If the bankrupt be a merchant, no statute can reach his effects
beyond the seas; so that he has nothing to secure but his books, and
away he goes into the Friars. If a Shopkeeper, he has more
difficulty: but that is made easy, for there are men and carts to
be had whose trade it is, and who in one night shall remove the
greatest warehouse of goods or cellar of wines in the town and carry
them off into those nurseries of rogues, the Mint and Friars; and
our constables and watch, who are the allowed magistrates of the
night, and who shall stop a poor little lurking thief, that it may
be has stole a bundle of old clothes, worth five shilling, shall let
them all pass without any disturbance, and hundred honest men robbed
of their estates before their faces, to the eternal infamy of the
justice of the nation.

And were a man but to hear the discourse among the inhabitants of
those dens of thieves, when they first swarm about a new-comer to
comfort him, for they are not all hardened to a like degree at once.
"Well," says the first, "come, don't be concerned, you have got a
good parcel of goods away I promise you, you need not value all the
world." "All! would I had done so," says another, "I'd a laughed at
all my creditors." "Ay," says the young proficient in the hardened
trade, "but my creditors!" "Hang the creditors!" says a third;
"why, there's such a one, and such a one, they have creditors too,
and they won't agree with them, and here they live like gentlemen,
and care not a farthing for them. Offer your creditors half a crown
in the pound, and pay it them in old debts, and if they won't take
it let them alone; they'll come after you, never fear it." "Oh! but
a statute," says he again. "Oh! but the devil," cries the Minter.
"Why, 'tis the statutes we live by," say they; "why, if it were not
for statutes, creditors would comply, and debtors would compound,