It is a grave disaster that the granting and regulation of licenses should

have fallen into the hands it has. Mr. Balfour's observation "that among

all the social evils which meet us in every walk of life, every sphere of

activity, the greatest of all evils is the evil of intemperance" is useful

as a peroration to any platform speech on the subject, but only makes the

judicious grieve that with the opportunity to do exactly as he liked and

the ability to draft useful legislation, Mr. Balfour did nothing whatever

to improve matters and diminish the evil of which he was so sensible.

Section 4 of his Act does indeed enable the magistrates to grant new

licenses and to make their own conditions as to the payments to be made by

the licensee, the tenure of the license, and any other matters "as they

think proper in the interests of the public." Under this section if there

were a licensing bench containing a working majority of friends of the

people, men who had no social or political interest whatever either in

breweries or teetotallers, it would seem that almost any experiment in

model public houses could be made under any regulations that the bench

chose to impose on the licensee. Mr. Balfour was perfectly right in

telling us that "love of temperance is the polite name for hatred of the

publican"; but what is the right name for love of the brewer? The fact is

that with these two warring political factions in the field the ideal

public house is not for this generation. No use will ever be made of

Section 4 under present conditions, because whoever applied for a license,

and however noble and beautiful the licensed premises were to be, however

ideal the provision of food, entertainment and drink, and whatever the

guarantees of good management, the combined opposition of the puritans and

the brewers would always strive to defeat or destroy any effort to give

the poorer classes pure beer in pure surroundings.

The first step you have to take is to convince the unenlightened puritan

that the Alehouse is, or ought to be, as worthy a public house as the

church or the school. This might be done by means of thoughtfully prepared

text books of English literature. There is no great English book from the

Bible downwards that has not incidental good and holy things to tell you

of "The Inn." What an appetising volume could be written of the inns and

innkeepers of Charles Dickens. How he revelled in their outward appearance

and the inward soul of welcome which he found there. How he rejoiced in

his sane English way over "The Maypole," "with its overhanging stories,

drowsy little panes of glass and front bulging out and projecting over the

pathway," and honest John Willet, the burly, large-headed man with a fat

face, intended by providence and nature for licensed victualling. Could we

have met Mrs. Lupin anywhere else than beneath the sign of that "certain

Dragon who swung and creaked complainingly before the village alehouse

door"? Could Mark Tapley have acquired his saintly outlook on life

anywhere but at "The Blue Dragon," and are we not full of joy to find him

returning there to live happily ever afterwards under the "wery new,

conwivial, and expressive" sign of "The Jolly Tapley"? How pleasant it is

to assist Crummles and Nicholas over their bowl of punch and the

beefsteak-pudding in the inn on the Portsmouth Road. Pickwick is a

cyclopaedia of inns, each with its own human character, good, bad and

indifferent. Who has not stayed at a "Peacock" with a "mantelshelf

ornamented with a wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half

a wafer: a road book and directory: a county history minus the cover: and

the mortal remains of a trout in a glass coffin"?

One could run on in pleasant remembrances of these beautiful and

delightful places by the hour, but one imagines that even the most

hardened political teetotaller must really know all about them, and

perhaps in his dreams strolls into "The Marquis of Granby" and sips his

glass of reeking hot pine-apple rum and water with a slice of lemon in it,

and awakens to the horrible imagination that his astral body has wandered

instinctively into a manifestation of his master and leader, the

incomparable Stiggins.

One very noticeable matter about any old-world book in which inns are

faithfully pictured is that in former days there was a real race of

English innkeepers, independent licensed victuallers, not mere brewers'

managers. There are still a few remaining with us who keep up the old

traditions, but the political forces of brewers and teetotallers have

squeezed this excellent race of public servants almost wholly out of

existence. You remember the Six-Jolly-Fellowship-Porters whose bar was "a

bar to soften the human breast" with its "corpulent little casks and

cordial bottles radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches and lemons in

nets and biscuits in baskets, and polite beer-pulls that made low bows

when customers were served with beer." How could there have been such an

ideal haven for the weary porters but for the sole proprietor and manager,

Miss Abbey Potterson, whose dignity and firmness were a tradition of the

riverside?

And then the dressing down she gave Rogue Riderhood.

"But you know, Miss Potterson," this was suggested very meekly though, "if

I behave myself you can't help serving me, miss."

