasional relaxation, but to say that the general scope of the laws of this country is to favor the debtor at the expense of the creditor, is absolutely untrue, and calumnious. We still hold, in almost, if not in every state, to the imprisonment of the person for debt; we still hold every man, to be in law capable of paying to the uttermost farthing; and therefore we apply the old principle, solvat per corpus, qui non possit crumena. We discourage marriage settlements, and family settlements, to an extent, in the opinion of some, far too great; our lawgivers and tribunals all look with jealousy on trusts and entailments, and all the various modes of tying up estates, and rendering them inalienable; and all this simply from respect to the rights of creditors.

In most of the states also, the fee simple of the debtor's estate may be taken, to satisfy the creditor, and lastly, we hold, that whatever laws the individual states may pass respecting insolvents, such laws, if they in any manner impair the validity of contracts, are absolutely null and void. We have from the first introduced and maintained this great and salutary, and protecting principle in the fundamental articles of the national government; and yet Mr. Bristed can say, and the reviewers in England can believe, that in this country the laws are generally made to favor debtors at the expense of the creditors! Every well informed man knows the difficulty of legislating on the subject of insolvents; and none better than the eminent living judicial characters in England. We now speak of the insolvent laws, as distinguished from the bankrupt laws; since the insolvent laws which individual states have sometimes enacted in this country, resemble the cessio bonorum of the civil law, and the insolvent laws of England, much more than the bankrupt system of that country.

We wish, before gentlemen in England give credit to such loose calumnies as this of Mr. Bristed's upon the laws for the relief of insolvent debtors in the United States, they would attend to their own case, and to the difficulties which they themselves have experienced on this subject. This would, we think, give some moderation to their fault-finding, and some measure to their language of rebuke. We wish they would consult Lord Eldon, Lord Redesdale, Lord Aukland, Mr. Sergeant Runnington, the late, and Mr. Reynolds, the present judge of the insolvent debtor's court, upon the unavoidable obstacles, and difficulties which lie in the way of uniting

on this subject the just claims of creditors, with due compassion for honest but unfortunate debtors. When they have done this, we shall hear with somewhat more patience, what they may see to find fault with, in systems adopted by their neighbours.

It is well known that it has been the practice of Parliament to grant occasional relief to such insolvent debtors, as do not come within the provision of the bankrupt laws. And it being thought expedient to make a permanent provision on the subject, Parliament passed the act 53 Geo. III. chap. 102. This act, we believe, was drawn by Lord Redesdale, a man of the highest legal eminence, and of great experience. It has sixty sections, and appears to have been prepared with the utmost care and solicitude, in order that it might prevent, on the one hand, the harsh and unfeeling confinement of honest debtors, and on the other, the practice of fraud by the dishonest. This act was limited to November 1818, and to the end of the next session of Parliament. The powers and duties of the act were to be exercised and discharged by a judge, or commissioner, who should be some "fit person, being a barrister or lawyer of six years' standing at the court," and Mr. Sergeant Runnington was appointed to this office. We have already said, that the act contained all the provision which could be thought of, to prevent fraud on the one hand, and cruelty on the other; an application to be discharged was to be accompanied with an offer to assign all his property, excepting wearing apparel, bedding, and tools of his trade, never exceeding in all twenty pounds; and there must be annexed to the petition a schedule of property and effects, and another of debts due by the prisoner, and the prisoners' oath to the truth of these schedules; and every creditor to be served with a copy of the petition and schedule, and notice inserted in the Gazette, and other newspapers, and creditors to have a right to appear and to put any questions to the prisoner, touching his conduct under oath; and assignees to be appointed to receive his assets, books, &c. of all sorts; and then the court, after all, may annul his discharge if it shall appear to have been obtained by fraud, or revoke it, if it afterwards appear that he has ability to pay his debts. The assignees are required to get in effects and debts, and make distribution at the end of three months, &c. with proper penalties for perjury; with a train of exceptions, such as attorneys embezzling money, persons getting money on false pretences, &c. who are not to be allowed the benefit of the law.

Here then is a law for the relief of insolvent debtors, fully considered, and deliberately passed, guarded by all practicable securities, and limitations, and placed under the administration of a competent and learned court; and what is found to be the result? The law was to expire in July last, at the end of the last session of parliament, unless continued by another act. To prevent this continuing act, very numerous and very respectable petitions were laid on the table of the Lords and Commons. Innumerable and intolerable frauds were alleged to have been perpetrated in the cases arising under the act. A committee of the House of Commons reported, if we mistake not, "that during the whole duration of the law, and out of the prodigious number of cases in which debtors had surrendered

their property, and been discharged, there had not been received above a penny in the pound upon the average of the debts discharged." This we quote from memory, but our statement is sufficiently exact for our purpose.

