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 from humanity, not from policy, but merely because we have not room enough to hold these victims of the absurdity of our laws, we turn loose upon the public three or four thousand naked wretches, corrupted by the habits, debased by the ignominy of a prison.  If the creditor had a right to those carcasses as a natural security for his property, I am sure we have no right to deprive him of that security.  But if the few pounds of flesh were not necessary to his security, we had not a right to detain the unfortunate debtor, without any benefit at all to the person who confined him.  Take it as you will, we commit injustice.  Now Lord Beauchamp’s bill intended to do deliberately, and with great caution and circumspection, upon each several case, and with all attention to the just claimant, what acts of grace do in a much greater measure, and with very little care, caution, or deliberation.