"_Can't I!_" said Abbey with infinite expression.

"No, Miss Potterson; because you see the law----"

"I am the law here, my man," returned Miss Abbey, "and I'll soon convince

you of that if you doubt it at all."

"I never said I did doubt it at all, Miss Abbey."

"So much the better for you."

And how much better not only for Rogue Riderhood, but for all of us, if we

could once again make licensed victualling a great and respectable trade,

and once again have a race of people managing businesses that they could

really take a pride in.

The death of the old Boniface who owned his house and bought his beer in

the open market was brought about by the amalgamation of the smaller

breweries in the country, and the purchase of the bulk of the licensed

houses by the big breweries. The teetotallers assisted this natural

evolution by harassing individual owners with trumpery prosecutions,

opposing alterations and transfers at licensing sessions, and surrounding

the commercial life of an individual licensee with persecution and

annoyance and continued threats of impending ruin. One man could not fight

the great moneyed forces of the puritans, and the licensed holder was glad

to get out of an impossible trade by selling his interest to the brewers.

Most of the licensed houses in the country now belong in everything but

name to the big brewery companies. Their political friends have given them

a vested interest in their licenses, and the teetotallers having spent

large sums of money and wasted much energy in manoeuvring their

opponents into this excellent position, now sit sulkily at the gates of

it, and as they cannot do any effective good themselves, take earnest

pleasure in preventing any enlightened brewer from making the conditions

under which he sells his drink better and healthier for the community.

The result is that the poor man suffers. In the whole of this long

unworthy struggle between the political teetotaller and the brewer, the

higher interests of the poor and the real desires of the working classes

are scarcely ever mentioned--still less considered. When he is in

sufficient numbers, and is well enough off to do so, the poor man starts a

club like his betters, and no doubt these are valuable institutions, but

the club at the best does little for the wives and children, and is apt,

unless the public opinion of it is sound, to lead a man astray owing to

its very privacy. The puritan ideal is to drive the drinker into dark

secret places, and as far as possible make his surroundings uncomfortable

and degrading. The policy of the future is going to be to encourage the

authorities--and, if necessary, get new and more up-to-date

authorities--to replace the old dark, dirty puritan pub with a bright and

enchanting reformed inn, fit for all classes of folk, with music,

entertainment, and all manner of reasonable refreshment. Nothing can be

done until we recognise frankly that for years we have been moving along a

false track towards a mirage castle in the air, and that if anything

useful is to be achieved by administration or legislation we must turn our

backs on the past and start along a new road.

Some few facts seem beyond dispute. The mere cutting down of licenses has

in itself no demonstrable effect on the evil of the drink habit. The

manners and habits of all classes of people are tending to temperance and

sobriety, but the consumption of exciseable articles is increasing--last

year there was an increase of L5,128,000 over the figures of 1912.

What, then, is to be done? I think if we really want to do good in the

matter and can approach it without a desire to make dividends out of

brewery shares, or make alliances with teetotallers for political ends, we

shall have to look to some extent to foreign examples for guidance in our

difficulties.

All of us who have had leisure and money to see something of foreign

countries know that the squalid ideal of the brewer and the puritan is not

the only possible solution of such social difficulty as there is in

providing reasonable alehouses. The British public-house is a national

disgrace thrust by the rich on the poor by means of law. The working man

has no chance of amending things, as he has no say in electing the bosses.

Labour leaders short-sightedly favour the puritans' views. Certainly, our

public-houses being what they are, it is a choice of evils to keep out of

them.

But why should public-houses be what they are? I well remember at Mayence

entering a beautiful public hall--it was a rainy night, or the

entertainment would have been out of doors--where there was a fine string

band playing excellent music. Men, women, and children sat at tables and

had ham and bread and cake and beer and coffee, and those who wished to do

so smoked. There was no swilling at counters, there was no forced

teetotalism, there was no drunkenness; merely domestic liberty for

rational enjoyment.

Why cannot there be sufficient free trade in the beer business of this

country to allow an individual or, if you prefer it, an enlightened

municipality--where such exists--to copy the sane entertainments of our

German neighbours? A working man and his wife and children spend their

evening listening to the band in a German beer-garden with as little sense

of impropriety as Lord and Lady De Vere and the Hon. Gladys De Vere take

their lunch at the Ritz, or Alderman and Mrs. Snooks lunch in the French

restaurant at the Midland.

