n his return to his
poor dwelling.

And then, after that long cessation from labor, he will find it
difficult to return to his old employers. How many days will be lost in
seeking for work! and a day without employment is a day without bread!

Let us repeat our opinion, that if, under various circumstances, the law
did not afford to the rich the facility of giving bail, we could only
lament over all such victims of individual and inevitable misfortune.
But since the law does provide the means of setting provisionally at
liberty those who possess a certain sum of money, why should it deprive
of this advantage those very persons, for whom liberty is indeed
indispensable, as it involves the existence of themselves and families?

Is there any remedy for this deplorable state of things? We believe
there is.

The law has fixed the minimum of bail at five hundred francs. Now five
hundred francs represent, upon the average, six months' labor of an
industrious workman.

If he have a wife and two children (which is also about the average), it
is evidently quite impossible for him to have saved any such sum.

So, to ask of such a man five hundred francs, to enable him to continue
to support his family, is in fact to put him beyond the pale of the law,
though, more than any one else, he requires its protection, because of
the disastrous consequences which his imprisonment entails upon others.

Would it not be equitable and humane, a noble and salutary example,
to accept, in every case where bail is allowed (and where the good
character of the accused could be honorably established), moral
guarantees, in the absence of material ones, from those who have no
capital but their labor and their integrity--to accept the word of an
honest man to appear upon the day of trial? Would it not be great and
moral, in these days to raise the value of the lighted word, and exalt
man in his own eyes, by showing him that his promise was held to be
sufficient security?

Will you so degrade the dignity of man, as to treat this proposition as
an impossible and Utopian dream? We ask, how many prisoners of war have
ever broken their parole, and if officers and soldiers are not brothers
of the workingman?

Without exaggerating the virtue of promise-keeping in the honest and
laborious poor, we feel certain, that an engagement taken by the accused
to appear on the day of trial would be always fulfilled, not only with
fidelity, but with the warmest