Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship that is rotten. Were all men doing their duty, or even seriously trying to do it, there would be no Pauper.········Pauperism is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid unveracities and God-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving cants and jesuitisms, that exist among us. Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other.Thomas Carlyle: “Latter-day Pamphlets,”“The New Downing Street.”
Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship that is rotten. Were all men doing their duty, or even seriously trying to do it, there would be no Pauper.
········
Pauperism is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid unveracities and God-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving cants and jesuitisms, that exist among us. Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other.
Thomas Carlyle: “Latter-day Pamphlets,”“The New Downing Street.”
The current cant of the day is that the alehouse leads to the workhouse. From an architectural and hygienic point of view they have much in common, and perhaps when one comes to spend one’s last years amid the unloveliness and official squareness and coldness of the workhouse one will be able to look back with a sense of grateful pleasure to the more natural squalor of the alehouse. It is a zoological fact that the human pauper, escaped for the day from a workhouse, makes like a homing bird for the alehouse, wherefrom we may draw the conclusion that the public for whom our two public housesare provided by an intelligent State prefer the alehouse as the lesser abomination of the two.
I often wonder if there is any nation in the world that possesses an appetite equal to that of our own people for Royal Commissions and reports. I admit that I have the craving strongly myself—not to sit upon Commissions, for I am a working man and the amusement is one for Bishops, Law Lords, philanthropists and the leisured classes—but I buy the reports when they come out and sometimes read them—or some of them—or some part of them—and marvel at the patience and energy and research that have gone to the making of them, and sigh over the pity of it and the heart-breaking inutility of the whole business.
Here is the report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909. The blue cover of my copy is already turning grey with old age, the pencil marks I made in the margin when I read it five years ago remind me of the splendid reforms that spread themselves out in its pages and made one feel that after all the world was a better affair than one had hitherto believed. This report is indeed literally a monument of industry. It sat from 1905 to 1909. There are over twelve hundred pages in the report itself, which you can buy for the trumpery sum of five and six. The evidence of it is contained in many volumes, and if your library is large enough and you can afford to pay the price of a large paper set, you would have reading enough for the rest of your natural life. And what has come of it all? Practically nothing. It is notto be supposed that either the report or the evidence has ever been read and studied by our ministers and rulers. A few magazine and newspaper articles have been made of it, then perhaps a book or two are written on the subject, the origin of which you can trace to the report, and after that gradually the thing sinks by its own cumbrous weight into the dead limbo of forgotten state papers. Yet if there was a problem called the reform of the Poor Law in 1905 worthy of the consideration of the good men and women who gave up a large slice of their lives to working at it surely in 1914 there is still such a problem, and some of it is at least as urgent as the questions over which our political pastors wrangle and fight with such splendid energy. To write an essay on the law and the poor in relation to the relief of distress would be to traverse the whole ground of this famous report, but for my own part I only want to call attention to an institution typical of all the faults and errors of the Poor Law—the workhouse.
For if the rich have by their laws made a mess of the alehouse, what about the other public-house—the workhouse? When you have no money to enable you to take your ease at your inn the only other hostelry open for you and your wife and children is the Poor House.
If there is one subject that has a more confused melancholy legal history than another it is the story of the workhouse. No doubt much has been done and something is doing, but it is difficult to see the real metal of the reformer’s work for the greatheaps of Poor Law dirt that our forefathers have left for us to clear away. For years the great English General Mixed Workhouse has been looking for trouble. It has not a friend even in the Local Government Board Office, and it has been condemned by all right-minded men and women time out of mind as an abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Yet there it is. A blockhouse, invented, built, and governed by blockheads, or at least beings with wooden blocks instead of human hearts. It is mournful to read the Poor Law history of the last eighty years and to learn how little we have done to dry the tears of the widows and orphans who become, through folly, misfortune, or ill-regulated industry, the wards of the State.
And to understand how such an institution came into our midst, it is necessary to look back a bit upon the natural history of our Poor Law.
Whatever our failings may be as practical statesmen capable of translating philanthropic theory into practical statutory right action, no one can deny we are a great people for ideals. And the ideal of our Poor Law has from earliest days been excellent. Coke in his Institutes tells us that it was ordained by Kings before the Conquest that the poor should be sustained by parsons, rectors, and parishioners, “so that no one should die from lack of sustenance.” That was, and still is, the ideal. No citizen is to die from lack of sustenance, and yet surely since the Conquest, and even recently in our own time, some perverse person has escaped the careful eyes of the parsons, rectors, and parishioners, and crept awayto an obscure corner there to die of hunger against the ordinance of Kings in that case made and provided.
Coke got this phrase from Andrew Horn, the author or editor of that excellent treatise “La Somme appelle Mirroir des Justices,” which he must have compiled somewhere before 1328, though it was first printed in 1624. Horn’s “Mirror of Justices,” is not, I believe, regarded with great reverence by the learned as a law-book, but Coke enjoyed it and quoted it with approval, and whether or not some of its phrases were ever sound law I dare not express an opinion, but I will vouch for the excellence of Andrew’s sympathies.
In writing of the criminal law he tells us that “the poor man who to escape starvation takes victuals to sustain his life, or a garment to prevent death by cold, is not to be adjudged to death if he had no power to buy or to borrow, for such things are warranted by the law natural.”