But in England these domestic felicities are for the rich alone. The

brewers and puritans have given the poor man a mean tippling-house to

booze in, and deny him anything better. His wife is looked upon as

degraded if she joins him at the only place where he can spend his

leisure, and the rich lawgivers put the true stamp on their own invention

by enacting that it is an unfit place for little children to enter.

The fact is that the public house should be built in the interests of the

public. There seems no great decrease in the desire to drink good ale. It

is a national taste, and, if the ale be good, it is probably at least as

healthy, or healthier, than drinking tea as tea is brewed in cottage

homes. But in the name of liberty and equality, surely if a man wants to

drink ale in moderation he should be encouraged to do so in bright,

pleasant surroundings, where he can spend his evenings at a moderate cost

with his wife and children and meet his friends. He should be allowed to

open such a place himself if the municipality will not do it for him, and

the more civilised brewers should be assisted and encouraged by the

licensing authorities to build big, spacious public houses, where the poor

man could obtain similar entertainment to that provided for his wealthier

brother.

There is something almost shameless in the way in which the law of

licensing is stretched to the uttermost for the rich and drawn to the

narrowmost for the poor. One picks up a paper with an account of the

latest midnight ball--the gayest event of the season--all in the interests

of charity, of course. What has become of that closing time which, if

overstepped by the poor, means police court for the criminals and loss of

license to the innkeeper? It has been extended, no doubt, by a complacent

magistrate, and you can sit down to supper at midnight, and all night long

you can refresh yourself at American bars presided over by beautiful

ladies of the chorus. One gathers there will be no closing time at all, as

breakfasts will be served from three o'clock. In the intervals of the

dancing there are to be famous music-hall turns. At some of these

fashionable dances valuable prizes are given, at others these fall to

lucky ones by some form of lot--not lottery, of course, for that would be

against the law, and these entertainments are arranged by eminent leaders

of society who are always within the law--well within it.

It would be ill mannered to endeavour to stop so much innocent enjoyment

of a class that has so little real pleasure by enforcing the licensing and

other laws to interfere with their amusements. On the contrary, we should

seek to use their example and better our own licensing circumstances by an

appeal to their precedent. If it is good for leaders of society to sing

and dance and sup after hours in their public houses, why should not the

rest of society be allowed to follow their example and have their own

beanfeasts in ample public houses undisturbed by the law? Of course there

must be a charity! Give me an extension of license in the Old Kent Road

and I will provide plenty of charities and plenty of lads and lasses ready

to sing Mr. Adrian Ross's refrain:

Care has gone to sleep till morning,

Night's the noon of joy.

For the young people of the poor are just as fond of a spree as those of

the rich, and quite as ready to be charitable to the extent of their means

after the same fashion.

There is an excellent letter of Charles Kingsley's written to the

"Christian Socialist" some sixty years ago that might well be circulated

among licensing benches by the Home Office--though I believe it is

considered officially to be bad economy to address printed common sense to

the unpaid magistracy. Naturally, autocrats resent or scoff at advice that

has no sanction behind it. The teetotal attitude of mind and the quarrels

it aroused very properly disgusted Kingsley. He took no pleasure in

hearing the water drinkers calling the beer drinkers "flabby, pot-bellied,

muddle-headed, disgusting old brutes," and the beer drinkers retorting on

the water drinkers that they were "conceited puritans and manichees and

ascetics." He saw that the quarrel would not do any good to the cause of

temperance, and in his honest enthusiasm blurted out the truth, the whole

truth and nothing but the truth about his teetotal friends, like the good

old Christian warrior that he was.

"On my honour," he writes, "unless the teetotallers show a more humble,

gentle and tolerant spirit than is common among them I shall advise beer

drinkers like myself and Mr. Hughes (Tom Brown of the Schooldays) either

to flee the country, or if their cloth allows them, which mine does not,

prove by self-defence that a man can value his beer, and thank God for it

with a good conscience, as tens of thousands do daily and yet feel as

tight about the loin and as wiry in the arm as any teetotaller in England.

