OUR ADMINISTRATION OF "JUSTICE" IS IMMORAL
When we read about the Turkish or other Eastern law courts, in which
direct bribery of every official up to the judge himself is a regular
feature, we are horrified, and are apt to proclaim the fact that our
judges never take bribes. But, practically, it comes to very nearly
the same thing in England. No single step can be made for the purpose
of getting justice without paying fees; while the whole process of
bringing or defending an action-at-law is so absurdly complex as to
be almost incredible. Jeremy Bentham satirised this by supposing a
father of a large family to adopt the same method of settling a dispute
between two of his sons. He would not hear either of them himself, but
each must tell his story to a stranger (a solicitor), who wrote it
down and then instructed another stranger (a barrister) to explain it
to the father (as judge) and twelve neighbours (the jury). Then the
stranger (barrister) on each side asked questions of all the family who
knew anything about it; and the barristers, who had only third-hand
knowledge of the facts, tried to make each witness contradict himself,
or to acknowledge having done something as bad another time; till the
jury became quite puzzled, and often decided as the cleverest of the
barristers told them.
That is really the system of law courts to this day; and it is grossly
unfair, because the party who can pay the highest fees for the
services of the most experienced counsel is most likely, through the
lawyer's skill and eloquence, to secure a verdict in his favour. Yet
there is no effective protest against this unjust and absurd system,
which absolutely denies all redress of wrongs to the poor man when
oppressed by a rich one. One would think it self-evident that justice
ceases to be justice when it has to be paid for. But the system is
so time-hallowed, the profession of a barrister so honoured, and its
rewards so great, that it will never be abolished till there comes
about in our social system that fundamental change which will cut at
the very root-cause of almost all our existing law-suits, immorality
and crime.
In our criminal as well as our civil law and procedure there is equal
injustice. When the poor man is accused of the slightest offence
and brought before a magistrate by the police, he is, even though
perfectly honest and respectable, treated from the very first as if he
were guilty, often refused communication with his friends; and, when
the accusation is serious, he is remanded to prison again and again
till evidence has been hunted up, or even manufactured, against him.
Experience shows that the latter is often done and a quite innocent man
not infrequently punished. The dictum of the law, that an Englishman
should be held to be innocent till he is proved to be guilty, is
absolutely reversed, and he is treated as if he were guilty till,
against overwhelming odds, he is able to prove himself innocent. There
is no possible excuse for this now, and at the very least every man who
has a home or a permanent employment should be at once discharged on
his own recognizances.
Equally unjust and barbarous is the system of money-fines, often for
merely nominal offences, with the alternative of imprisonment. To the
well-off, or to the habitual criminal, the fine is a trifle; but to
the poor man charged with being drunk, with begging, or with sleeping
under a haystack, or any such act which is no real offence, the common
punishment of 10s. or a week's imprisonment, leaving perhaps wife and
children to starve or be sent to the workhouse, is really far more
immoral than the alleged offence.
Again, our Poor Law itself, as usually administered, is utterly
immoral. This is what a competent authority—Mr. Sidney Webb—says of
it:
"Underneath the feet of the whole wage-earning class is the
abyss of the Poor Law. I see before me a respectable family
applying for relief. What do we do to them? We, the Government
of England, break up the family. We strip each individual of
what makes life worth living. When the man enters the workhouse
he is stripped of his citizenship—branded as too infamous
to vote for a member of Parliament. Once in the workhouse,
we put him to toil or to loiter under conditions that are so
demoralising that we turn him into a wastrel. And we strip
the wife of her children. We send her to the wash-tub or
the sewing-room, where she associates with prostitutes and
imbeciles. The little children, if they are under five, are
taken to the workhouse nursery, where they also are tended by
prostitutes and imbeciles. There they remain, day after day,
without ever going down the workhouse steps until they are old
enough to go to the Poor Law school, or until they are taken
down in their coffins, owing to the terrible mortality among
the workhouse babies."
Of course, all workhouses are not so bad as this, but many are, and
have been during the three-quarters of a century of their existence.
Can we, therefore, wonder that week by week some poor and honest
parents commit suicide rather than see their children starve, or be
separated from them in the workhouse! The people we thus drive to death
are many of them as good as we ourselves are; yet the "Guardians of the
Poor"—well-to-do gentlemen and ladies—go on administering it week
after week and year after year without protest or apparent compunction.
Such is the deadening effect of long-continued custom.