I suppose it is doubtful if this was ever good common law to be acted upon in all criminal courts, but one admires old Andrew for setting it down and is glad to learn that even in the beginning of the fourteenth century there were writers on law who were trying to mitigate the rigour of the law in favour of the poor. They may not have actually stated what the law exactly was, but they had shrewd ideas at the back of their minds as to what it ought to be. If they confused the two themselves at times, and this confused other learned ones in after times, maybe no one has been much the worse for it.And when Horn laid down in his quaint dog French that “Les povres fusent sustenuz par les persones rectours des eglises e par les paroisiens,” I fear he was writing of what ought to be rather than what was the existing common law of the relief of the poor.
I am not at all sure that leaving the matter in the hands of parsons and parishioners has not been the cause of most of the failure of the Poor Law. If you have studied parsons and parishioners as a class, you do not find them peculiarly desirous of providing sustenance for others. Queen Elizabeth—a very practical lady, much thought of by parsons and parishioners—was evidently of the opinion that you were asking too much for the poor when you said that they should have sustenance for nothing. She it was who enacted that in return for the ideal Saxon sustenance, which was apparently to be freely given, the poor person was now to give his work. Churchwardens and overseers, instead of giving free relief had power to set to work children whose parents could not maintain them, and make their parents work too if necessary. This was the beginning of the system that made you chargeable on the parish, and gave the parish a right to make you work off some of your chargeability.
In the eighteenth century came the interesting and disastrous experiment of indiscriminate out-door relief. The farmer parishioner discovered he could get a cheaper labourer by making his fellow parishioners pay some of the wages in out-door relief. A pauper was a better tenant to have, since the rent was paid out of the poor rates, abastard child was an asset in a household, and in 1821 overseers are known to have shared out the pauper labourers among themselves and their friends and paid for the labour wholly out of the poor-rate.
The scandals that had arisen led to the reform of the Poor Law in 1834, which placed the administration in the hands of Commissioners who were to see that the law was carried out, and by a natural swing of the pendulum they turned from an indiscriminate doling out of rates to favoured paupers to a system whereby the labourer was to find that the parish was his hardest taskmaster so as to induce him to keep away from the overseers and make parish relief his last and not his first resource. The ideal that the Commissioners stood out for was that no relief whatever was to be given to able-bodied persons or to their families otherwise than in well-regulated workhouses. This was the beginning of the workhouse system which really made the workhouse a kind of prison for those who could not find work outside.
A great deal has been done since then, and especially in recent years, to mitigate the lot of the poor. Old Age Pensions, Labour Exchanges, Medical Insurance, Unemployment Insurance and the enlightened administration of some of the better Boards of Guardians have made great inroads on the negative inhumanity of the workhouse system. But unless it be in some of the more vigorous northern centres Poor Law work and Poor Law elections rouse but little enthusiasm. There are nodoubt many men and women who enter into the service of the Poor Law from noble motives and do useful work, but the good they can do is very limited. The Central Authority seems to have no very settled ideals, different boards run different policies, some hanker after the flesh pots of labour cheapened by indiscriminate relief, others clamour for lower rates obtained by the inhumanity of not allowing anything but indoor relief. The guardians whose voices are raised only in the interests of the poor are scarcely heard by those who are clamouring for a lowering of the rates.
One thing all reformers seem to be agreed upon, and that is that the General Mixed Workhouse with good, bad, and indifferent men, women, and children herded together within its four walls is an abomination of desolation. Maybe it did its work in the past as part of the evolution of the Poor Law, dragging it out of a slough of corrupt and unwholesome administration, but a time has surely come when we can apply more scientific remedies to prevent the recurrence of such scandals, and there is no longer a necessity to sacrifice the lives and happiness of decent men, women, and children by the continuance of our workhouse system.
For what is a General Mixed Workhouse? It is an institution that has been officially condemned since the Commissioners of 1834 went their rounds and made their report. Crowded together in the workhouses of that day they found a number of paupers of different type and character, neglected children under the care of any sort of pauper who wouldundertake the task, bastard children, prostitutes, blind persons, one or two idiots, and an occasional neglected lunatic. There was enough humanity among the Commissioners of eighty years ago to see that what was urgently necessary was classification; the aged and the really impotent wanted care, peace, and comfort, the children wanted nursing, supervision, and education, hard working men and women in misfortune did not want to live in close proximity to the “work shy” and the “ins and outs.” “Each class,” says the Report, “should receive an appropriate treatment; the old might enjoy their indulgences without torment from the boisterous; the children be educated and the able-bodied subjected to such courses of labour and discipline as will repel the indolent and the vicious.” This was reported of the workhouse in 1834, this is again reported of the workhouse in 1909; there seems every reason to believe that it will be once more reported of the workhouse in 2000.
Of course, many things are better to-day than they were eighty years ago. A different standard of sanitation and hygiene has arisen throughout the country and some of it has found is way into the workhouse. We have Poor Law schools and Poor Law infirmaries that were unthought of in those days and, as a whole, our buildings are clean and healthy; there is no ill-treatment in them as there was in the days of Bumble; food, clothing and warmth are at least sufficient; and in communities where there is an exceptional Board and a superior master and matron much is done to hinder theobvious evils of promiscuity. Nevertheless, the evil overshadows the good, for it is the institution itself—the workhouse—that is as radically unwholesome and unfit to-day as it was in 1834.