Honestly, I am jesting in earnest. I regard this teetotal movement with

extreme dread. I deeply sympathise with the horror of our English

drunkenness that produced it. I honour every teetotaller as I honour

every man who proves by his action that he possesses high principle and

manful self-restraint.... That a man should be a teetotaller rather than a

drunkard needs no proof. Also that a man should go about in a sack rather

than be a fop and waste time and money on dress. But I think temperance in

beer, like temperance in clothes, is at once a more rational and a higher

virtue either than sackcloth or water."

This was true doctrine then and is true doctrine to-day, and the sad fact

that it fell on deaf ears and is still but half understood is the reason

of our backwardness in licensing reform and the presence of the degrading

public house which the law cherishes and protects.

Only the other day in a country town, on the application for a license,

the police superintendent objected to the house on the ground of the small

bar accommodation. His Grace the Duke, who happened to be in the chair,

wanted to know if the proprietor of the house would prepare a plan for

enlarging the bar accommodation. What could the proprietor do? The police

wanted to herd the drinkers into a bar so that they could pop their heads

in and see them all at once without any trouble, the bench wanted to do

what the police wanted them to do. The interests of the poor, the cause of

temperance, the betterment of the social life of the people were as

irrelevant to the case as the flowers that bloom in the spring.

At many a licensing session, too, you will listen to solemn warnings by

the superintendent of police against the public being allowed to amuse

themselves with penny-in-the-slot machines or gramophones or parlour

quoits or the like. Amusement is regarded with a natural horror by the

puritan, and the friends of the brewer see in it a dangerous alternative

to the duty of the working man to drink. One police authority threatened

the license holders "that if they continued to allow these machines to be

used in their licensed premises they did so at the risk of prosecution for

allowing gaming." The gaming laws of England with their wholesale

permission of gambling in one place and their retail persecution of

gambling in another place, and their incapacity to know when a place is

not a place or how otherwise, are a public laughing stock, but it is a

grievous thing that they should be dragged out to drive a little harmless

amusement out of the dingy tavern which is the only public institution the

poor man has for rest and recreation.

As a matter of fact, these machines, if they are used for gambling, are

generally used to see who shall pay for drinks. In some bars in foreign

countries a dice-box is always handy for this purpose. Three or four

friends come in and throw, the loser pays for drinks, and all are

satisfied, and having had their drink they go. I am not upholding the

custom as ideal, but I see little harm in it. In England, if three or four

enter a public house, the etiquette in many places is for one to stand

drinks, and for the rest in turn to offer to stand another round--an offer

seldom refused--and for the rounds to continue until each has stood his

corner. I would not go so far as to insist on a compulsory dice-box in

every bar, but I fancy on the whole that it is an agent of temperance.

Every one who has given any thought to temperance as opposed to

teetotalism, is agreed that what is wanted is the gradual elimination of

bars and counters and the substitution of chairs and tables and big open

rooms. In these must be provided tea, coffee, and all the usual lighter

refreshments that you find in the better-class restaurants and hotels. In

a big West End hotel you find every afternoon that the lounge is laid out

for afternoon tea. I do not see why a working man and his wife should not

have their tea in a lounge in their public house. I cannot understand why,

if two friends after a day in the workshop want to have a friendly chat,

they cannot find an institution where one can have his cup of tea and a

muffin, and the other his glass of ale and a sandwich, and both sit at one

table in a spacious room with comfortable surroundings, and if they do not

heartily dislike it a gramophone to play tunes to them. That is impossible

of attainment as the law now stands. If a millionaire was to offer to

build in Manchester a dozen working-men's cafes on the continental plan

where any decent citizen could be pleased to take his wife and children,

as our French and German neighbours do, the brewers, the teetotallers, the

police, the licensing magistrates and the law would see that it was not

permitted.

And yet we know by experiment that in proper surroundings, reasonable

facilities for refreshment do not lead to drunkenness. In the Manchester

Exhibition of 1887, it being a wonderfully fine summer, and licenses

having been freely given for the occasion, there was an opportunity of

testing whether under proper conditions opportunity led to excess. I never

heard that it did. In the Franco-British Exhibition where reasonable

facilities of refreshment were also given, it is said--and I have no doubt

truly said--that though eight or nine million visitors passed through the

turnstiles, yet there was not a single case of drunkenness.