We have thus alluded to the experience of England on the subject of insolvent debtors, not by way of an idle retort, but to expose the intrinsic difficulty of the subject, and to shut up the mouths of half-informed, superficial and self-sufficient scribblers and rebukers, on both sides the Atlantic. Would it not be wrong from the facts which we have stated to infer a plausible case of enormous fraud and corruption against English justice? If we were to try our hand at such a paragraph as Mr. Bristed has written and the Quarterly Review has cited against us, might we not say, England is not a country for a man to recover his debts. All her merchants, who are debtors, are provided for, by what she calls her system of Bankruptcy, a stupendous system, which many of her most eminent lawyers have been honest enough to confess was productive of unmeasured fraud and injustice; and as to all the rest of her subjects who may owe anything, there is the insolvent debtor's court, where anybody may be discharged; and of this court it is enough to say, that during all its existence, although no man can be discharged without surrendering all his property, which the law says shall go to his creditors, yet in truth no creditor ever gets anything. How much the officers of the court get, we do not know; and what becomes of that part which they do not get, we do not know, but we do know that the creditor gets nothing." We forbear. It is hardly fit to write such paragraphs, even for the mere purpose of showing how easily they may be written. It is a dangerous curiosity to commit sins, only to learn or to show with what facility sins may be committed.

An act of the last session of Parliament was intended, we believe, to have continued the insolvent debtor's law to the present session. Owing to mistake, however, the purpose was not effected, and the law is supposed to have expired, and proceedings under it are for the present discontinued. The subject, however, is before Parliament, and it will give us unmixed pleasure if the English government shall be able to adopt such legislation on this equally important and difficult subject as shall satisfy the necessities of its own case, and afford light to the lawgivers of other countries. In the meantime let it not be understood, that the law of creditor and debtor is in a worse state for the creditor in this country than in others. As before observed, some of the states may have occasionally departed, and may still occasionally depart from the dictates of enlightened wisdom on this subject, from a disposition to relieve hardship, and from a vain and illusory hope of finding, in mere remedial legislation, a relief against the pressure of the times, and the stagnation of trade. But the general scope and tendency of our laws is to give creditors full and ample remedies, and to render property of all sorts liable for debts. We may say, indeed, that there is no country in the world, in which a regard for the rights of property is more likely to prevail; for in no country was property ever so equally diffused,

or was so great a portion of the numerical population interested directly in the laws which protect it. We look upon this so equal distribution of property, and to the regard paid to the rights of property in this country, as the great safeguards and security of the commonwealth. Almost every man among us is interested in preserving the state of things as it is; because almost every man possesses property, and while he cannot see what he might gain, he sees clearly what he might lose, by change. We think we may perceive here a fair ground of belief in the preservation of our republican forms of government. It is not less the language of reason than of experience, that property should have influence in the state, whenever such a state of things exists, as that military fame is not supreme. If the tendency of the laws and institutions of society be such, as that property accumulates in few hands, a real aristocracy, in effect, exists in the land. This is not a merely artificial, but a natural aristocracy; a concentration of political power and influence in few hands, in consequence of large masses of property having accumulated in such hands. There is not a more dangerous experiment than to place property in the hands of one class, and political power in those of another. Indeed such a state of things could not long exist. We have seen something like it in the ancient noblesse of France, in relation to whom the attempt seemed to be to make up, in positive power, or artificial distinction, what was wanting in the natural influence of property and character. The generality of these personages, with all their pretensions to rank, and all their blazoning of heraldry, were infinitely inferior in respectability, and in just influence in the state, to hundreds of the untitled but independent landholders of Great Britain. It will be disastrous, indeed, for this latter country, whenever a separation shall take place between the influence, the indirect, but the natural and salutary influence of property, and political influence, or political power. They would not, and as we have already observed, in the absence of direct, military despotism, cannot be long separated. If one changes hands, so will the other. If the property cannot retain the political power, the political power will draw after it the property. If orator Hunt and his fellow laborers should, by any means, obtain more political influence in the counties, towns, and boroughs of England, than the Marquis of Buckingham, Lord Stafford, Lord Fitzwilliam, and the other noblemen and gentlemen of great landed estates, these estates would inevitably change hands. At least so it seems to us; and therefore when Sir Francis Burdett, the Marquis of Tavistock, and other individuals of rank and fortune, propose to introduce into the government annual parliaments, and universal suffrage, we can hardly forbear inquiring whether they are ready to agree that property should be as equally divided as political power; and if not, how they expect to sever things, which to us appear to be intimately connected.

These speculations, however, are beside our present purpose. We mean only to say, that, in the present state of the world, wherever the people are not subject to military rule, the government must in a great measure be under the guidance of that aggregate of

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