cial science
operates to change a civil into a criminal judgment, and to scourge
misfortune or indiscretion with a punishment which the law does not
inflict on the greatest crimes.

The next fault is, that the inflicting of that punishment is not on the
opinion of an equal and public judge, but is referred to the arbitrary
discretion of a private, nay, interested, and irritated, individual. He,
who formally is, and substantially ought to be, the judge, is in reality
no more than ministerial, a mere executive instrument of a private man,
who is at once judge and party. Every idea of judicial order is
subverted by this procedure. If the insolvency be no crime, why is it
punished with arbitrary imprisonment? If it be a crime, why is it
delivered into private hands to pardon without discretion, or to punish
without mercy and without measure?

To these faults, gross and cruel faults in our law, the excellent
principle of Lord Beauchamp's bill applied some sort of remedy. I know
that credit must be preserved: but equity must be preserved, too; and it
is impossible that anything should be necessary to commerce which is
inconsistent with justice. The principle of credit was not weakened by
that bill. God forbid! The enforcement of that credit was only put into
the same public judicial hands on which we depend for our lives and all
that makes life dear to us. But, indeed, this business was taken up too
warmly, both here and elsewhere. The bill was extremely mistaken. It was
supposed to enact what it never enacted; and complaints were made of
clauses in it, as novelties, which existed before the noble lord that
brought in the bill was born. There was a fallacy that ran through the
whole of the objections. The gentlemen who opposed the bill always
argued as if the option lay between that bill and the ancient law. But
this is a grand mistake. For, practically, the option is between not
that bill and the old law, but between that bill and those occasional
laws called acts of grace. For the operation of the old law is so
savage, and so inconvenient to society, that for a long time past, once
in every Parliament, and lately twice, the legislature has been obliged
to make a general arbitrary jail-delivery, and at once to set open, by
its sovereign authority, all the prisons in England.

Gentlemen, I never relished acts of grace, nor ever submitted to them
but from despair of better. They are a dishonorable invention, by which,
not f