The problem is really a simple one, if we could only get administrators

and legislators, but especially the former, to look at it in the interest

of the man in the street. To the big brewery company beer is an effluent,

and the public house is the conduit pipe through which they pour it into

the public stomach. They have obviously no interest in ideal public

houses--and why should they? They are business men on business bent. The

teetotallers, on the other hand, regard the drinking of beer as a sin, and

any public house as the house of the Devil. Why should they help the Devil

to make his house sweet and attractive, and make the path easier for the

poor sinner who thirsts after beer? At present the average licensing bench

consists of "half and half"--to use a trade term--of these elements. If

there happen to be a few cranks on the bench who share the feather-headed

notions set down in this chapter, they can always be out-voted by a

combination of brewer and teetotaller. And for my part I think we shall

stick to our glorious institution of the "tied-house" just as long as the

working man intends to allow us and no longer.

When reformed public houses are taken up by the men who use the public

house, and when labour demands something better, the demand will be met.

For the teetotaller is nothing if not political, and when he sees where

the votes are, and not before, he will begin to see the error of his ways.

Meanwhile it will do him no harm to study the statistics such as they are,

and discover that the number of licenses in a district has nothing to do

with the amount of drunkenness therein, and to look back on the past

history of the public house and recognise that he has for many years been

the friend and ally of the undesirable brewer. The good citizen's policy

should be the provision of pure ale in wholesome surroundings, thereby

freeing the working class from the tyranny of the public house. To the

teetotallers who hinder such a policy I can only repeat Charles Kingsley's

message: "And I solemnly warn those who try to prevent it that they are,

with whatsoever good intentions, simply doing the Devil's work."

CHAPTER XIV

THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES

2. THE WORKHOUSE.

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 houses are 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 not to 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 great heaps 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 away to 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, a bastard 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 no doubt 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 would undertake 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

the obvious 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 whom out-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 great

palatial 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 deep

enough 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 fact

that 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.

CHAPTER XV

REMEDIES OF TO-DAY

Ring out the feud of rich and poor;

Ring in redress to all mankind.

TENNYSON: "In Memoriam."

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 your theatre-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 to

picture 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 imprisoned for 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 you think 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 practical difficulties. 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 experienced about

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 prices ought 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 the tally-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

furniture dealer 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 boarding

schools. 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 the

County 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, and the Treasury must

cease to rob the poorest bankrupts of L13,000 a year, and the limit of

such bankruptcies must be raised to L250, 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.

CHAPTER XVI

REMEDIES OF TO-MORROW

Happy he whose inward ear

Angel comfortings can hear,

O'er the rabble's laughter;

And, while Hatred's faggots burn,

Glimpses through the smoke discern

Of the good hereafter.

Knowing this, that never yet

Share of Truth was vainly set

In the world's wide fallow;

After hands shall sow the seed,

After hands from hill and mead

Reap the harvests yellow.

Thus, with somewhat of the Seer,

Must the moral pioneer

From the Future borrow;

Clothe the waste with dreams of grain,

And, on midnight's sky of rain,

Paint the golden morrow!

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER:

"Barclay of Ury."

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 about carpentering; 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 beautiful souls

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 precis 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 of these 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 aesthetically

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

anything ever 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 men

For 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

thrust before 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 be Forgiven." 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.

INDEX

Abinger, Lord Chief Baron, his judgment in _Priestley_ v. _Fowler_, 77,

78, 95, 96

Ademantus, 254

Administration orders in bankruptcy, 119-124

Alehouse, the, 252-270

"Alton Locke," slums described in, 238

American judiciary and working classes, 93, 94, 95;

and workmen's compensation, 103

Appeals, cost of, 175

Artisans Dwelling Act, 1875, 241

Asquith, Right Hon. Herbert Henry, on workmen's compensation, 87

_Attorney-General_ v. _The Edison Telephone Co._, 83

Bacon, Lord Chancellor, 305

Bail, unnecessary refusal of, 226;

statistics of this, 228, 229

Balfour, Right Hon. Arthur James, on intemperance, 255, 256

Bankruptcy, 106-124;

failures due to extravagance, 115-117;

not open to the poor, 118;

administration orders, 120;

