Nothing is more common in rude states of society, and under arbitrary and despotic gov ernments, than the liability of the person of the debtor for his debt. This is one of the original sources of slavery. Even in the comparatively enlightened states of Greece and Rome the power of the creditor over the person of his debtor was recognized by law. This power was abolished in Athens by Solon, who is said to have taken his reform from Egypt, where the same unjust law had already run its course. The early Roman law was even more excessive in its undiscriminating severity. By the law of the Twelve Tables the creditors might cut the body of the debtor in pieces and share it among them, they might also sell him and his wife and family to perpetual slavery. In the Middle Ages, notwithstanding the influence of Christianity, the debtor was treated with hardly less severity. Even the Church took the side of the creditor, and the debtor who died without discharge was excotbmunicated and deprived of Christian burial. As society became more re fined the laws against debtors were again grad ually ameliorated, but the process was a slow one. Imprisonment for debt in England, except as an instrument for compelling the surrender of the debtors' effects, was only put an end to in the reign of Victoria.
In the United States originally imprisonment of debtors was adopted as a part of the common law, but at the present time imprisonment for debt, except in case of fraud, or of an ab sconding debtor, does not legally exist in any of the States. Congress, empowered by the United States Constitution to make a uniform bankruptcy law, exercised this power, and sub sequently repealed the law of imprisonment; and now, by Revised Statutes 990 and 991, no per son can be imprisoned for debt by any process issuing out of the courts of the United States, in any State where by the laws of the State imprisonment for debt has been abolished. Most of the States, by constitutional provision, have prohibited arrest or imprisonment for debt, while the other States, either by direct statutes prohibiting imprisonment for debt, or by poor debtors laws, or by insolvent laws, secure the same result; it being held to be against public policy to deprive a man, by imprisonment, of the power to pay his debts and make him a direct charge upon the State. See DEBT; DEBT,