The evils of promiscuity cannot be exaggerated. In the larger workhouses male and female inmates dine together, work together in kitchens and laundries and in the open yards and corridors, with results that are obvious. In a fortuitous assembly of such people the lowest common denominator of morality is easily adopted as the standard. What a terrible place is a General Mixed Workhouse to which to send children or young people. One cannot read some of the passages in the report for which Mrs. Sidney Webb and her colleagues were responsible without shuddering at our own guiltiness and folly as ratepayers for allowing these things to be done in our name. “No less distressing,” they say, “has it been to discover a continuous intercourse which we think must be injurious between young and old, innocent and hardened. In the female dormitories and day rooms women of all ages and of the most varied characters and conditions necessarily associate together without any kind of restraint on their mutual intercourse. There are no separate bedrooms; there are not even separate cubicles. The young servant out of place, the prostitute recovering from disease, the feeble-minded woman of any age, the girl with her first baby, the unmarried mother coming in to be confined of her third or fourth bastard, the senile, the paralytic, the epileptic, the respectable deserted wife, the widow to whomout-door relief has been refused, are all herded indiscriminately together. We have found respectable old women annoyed by day and by night by the presence of noisy and dirty imbeciles; idiots who are physically offensive or mischievous, or so noisy as to create a disturbance by day or night with their howls, are often found in Workhouses mixing with others, both in the sick wards and in the body of the house.”
This picture is foul and detestable enough, but it is perhaps in the treatment of children that the workhouse system causes the greatest unintentional cruelty. There are some 15,000 children actually living in General Mixed Workhouses. A large proportion of these have no separate sick ward for children, and no quarantine wards if there should be such a thing as an outbreak of measles or whooping cough. Young children are to be found in bed, with minor ailments, next to women of bad character under treatment for contagious disease, whilst other women in the same ward are in advanced stages of cancer and senile decay. Children come in daily contact with all the inmates, even the imbeciles and feeble minded are to be found at the same dining table with them. In this huge State nursery the nurses are almost universally pauper inmates, many of them more or less mentally defective. A medical Inspector’s report in 1897, stated that in no less than “sixty four Workhouses imbeciles or weak-minded women are entrusted with the care of infants.” One witness states that she has “frequently seen a classed imbecile in charge of a baby.” In the greatpalatial workhouses of London and other large towns the Commissioners found that “the infants in the nursery seldom or never got into the open air.” They found the nursery frequently on the third or fourth story of a gigantic block, often without balconies, whence the only means of access, even to the workhouse yard, was a lengthy flight of stone steps down which it was impossible to wheel a baby carriage of any kind. There was no staff of nurses adequate to carrying fifty or sixty infants out for airing. “In some of these workhouses,” they write, “it was frankly admitted that the babies never left their own quarters, and the stench that we have described, during the whole period of their residence in the workhouse nursery.”
Seventy years have passed since it was written, and yet the “Cry of the Children” has as much meaning for us as it had for our grandfathers.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,The young birds are sleeping in the nest,The young fawns are playing with the shadows,The young flowers are blowing toward the west—But the young, young children, O my brothers,They are weeping bitterly!They are weeping in the playtime of the others,In the country of the free.
And I am far from suggesting that all this evil is the result of any personal inhumanity of Boards of Guardians, Masters or Matrons or of their Inspectors and Governors in higher places. It is a matter in which each individual citizen must bear his share of blame for he knows it to exist, and he knows that he can have it altered if he cares to put his hand deepenough into his pocket, or if he will forgo some of the political luxuries dear to his party heart and give up the expenditure on them to the betterment of little children.
Other European countries have managed to classify their poor. In France the medical patients go to hospitals, the infirm aged poor have special “hospices,” and the blind and the idiots are separated from the little children, each having their appropriate establishments. Of course we take a great and to some extent justifiable pride in our Local Government institutions, but as the world becomes more complex and difficult, it is beginning to be seen that backward and less intelligent districts do not get the full value out of legislation and rates that a progressive and vigorous district obtains. It is one thing to pass an Act of Parliament and another thing to get a local elective body to administer it intelligently. If we could level up the worst administration of Guardians to the best, a great deal would be done, but there is no manner of doubt that the State ought to impose a time limit on the General Mixed Workhouse and to enact that after such a date no Board of Guardians shall be allowed to house men, women, and children in the unclassified barracks in use to-day. If any body of Guardians do not feel capable of carrying out such a decree the State must take their job over and do it for them.
For eighty years the law makers have been told by their own experts what their workhouses were, and why they ought to be abolished and the factthat the greatest sufferers from the iniquity are poor children who cannot voice their complaints, and exist in dumb ignorance of the wrongs that are done to them, does not make our position as the wrong-doers any less deserving of damnation.
REMEDIES OF TO-DAY
When Absalom cried out in a loud voice, “Oh, that I were made judge in the land that every man which hath any suit or cause might come unto me, and I would do him justice!” he was, as we should say nowadays, playing to the gallery. Yet, sincerely uttered, what a noble wish it was. Let it stand as an expression of the still unfulfilled ideal of judicial duty and public service which we owe to-day to the poor of this country. Every man has not as yet a judicial system that does justice to every man.
And I fear that Absalom’s fine saying was only an election cry in his campaign against his father, recalling to the voters perhaps David’s inconsistency in the theory and practice of justice in the matter of Uriah and his wife. In those days the King, the Lawgiver, and the Judge were but one person, so that to be made Judge was to be made Lawgiver and King, and you not only administered the laws but made them as you went along. Absalom was only an office seeker, but his election address contained a noble sentiment.
Nowadays the Judges are merely servants of the law, like policemen and bailiffs and the hangman. Nor does the King make the laws, nor are there in theory any professional Lawgivers. The people—or at least so many of the people as get on the register and trouble to vote—make their own laws, or are supposed to do so. At least they have the power of choosing their representatives and servants to make what laws they want.