exorbitant Treasury fees, 122-124

Bell, Alexander Graham, 82

Belloc, Hilaire, 254

Bentham, Jeremy, on legal evidence, 192

Bias in judges, 96-103

Bills of Sale Acts, 168

Black Act, 1722, 218

Blasphemy Laws, 199, 200

Blue Books, 301, 302

Bradlaugh, Charles, 199

Bridewell, the, 9-10, 213

Bright, John, 99

Brougham, Lord, on imprisonment for debt, 48, 49;

on the Evidence Amendment Act, 193;

on Chancery reform, 287, 288

Butler, Samuel, 211

Cadaval, Duke de, arrested on mesne process, 46

_Capias ad satisfaciendum_, 37, 39

Carlyle, Thomas, on history, 21;

on language, 108, 110;

on fools, 153;

on land question, 250

Cattle maiming, 216-219

Chamberlain, Right Hon. Joseph, on workmen's compensation, 87-90;

on administration orders, 119, 120;

is housing work in Birmingham, 241

Chancery Court, and Lord Brougham, 287

Children, treatment of, in workhouses, 280, 282

Closing time, regulations for rich and poor, 263, 264

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 169

Cobbett, Sir William, 186

Coke, Sir Edward, Chief Justice, his description of _peine forte et

dure_, 11, 201;

on early Poor Laws, 274, 275

Collier, Sir Robert, on imprisonment for debt, 55, 56

"Compleat Constable," The, 4-7

Conciliation in trade disputes, 110

Conciliation, preliminary of, in France, 187

Corporal punishment, advisability of, discussed, 209-212

Costs in police court, abolition desirabie, 222

Cottenham, Earl of, his Insolvency Bill, 1837, 45-47

County Court procedure, expense of, 184

Court of Criminal Appeal Act, 1907, 194, 197, 198

Crabbe, on lawyers, 183

Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, on divorce, 125, 126, 127

Crime and punishment, 189-212

Criminal Appeal, Court of, 189

Criminal Evidence Act, 1898, 194-196

Criminal Law Amendment Act, 210

Cruelty to Animals Bill of 1811, 219

Davey, Lord, on workmen's compensation, 92

Deane, Mr. Justice Bargrave, on divorce, 137

Debt, imprisonment for, Old Testament view of, 22;

New Testament view of, 24;

Greek law of, 27;

Roman law of, 31;

in Papal Rome, 34;

in time of Henry III., 36-39;

in eighteenth century, 41, 43;

in "Pickwick," 45;

mesne process, 45;

debates on, in 1837, 46;

in 1869, 50-57;

evils of, 59-68;

arguments against abolition, 69-71;

none in Germany, 71;

nor in France, 72;

wastefulness of system, 72;

encourages improvidence, 157-160;

in police courts, 220, 222;

political views on abolition of, 288-293

Debtors Act, 1869, 41, 49-57, 158

Debtors' prisons, 41-47

Dendy, Mr. Registrar, on divorce in County Court, 146

Denman, Lord, speech on imprisonment for debt, 46

Dickens, Charles, on imprisonment for debt, 45;

on the living wage, 108;

on the evidence of prisoners, 194;

on slums, 238;

on inns and innkeepers, 257-259

D'Israeli, Benjamin, slums described in "Sybil," 239-242

Distress, law of, 233

Divorce, 125-151;

in time of Edward VI., 125-128;

Act of 1857, 131;

hard cases of poor, 133-141;

necessity of using County Court, 144-146, 297

Dogberry, abolition of discussed, 223, 224

Edalji, 217

Edward VI., 126

Edward VII., 126

Eliot, George, 174

Elisha, and imprisonment for debt, 22, 23

Elizabeth, Queen, her Poor Law, 276

Employers Liability Act, 1880, 86

Erewhon, treatment of crime in, 211

Erskine, Lord, and cruelty to animals, 219

Eviction, 234

Evidence, prisoners right to give, 193;

