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GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS 47
of gin hung out signs to the effect that one could be made drunk for a,
pennyworth of gin, dead drunk for two pence, and should have straw to-
sleep on for nothing. Naturally crime and immorality increased with
the consumption of gin."
It was at this crisis of affairs that the debtor prisons of England
began to swell with inmates. Every grim fortress for the detention of
insolvents began to open wide its devouring jaws. According to writers
of the time, 4,000 persons were annually committed to these prisons for
debt in the one city of London.* To the shame of England be it said
that upon her statute books there existed laws, giving to creditors such
an arbitrary power; that no provision was made for the relief of honest
debtors, "for a judicious distinction between fraud and misfortune."
These laws only diminished a debtor's ability to pay by depriving him of
his personal liberty and by making him odious from association with
criminals in a common jail.
Hundreds of these hapless debtors were the innocent victims of specu
lative enterprises to which the government itself had given charters -T
hundreds had been reduced to penury by the collapse of the South Sea
Company, to which England's good faith was itself pledged; hundreds
were men of high birth, of gentle blood, of aristocratic family connec
tions; and riot a few were even men of genius. To realize what these
debtor prisons were and to know what choice spirits they sometimes con
tained one needs only to read the tale of "Little Dorrit," a novel in
which Dickens has charmingly portrayed for us a child of the Marshalsea.
Oftimes these debtor prisons witnessed the most cruel outrages. Men of
the highest respectability were made to consort with prisoners of the
lowest type, all thrown together in dungeons, not only devoid of ventila
tion but noisome with foul air and offensive with filth. Not unlike
Georgia's convict lease system of a later day, the control of .these prisons
was farmed out to the highest bidder. Sometimes as much as 5,000
pounds sterling per annum was paid for this coveted franchise; and, as
a rule, whenever a government, for ends of gain, transfers to private in
dividuals its authority over prisoners, we find a ruthless disregard of
human life on the part of monstrous Calabans who call themselves over
seers or jailers. England's prison laws were bad enough even under
normal conditions; but when, due to exploded bubbles in the financial
world, there was a swelling of these dens .of torture for unfortunate
debtors, suffering reached its climax, endurance was strained to its
utmost tension. It was time for the government itself to act. The re
sponsibility for these prison outrages, for these inhuman jailers, for these
unhappy debtors, all lay at the door of Christian England.
But relief was in sight. One day there appeared at the debtor
prison of the Fleet a gentleman whose tall figure, commandingly impres
sive, bespoke a military training. His face wore an anxious look. For
weeks he had missed a friend whom he had finally traced to this prison
—Robert Castell, a skilled architect, born to wealth. There was his name-
enrolled among the inmates. But on further inquiry touching the pris
oner's health he learned to his dismay that Castell. having been impris-
* J. E. McCain, '' The Executive in Proprietary Georgia," p. 8.