If, therefore, a sufficient number of men in the street greatly desired amendment of the law in this or that direction, I have no doubt it would come about. But very few of the problems that trouble me come before the eyes of the average man in the course of his daily life, and he is scarcely to be blamed for not trying to mend that which he has not observed is broken and worn out.
One man may know at first hand the story of a home ruined by reckless credit and imprisonment for debt, another may know a cruel case of lives blighted by our unequal divorce laws, a third may have seen the sad spectacle of an injured workman sinking from honest independence to neurasthenic malingering by reason of the poisonous litigious atmosphere of the Workmen’s Compensation Act.
I can never understand why men and women hunger after the tedious, unreal, drab scandals portrayed in a repertory theatre when they could take a hand at unravelling the real problem plays of life in the courts and alleys of the city they live in. Real misery and wretchedness is at least as pathetic as the sham article, and if you do yourtheatre-going in a real police court you may learn to become a better citizen.
Not that I advise all men and women to spend their leisure in these squalid surroundings. I recognise that the man in the street cannot at first hand study all these problems, and that is why I have set down something of the disabilities of the poor under the law, in the hope that my political pastors and masters may take an interest in these domestic reforms.
There are many, I know, who think that a judge, like a good child, should in matters of this kind be seen and not heard. But for my part I am not of that opinion, for if a judicial person knows that the machine he is working is out of date and consuming unnecessary fuel, blacking out the moral ether with needless foul smoke, and if, moreover, he thinks he knows how much of this can be put right at small expense, should he not mention the matter not only to his foreman and the frock coat brigade in the office—who are the folk who supply the bad coal—but to the owner of the machine who has to pay for it and live with it—the man in the street?
Now there is a great deal that might be done to make the law less harsh to the poor without any very elaborate legislation, and certainly without any of those absurd inquiries and commissions which are the stones the latter-day lawgivers throw at the poor when they ask for the bread of justice.
I like to read of Lord Brougham, as far back as 1830, shivering to atoms the house of fraud and iniquity known as the Court of Chancery. I like topicture him pointing his long, lean, skinny fingers at his adversaries, and to see the abuses he cursed falling dead at his feet. Could he have had his way, the very County Court system which we have to-day would have sprung into being within a few months of his taking his seat on the woolsack, and he would have instituted Courts of Conciliation for the poor, to hinder them from wasting their earnings in useless costs.
But the petty men who walked under his huge legs and peeped about were too many for Colossus. And, to be fair to the fools of his time, the great giant was not himself a persuasive and tactful personality. Sane, wise, and far-reaching as were the legal reforms he propounded, too many, alas, still remain for future generations to tackle.
Pull down your Hansard debates of to-day, read them if you can, and say honestly in how many pages you find political refreshment for the man in the street. The small reforms of existing laws that weigh hardly on the poor are worth at least as much of parliamentary time as many of the full dress debates about ministers’ investments and tariff reform and the various trivial absurdities that excite the little minds of Tadpole and Taper, but have no relation whatever to the works and days of the power citizens of the country.
And if I were called upon to draw up a new Magna Charta for the poor—and I could draft all the reforms I want in a very small compass—I should put at the head of the parchment—“Let it be enacted that no British subject may be imprisonedfor a civil debt.” I do not believe that if Members of Parliament would vote on this subject as I know many of them would really wish to vote that there would be a dozen voters in the “No” lobby, and I am firmly convinced, though here I must own my parliamentary friends are in disagreement with me, that they would not injure their hold on their constituencies.
If there were any machinery in our unbusiness-like Parliament for dealing with social subjects on a non-party basis, imprisonment for debt would have been abolished long ago. The proposal is, however, a proposal to ameliorate the bottom dog, and the human bottom dog is poorly represented in the great inquest of the nation. The foreign bird whose plumes adorn the matinee hats of our dearly beloveds, the street cur who might find a sphere of utility in the scientist’s laboratory, the ancient cabhorse who crosses the Channel to promote an entente cordiale by nourishing the foreigners—all these have friends, eloquent and vigorous for the lives and liberties of their especial pets; but the poor man who goes to gaol because he cannot pay the tally-man has few friends.
There is no getting away from the fact that political influences are against the abolition of imprisonment for debt. I remember many years ago—more than twenty, I fear—a learned County Court judge laughing at the eagerness with which I threw myself into a newspaper campaign against imprisonment for debt. “I, too,” he said, “used to think I should live to see it abolished, and youthink that merely stating unanswerable arguments against it is likely to lead to results. Well, I used to think that way about it at one time, but it is not a matter of argument at all; it is all a case of vested interests and nervous politicians. Some day another Lord Brougham will come along and sweep the thing away as he swept away the old Chancery Courts and many another legal abuse, but I shall never see it done, and unless you are another Methuselah you will never see it done.” And then with a laugh of mock despair he added:
Logic and sermons never convince,The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
I am beginning to think that my old friend spoke with the tongue of prophecy, and he was certainly right about the vested interests.
The three parties in English politics have a curious attachment to imprisonment for debt. They do not allude to it much on the platform or in the House, but it is there at the back of their minds all the same. The Conservative opposition to the proposal is the more straightforward and natural. Here is a system which enables the well-to-do to collect money from the poor, it encourages credit giving, and is thought to promote trading, it causes no inconvenience to the wealthier classes, it exists and always has existed, and it works well. Why should it be altered, especially as there is no great demand for change, and change is in itself an evil thing? Let us leave well alone. The Liberal, off the platform, is much in agreement with the proposition of abolition, his difficulties are purely practicaldifficulties. He finds among his best supporters, drapers, grocers, tally-men and shop-keepers, most of them Nonconformists and keen Radicals, and all of them credit givers, carrying on their businesses under the sanction, more or less direct, of imprisonment for debt. These traders are not only voters and supporters, but they are centres of political influence. I remember in the South of England, thirty years ago, being told of a grocer in a small village who was a man whose support it was necessary for the candidate to obtain. I went along to see him and he agreed to support my friend. He was worth over two hundred votes, all of them in his debt and liable to be summoned at any moment for more than they could pay.