Criminal Evidence Act, 1898, 194;

of Crown not available to prisoner, 207-209

Exekestides, 27

False pretences, 202, 203

Fielding, as a magistrate, 213

_Fieri facias_, 39

Fines in police courts, unfair incidence of, 221, 222;

time for payment of, 224;

statistics of, 225;

abolition of, 297

France, no imprisonment for debt, 72;

divorce law, 143, 147;

preliminary of conciliation in, 187;

poor law, 283

Fuller, on burning of heretics, 200

Geographical distribution of crime, 216

Germany, no imprisonment for working men debtors, 71;

divorce in, 147

Gilbert, Lord Chief Baron, 37, 39

Goldsmith, Oliver, 13, 14

Gordon, Cosmo, Archbishop of York, on divorce, 128

Gordon, Mr. Justice, of Australian Labour Court, 110

Governor of gaol, charity to poor debtors, 65

Grand jury, 181

Grantham, Hon. Mr. Justice, 101;

on poor prisoners defence, 196

Gray, Professor John Chipman, of Harvard, 80;

on judge-made law, 81

Haldane, Viscount, 66, 215

Hale, Sir Matthew, Lord Chief Justice, 100

Halsbury, Earl of, on workmen's compensation, 92

Hard labour for unconvicted prisoners, 227, 228

Headlam, John, an old-fashioned Dogberry, 227, 228, 229

Herschell, Lord, on prisoners giving evidence, 195

Hogarth, 10, 15

Homestead laws of America and Canada, 293, 294, 295

Hood, Tom, 108

Horn, Andrew, his "Mirror of Justices," 275

Housing question, 236-251;

Royal Commission, 1884, 242;

Select Committee, 1902, 244

Identification of prisoners, present methods criticised, 230, 231

Imprisonment for debt. _See_ Debt.

Innkeeper, independence of, 258

Jeremiah, and the living wage, 108, 113

Jessel, Sir George, on imprisonment for debt, 50

Johnson, Dr., 4;

on the poor in England, 13, 14;

on public executions, 15, 16;

on imprisonment for debt, 70;

on the formation of laws, 70

Johnson, William, miners' agent, his views on imprisonment for debt, 292

Judge-made law, 79-85

Judgment summonses, statistics of, 60, 63

Judicial irrelevancy, 180

Judson, Frederick N., author of "The Judiciary and the People," 94

Justice of peace, utility of lay justices, 231

Kelvin, Lord, 82

Kingsley, Charles, 108;

on slums, 238;

on teetotallers, 264-266, 270

Kipling, Rudyard, 303

Landlord and tenant, 233-251

Land transfer system, assists fraud, 183

Leniency to well to do in criminal courts, example of, 205, 206

Licensing, class regulation of, 253;

section 4 of Act of 1904, 256;

effect of reducing number of licences, 261;

extension of hours for rich, 263;

prohibition of amusements, 267

Living wage, 108, 109, 110

_Lysons_ v. _Andrew Knowles_, 175

McMahon, M.P., on imprisonment for debt, 55

Malicious injury to property, 217, 218

Manitoba, homestead laws of, 294, 295

Marcus Aurelius, 299, 306

Married Women's Property Act, undesirable use of, 161-170

Matthew, and imprisonment for debt, 24, 25

Maule, Mr. Justice, on divorce, 129

Maxwell, Rev. Dr., 13, 14

Mayence, public beer drinking at, 262

Medical officer of health, status of, 248

Menander, on marriage, 163

Mesne process, arrest on, 45;

abolished, 49

Mesnil, M. Henri, on divorce, 143

Moryson, Fynes, 8, 11, 34, 35

Newman, Cardinal, 307

Ordeal of battle, 308, 309

Overbury, Sir Thomas, 11

Overcrowding, 245;

census statistics of, 246

Parry, Serjeant, 99

_Peine forte et dure_, 12

Pepys, Samuel, 4

Pickersgill, M.P., on prisoner giving evidence, 196

Pickwick, and imprisonment for debt, 45, 47

Piers Plowman, on debt, 75;

on law and poor, 172, 173;

on lawyers, 188

Police courts, abolition of fines, 297

Poor law, 271-284;

Royal Commission, report of, 272;

in time of Elizabeth, 276;

in eighteenth century, 276;

in 1834, 277;

general mixed workhouses, 278-284

Poor man's lawyer, necessity of, 184-187

Poor Prisoners Defence Act, 194-197

_Priestley_ v. _Fowler_, 76-79

Procedure and the poor, 172-188

Public houses, 252-270. _And see_ Licensing.

