34 - Of debtors

Summary

The need to guarantee the good faith of contracts and the security of trade require the lawgiver to assign to the creditors the persons of failed debtors. But I believe it is important to distinguish between the fraudulent bankrupt and the innocent bankrupt. The former ought to be punished with the same penalties which attach to the counterfeiter, because counterfeiting a metal coin, which is a token of the obligations citizens owe to each other, is no greater crime than counterfeiting the obligations themselves. {{But the innocent bankrupt is one who, after thorough investigation before his judges, has shown that he was stripped of his goods either by the wrongdoing of others, by the misfortune of others, or by circumstances beyond human control. On what barbarous grounds should he be thrown into prison, deprived of the sole, blighted good which is freedom, to suffer the miseries of the guilty, and, with the desperation of oppressed righteousness, perhaps go so far as to repent of his own innocence in which he lived peacefully under the protection of the laws, which it was beyond his power not to break? For these were laws dictated by the powerful out of greed and acquiesced in by the poor out of that hope which flickers in most human breasts and which makes us believe that events will be unfavourable to others and favourable to ourselves.