In politics it is absurd to expect individuals to kick against the pricks, and I do not know of any politician who, deeply as he may believe in the justice and expediency of abolishing imprisonment for debt, has ever cared to take up the matter and place it prominently before his constituents in the hope of being able to convince them that it would make for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The general belief seems to be that the influence of the shopkeeping and travelling trading classes would be used against such a Quixote, and he would receive a severe warning to stick to the ordinary hack lines of political talk and not risk his seat tilting at windmills.
The attitude of the Labour party is even more peculiar. Outwardly and individually they, of course, being more thoughtful and experiencedabout the wants of the poor, agree very heartily that imprisonment for debt is a class institution which should be abolished. But they certainly show no great enthusiasm in taking a hand at working for its abolition. This is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that they are business men and not theorists and have other and nearer work to do. They would, I make no doubt, support any measure of abolition, but it is essentially a legal reform and they would wait for some legal authority to initiate it.
There is too, undoubtedly, at the back of the Labour mind the idea that imprisonment for debt may be a very present help in time of trouble. In the Select Committee of 1893 Mr. William Johnson, a miner’s agent, gave evidence in favour of imprisonment for debt; he asserted that nine-tenths of his men did not desire its abolition and were in favour of its continuance. Later on he pointed out that in case of sickness or in the case of non-employment, “and probably in the case of strikes,” credit given under the sanction of imprisonment for debt would be useful. Unemployment and sickness are now largely dealt with by insurance, and from a public point of view the idea that strikes should be financed by the small tradesmen and, in case of their bankruptcy, ultimately by the wholesale trade, is not an attractive one.
The reformer must always expect to find selfish class interests up against him, but it seems to me that the desires of those who want to finance strikes on credit and the rights of those who at present are selling shoddy on credit at extravagant pricesought not to weigh against the general public welfare. If, as I venture to think, the arguments against the last step in the abolition of imprisonment for debt are as valid as they were on former occasions, and if, as must be admitted, no evils have followed on the partial abolitions of imprisonment already made in 1837 and 1869, then the mere fact that the public is apathetic on the subject and that members of Parliament are apprehensive of interested opposition is not of itself sufficient excuse for those who are in authority in legal matters refusing to complete the reform by abolishing imprisonment for debt for the poor as it has already been abolished for the rich.
Of course, the mere abolition of imprisonment for debt would not to my mind be a sufficient protection of the poor unless side by side of it were enacted a homestead law greatly enlarging the existing exemptions from execution of the tools and chattels of a working man. The idea is that the home furniture necessary to the lives of the human beings forming the home should be incapable of being seized for debt. Make the limit twenty pounds or whatever sum you please but clearly enact that sufficient chattels to furnish a reasonable house are exempt from execution. In America and Canada these homestead laws exist and work well. It occurs to our cousins across the pond that it is a better thing to keep a home together than to sell it up for an old song to pay official fees and costs and something on account to the foolish creditor. The returns from a poor auction of a workman’s household furniture are miserable reading. The landlord by distress or thetally-man by execution may get a few shillings for himself and pay away a few more shillings to bailiffs and others, but the cost of it to the poor is cruel. Tables and chairs and perhaps a sideboard that represent months of savings and long hours of labour are in a moment of misfortune snatched away from their proud possessor and his home is a ruin.
The homestead laws in Canada, though not the same in every State, go much further than any laws we possess to prevent the breaking up of a home. In Manitoba, for instance, executions against lands are abolished, though land can be bound by a judgment by registering a certificate, and the household furniture and effects, not exceeding 500 dollars in value, and all the necessary and ordinary clothing of the debtor and his family are exempt from execution. The actual residence or house of a citizen to the extent of 1,500 dollars is also exempt. Imagine what an incentive it would be to the purchase of house property and furniture if a man were to know that his cottage to the value of three hundred pounds, and its contents to the extent of one hundred pounds, would always be protected from bailiff and sheriff. What a check, too, such legislation would be on the reckless way in which credit is given.
One exception to this rule seems to me very fair. There is no exemption of anything the purchase price of which was the subject of the judgment proceeded upon. Thus a man cannot buy a sideboard, refuse to pay the price of it, and claim exemption of the sideboard from execution by the furnituredealer who sold it, though he could claim exemption of the sideboard against a money lender who had obtained a judgment against him, and wanted to recover his debt by sweeping his home away. Here in England people are driven to shifts and evasions by means of bills of sale, goods put in the wife’s name, and a number of other semi-dishonest devices to protect their homes. The sight of a home broken up and the furniture that has cost so many years of saving slaughtered at a third-rate auction for little more than the costs and fees of the bailiffs is no great incentive to a working man to spend his savings on good, home-made chattels. Cheap foreign shoddy on the hire system is the order of to-day, and as a mere matter of encouragement of the better class home trade in furniture, carpets, drapery and household goods generally, we might consider the advisability of taking a leaf out of the Statute book of Manitoba.
That debt should never be allowed to utterly destroy a family and a home seems to me such a clear and sane idea that it has always been a puzzle to me to try and understand the point of view of those who cannot see the matter in the same light. I know it is a degrading confession for anyone with even the pretence of a judicial mind to have to make but it is best to be honest about it. I rather gather I am a little obsessed, or abnormal, or feeble-minded, or senile perhaps nowadays about anything that touches home or home life.
The home to me is the great asset of the nation. I do not want to see the home superseded by State barracks or common hostels or district boardingschools. On the contrary, I think individual homes are good for the development of citizens. For this reason I would protect the home from ruin by an extravagant husband or an extravagant wife in the interests of the children, who are the next generation of citizens, and whose welfare is, therefore, a debenture of the State.
Nobody would think of distraining on a pheasant’s nest, or breaking up the home of a couple of partridges, or imprisoning the birds at breeding time in separate coops and cutting down their food merely because one of the birds had run up a bill for too many mangel wurzels or the other had run into debt for some fine feathers beyond her means.
Pheasants and partridges are too valuable to be so treated. Their nests are protected from any distress or execution by poachers, and their bodies are protected from arrest by watchful gamekeepers under strict laws. I want to insure under my reformed laws that the human nest should be protected in the same way, and that judges should not only be allowed, but ordered, to take care that the home is not devastated by human misfortune or even by improvidence. We want Game Laws for the poor. In future our legislators must treat them as game birds—as indeed most of them are—and not as vermin to be devoured, they and their children, by the owls and kites of the underworld in which they live.
And the second clause of my Magna Charta would be of almost simpler dimensions than the first. It would run: “Let it be enacted that theCounty Courts have jurisdiction in Divorce.” This would at once place rich and poor on an equality that is not yet even aimed at. I should not complicate this matter with the overdue reforms proposed by the Divorce Commission, much as I should like to see those enacted. They are matters of general interest that have waited for so many years that there is not much hardship in holding them back further, but the institution of a new tribunal of divorce is of vital and immediate importance to the poor. The Act would be a practically unopposed act of one clause. It would only touch one vested interest, the London lawyers of the Divorce Court, and it would greatly please their brethren throughout the country.
All details of costs and machinery could be left to rule committees, as is the common practice in other and more important matters that have come to the County Courts, such as Admiralty and equity jurisdiction, and a hundred other really difficult and complicated matters.
And then would follow a lot of simple but important reforms that really only need the stroke of the official pen that is never made until the man in the street rises in his wrath and knocks the official funny-bone on the official desk and wakens him up to the fact that it is officially time to do some official act.
For, of course, police court fines must be cut down and time given to pay them, and police court costs must be paid by the community, and bankruptcies must be made available to the poor, andthe Treasury must cease to rob the poorest bankrupts of £13,000 a year, and the limit of such bankruptcies must be raised to £250, so that poor little business men and their creditors may get what there is, rather than it should all go in costs and fees and payments to lawyers and accountants, who must give up sparrow shooting and hunt for bigger game.
And, above all, we must remember to engross in big black text on our parchment what Joseph Chamberlain said about his Workmen’s Compensation Act, that it is to be worked without lawyers, or at least, that it is to be made one of the judge’s duties to see employer and workman first and endeavour to bring them together before he issues his fiat that the affair is “fit for litigation.”
This little programme surprises me by its moderation. How any society of business men could palaver about it in any Palaverment for more than a week passes my comprehension. I commend my new Magna Charta to a party in want of a programme. If they carried it in the first week of their Ministry and then adjourned for seven years to see how the world went on without them, they would be the most sensible and popular Government since the days of Alfred the Great.
REMEDIES OF TO-MORROW
I remember in my youth being told in the words of Marcus Aurelius: “Be satisfied with your business and learn to love what you were bred to.” At the time I may have resented the advice, but I have lived long enough to see the wisdom of it. Personally, at that period, I should have liked to have been an engine driver or at least a railway guard; later on in years I had thoughts aboutcarpentering; and in course of time water-colour painting, etching, playing the fiddle, and even golf seemed possible of attainment. But when you really learn that these higher ranks of life are closed to you by your own natural limitations and find out that your business in life is to be a drab official in an inferior court, then Marcus Aurelius is indeed grateful and comforting.
One can, after many years of it, learn to love even the County Court. You have much the same outlook and experience of life and human nature as the old bus driver. Every day brings you new passengers who accompany you for a few minutes on the journey of life, and you get to know many old ones and have a friendly crack with them over their domestic troubles. Moreover, at moments your daily job brings you in near touch with the joys and sorrows and trials and daily efforts of poor people, and once in a way perhaps you can be of use, which to a child and to a grown-up who has any of the child left in him is always a jolly thing. When you have really got quite accustomed to enjoying your work the natural garrulity which your friends lovingly attribute to senile decay stimulates you to make them partners in your joy. The narrow circle in which you spend your daily life has become your only world. You find yourself quoting with approval “with aged men is wisdom, and in length of days understanding,” and you begin to believe you are the only person who really does understand. Childlike, you find dragons in your path that you want to slay, pure and beautifulsouls are oppressed, and you fancy that you can release them from bondage; there are giants of injustice and persecution in the land whose castles you mean to turn into peoples’ palaces. Then you sit down to write your fairy tales again—but no longer for the children nowadays, since they are all grown up. These fairy tales are for journalists, philanthropists and politicians who make fairy tales and live on fairy tales; and believe me, there are no more essential fairy tales than stories about legal reform. Only to the writer are they real, and to one or two choice child spirits who never grow old and still believe in a world where everyone is going to live happily ever afterwards. The way in which Master Ogre, the Law, swallows up the poor is quite like a real fairy tale, and it would have even a happier likeness to the fiction of the nursery if we could tell of a Jack the Giant Killer cutting off the wicked monster’s head and rescuing his victims.
I am under no delusions that this little volume is going to do any particular good in any particular hurry. I know by historical study that the way of reform lies through official mazes of docket and précis and pigeon holes, that legislative decisions are hatched out in some bureaucratic incubator that the eye of common man has never seen. I reverence the mystery that surrounds these high matters. It is really good for us that we should know so little of the reason why things are no better than they are. And then how good our rulers are to us in the matter of Royal Commissions and Blue Books! At our own expense we may really have as many ofthese as we ask for. I wish I could get folk to understand what a lot of sterling entertainment there is in blue books. All the earnest ones, all the clever ones, all the cranky ones of this world set down their views and opinions on any subject at any distance from that subject, and wrangle and argue and cross-examine each other, and then the good Government prints it for us all verbatim and sells it to us very very cheap. Practically, I dislike the shape of a blue book, and æsthetically they do not match my library carpet when they are lying around, which is a disadvantage, but I must own that if I were banished to a desert island I would rather have my blue books than much of what is called classical literature.
The evidence is the best reading—and when one comes to the final report I generally find the minority report to be the thing one is looking for, as it is usually the minority who want to do something. But in some subjects, divorce for instance, things are moving so hurriedly during these last few hundred years that actually there is a majority in favour of legislation and reform.
Not that this makes the slightest difference as to any actual reform being done. The feeling of security that nothing is ever going to come of it makes it a safe and reasonable thing to print the most advanced views at the expense of the State. The physical weight and size of these volumes have been carefully considered and the whole format cunningly designed to repel readers. Nothing ever comes of blue books, and I do not suppose anythingever will come of them. When I turn over their dreary pages I find myself humming Kipling’s chorus—
And it all goes into the laundry,But it never comes out in the wash,’Ow we’re sugared about by the old men(’Eavy sterned amateur old men!)That ’amper an’ ’inder an’ scold menFor fear o’ Stellenbosh.
Dickens had the same impatience of the heavy sterned brigade and invented his immortal Circumlocution Office, and doubtless genius is entitled to deride these substantial State institutions. Personally, I find them very English and valuable. The more energetic of us may take our pleasure in giving friendly shoves to these heavy sterned Christians, but their inert services to the community are not to be undervalued. But for this immovable official wall who knows what reforms, unnecessary and ill-advised, might have been carried through. If Lord Brougham could have had his way much that I am writing about to-day would long ago have happened. The heavy sterned ones sitting on the lid prevented the opening of the Pandora box with its promises of affliction for the human race in the shape of legal reform. They have left these things over until to-day and brought me amusement for idle vacation hours. At least, let me be thankful to them and sing their praises.
I remember when I was planning out these chapters being the victim of a most terrible nightmare. A newspaper with a King’s speech in it was thrustbefore me and every one of the reforms I had already written about was promised to be passed within the Session. I remember smiling in my dream, knowing what parliamentary promises were, and then as I was gliding down the Strand a silent phantom newsboy handed me an evening paper. There it was in black and white, every bill was passed—there was nothing left to write about. I awoke with a cry. It was a terrible shock, and it was some moments of time before I could realise that such a thing was absolutely impossible. And, of course, when you think of the large number of things that you want done and recollect that nothing ever is done that a man really cares about in his own lifetime it was absurd of me, even in a dream, to believe that anything was coming between me and my little book. Indeed, I have hopes that for many years to come it may be regarded as a popular primer about legal reform for future generations who wish to while away idle hours in the luxury of vain imagination.
I should like to interest the man in the street about legal reform and to see him at work remedying some of the more obvious of the existing abuses I have referred to, but I am under no delusion that such reforms would bring about the millennium. It is good to do the pressing work in the vineyards on the slopes of the mountain, but it is permissible for poor human man to have his day off now and then to climb on the hilltops and gaze out on the limitless ocean of the future and indulge in wild surmises of the after-world.
The remedies of to-day are really tiresome parochial affairs compared to the remedies of to-morrow and hardly seem worth troubling about when one considers that even if you passed them all this year in a century or two your new statutes would be out of date and only fit for the scrap heap.
Bacon tells us that Time is the greatest of all innovators, but he does not explain to us why, unlike all human innovators, Time is in no hurry about it. I have quite distinct beliefs, which to me are certainties, as to how Time will reconcile the law and the poor in the centuries to come, when our social absurdities and wrong-doing will not even be remembered to be laughed at. The law will never be a really great influence for good until it is utterly conquered, put in its proper place in the world and based on the principle of Love. In other words, when the Law of Love receives the Royal Assent no other law will be necessary.
Nineteen hundred years ago a new principle was introduced into the world. It was the principle of unselfishness, and its apostles were labour men. In relation to man’s personal life it has made some progress, but in practical social politics its business value is not yet fully recognised. Still, a beginning has been made, and that old snail, Time, is doubtless satisfied with the pace of things. Let us remember hopefully that two thousand years ago unselfishness as a basic principle of life, doing to others as you would be done by, promoting peace and good will instead of strife and ill will—these ideas as business propositions were as unknown then as railways,telegraphs, motor cars, and aeroplanes. A vision of to-day would have been a wild fairy tale to Marcus Aurelius, a vision of two thousand years hence would be incomprehensible to us.
One does not mean, of course, that unselfishness had never before been preached as an ideal, but a society based on the common quality of all its members placing the interests of others above their own was a new notion, and the novelty of it has not yet worn off. Nevertheless, love and unselfishness have achieved sufficient lip-service already to make me hopeful of their future, and I foresee a time when they will be the foundation of the laws of the world, and the preamble to every statute will be “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”
Some day when the Chinese send over a mission to heathen England, missionaries will go about the country destroying all the boards on which are written the wicked words “Trespassers will be Prosecuted.” But I hope we may not have to wait for a foreign mission to teach us our duty.
This phrase, typical of the law of to-day and eloquent of the claims of the rich to fence the poor off the face of the earth, must utterly disappear when the new spirit of the law is made manifest. We have no sense of humour. On Sunday we intone to slow music our desire to forgive our enemy his trespasses; on Monday we go down to our solicitor to issue a writ against him for the trespass we have failed to forgive. The old notice threatening prosecution is really already out of date. It ought, of course, to read, “Trespassers will beForgiven.” For my part if I met with such a notice, I should hesitate before I walked across the owner’s land; whereas to-day, when I am threatened with prosecution, my bristles go up, I scent a right of way, and as like as not proceed in my trespassing out of pure cussedness. There are a lot of other folk besides myself who are built that way. I know a little girl of five whose chief glory in life is to walk “on the private,” as she calls it, when the park-keeper is not looking. It is that constant “Don’t!” and “You mustn’t” that rouses the rebel in us. The less forbidding there is, the easier the path of obedience.
I hold no brief for trespassers. I know it is naughty to trespass. But in the present state of my evolution there is so much of the original monkey in me that when that “monkey is up,” to use a phrase dear to Cardinal Newman, I go astray. So do many of my best friends.
I have the same belief in the evolution of the moral world and its onward movement that I have in the revolution of the physical world and its rotary movement. For this reason I expect my great-grandchildren of two thousand years hence to be much better behaved than I am. You can see it coming along in your own grandchildren unless your sight is getting dim. And I am quite clear that my own manners are an improvement on my great grandfathers, who lived in caves, and, when they had disputes, made it clubs, and battered each other strenuously until it was proved which had the thickest skull, when he of the toughest cranium was adjudged to be in the right.
The vigorous legal procedure of the cave men sounds laughable enough to us nowadays, but does anyone think that two thousand years hence superior unborn persons will not be smiling superciliously over the history books that record the doings of our judges, our hired counsellors, our sheriffs, our gaolers, and our hangman?
It was only in the recent reign of good Queen Bess that the ordeal of battle was given up. The abolition of that old-world lawsuit must have been painful to the conservative mind. And there was a lot to say for it. From a sporting point of view, what could be better than to go down to Tothill Fields in Westminster, as you might have done in 1571, to see A. B. battering C. D. to the intent that whichever knocked the stuffing out of the other gained the verdict?
If you look at it from a healthy, open-air point of view, maybe it was better for everybody than sitting in a stuffy court and listening to two bigwigs splitting hairs to the resultant financial ruin of one of their clients. One reason, no doubt, that trials by battle were abolished was that they gave the poor at least as good a chance as the rich.
I remember a good story—it is an old one, but still quite good—of a noble lord and landowner who net a collier trespassing in the neighbourhood of Wigan.
“My good man,” said my lord, “do you know you are trespassing?”
“Well, wot of it?”
“You have no right to be walking across my land.”
“I’m like to be walking across somebody’s land, I’ve noan o’ me own.”
“Well, you must not come across mine.”
“How do I know it is yours, and who gave it you?”
“Well, this land,” replied the noble lord, “belonged to my father and grandfather and his father for many generations.”
“But how did thi’ first grandfeyther get it?” persisted the collier.
“Well, as a matter of fact, it was granted by the King for services rendered. I may say,” my lord added proudly, “that my ancestors fought for this land.”
“Did they, now?” said the collier, “then tak off thi’ coat an’ I’ll feight thee for a bit.”
One can see from this anecdote that it would never do to return to ordeal by battle. And though individual fighting by violence to assert rights is out of date and not permissible, yet in the affairs of the collection of human beings known as nations the horrible waste of armaments and the menace of war are living evidence of the ultimate tribunal to which we still appeal.
No one really believes that force and violence are sane remedies for the evils of the world, and the whole history of mankind shows a gradual decline in the practice and use of them. In each succeeding generation our children will be nearer the truth than we are, and further on the journey towards the end when the rule of Love and Unselfishness will be the only law of the Universe, and will enforce itself without judges, juries, or policemen.
And lest anyone should say that all this is the mere vague raving of prophecy, let me set down a short, practical catalogue of what I expect the remedies of to-morrow to bring about in, say, two thousand years. In the first place, the disabilities of the poor that I have written about in these pages will all have been abolished and forgotten. Crime will be regarded as a disease, and it will be as inhuman to treat the criminal with harshness as it is to-day to torture lunatics after the methods of a hundred years ago.
Every citizen will have a right to sufficient food, clothing, housing, and entertainment in exchange for reasonable hours of work. The spirit of humanity will so greatly have been improved that it will be very little necessary to extort proper conditions for the lives of citizens or to protect the weak from exploitation by the strong. Litigation and war will be out of date and replaced by conciliation and arbitration. In a word, the reign of love and unselfishness will have commenced.
We may not even see my beautiful world from afar, but this need not dismay us, for we know it is there, and we know that every effort we make to serve the cause of the poor helps to clear the path through the desert along which the coming armies of victory will march in triumph. The cause of the poor has always been the greatest cause in the world, and the generation that has at length understood it, and fought for it and won it, will find itself standing at the open gates of the promised land.