Railway Conciliation Boards, and their working, 111, 112

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 1, 3

_Regina_ v. _Thomas Hall_, 129

Registrars of County Courts and private practice, 72, 73

"Reformatio Legum Ecclesasticarum, The," 125

Ridley, Sir Matthew White, on workmen's compensation, 87

Rivers Pollution Acts, 248

Roe, Gilbert, author of "Our Judicial Oligarchy," 86, 94

Rogues and Vagabonds, 4-7

Ruskin, John, 108

Sabbatarianism, evils of, 215

Salford quarter sessions in 1824, 17

Salisbury, Earl of, 244, 245

Schuster, Dr., on German system of debt collecting, 71

Scold, common, trial and punishment of, 235

Scots divorce, 126

Scott, Sir William, 15

_Seisachtheia, The_, 29

Selden, John, on marriage contract, 150

Shop lifting by ladies, 204

Sims, George R., his "How the Poor Live," 242, 243

_Sittlichkeit_, 66

Slums, legislation against, 236

Smith, Judge Lumley, on divorce costs, 148, 149

Smith, Rev. Sidney, on prisoners' right to counsel, 190, 191;

on prisoners' inability to give evidence, 192

Smith, Sir A. L., Master of the Rolls, on workmen's compensation, 89

Smollett, 9, 42

Snowden, Philip, M.P., and the living wage, 109;

on strikes, 111

Socrates, on thirst, 255

Solicitors, speculative, 175

Solon, and imprisonment for debt, 27-31

Starkie, Sir Thomas, 17

Stephen, Mr. Justice, decision in telephone case, 82

Stipendiary magistrates, want of in country, 223;

necessary in interests of justice, 231

Sumner, Lord, 180, 181

Swift, on lawyers, 181, 182

Taylor, Jeremy, his prayer for debtors, 75

Teetotallers, persecution of licence holders by, 259;

their ideals, 260;

Charles Kingsley's views of, 264-266, 270

Telephone, legal position of, 82, 83

Tennant, Mrs., report on divorce, 136

Thackeray, on prisoner giving evidence, 193

Torrens Act, 1868, 241

Treasury fees on Administration Orders, exorbitancy of, 121-124, 298

Twelve Tables, The, 32

Tyburn, 7, 15, 16

Vinogradoff, Professor, 84

Warrington, Harry, imprisonment for debt, 45, 46

Webb, Mrs. Sidney, her report on poor law, 280

Weston, Richard, trial of, 11, 12

Whipping, punishment of, 6-9, 209-212

Witchcraft, 100

Workhouses, 271-284. _And see_ Poor Law.

Workmen's compensation, 76-105;

history of the law, of, 76-84;

employers liability, 86;

in Court of Appeal, 90-93;

in America, 94, 103;

162, 286;

and conciliation, 298

Wyrley, cattle maiming at, 219

York, Archbishop of, on divorce, 136, 137

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May be obtained from SHERRATT & HUGHES, 33, SOHO SQ., LONDON W., 34, CROSS

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_WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

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Judgments in Vacation.

SOME PRESS OPINIONS.

_Athenaeum._--"They deal among other topics with the letters of Dorothy

Osborne, the disadvantage of education, the craftsmanship of the drama and

the nice problems of the kitchen; and they all possess a lightness of

touch and sense of companionableness which makes them agreeable reading."

G. K. CHESTERTON in _Illustrated London News_.--"I cannot refrain from

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it is extraordinarily good."

_Morning Leader._--"Literature and law jostle each other with a delightful

air of indifference."

_The Standard._--"It is a rollicking book."

_Daily Graphic._--"A wide range of knowledge and experience and a faculty

of literary skill unite to make this collection of his papers exceedingly

readable."

_Manchester Guardian._--"It is all very jolly and irresponsible."

_Eye-witness._--"But it is not only a witty, sparkling book, it is a human

document in which the tragedy of the poor, their never-ending debts, their

hopeless yet patient insolvency is sketched with a profound insight, a

living sympathy."

_Westminster Gazette._--"But perhaps we have said enough to show that for

an hour or two by the fire the book is all good company."

_Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury._--"The essays and papers in his

Honour's book are in every way worthy of the bright humour, vivacity and

literary skill we are wont to associate with the name of the Admirable

Crichton of the County Court Bench."

_The Spectator._--"Judge Parry deals with various subjects, social,

literary and other, and has something worth hearing to say about all of

them."

_Daily Telegraph._--"Whether his themes are grave or gay, the mood in

which he treats them lively or severe, Judge Parry is invariably

interesting, and his volume should be widely read."

Second Impression in the Press. Large Post 8vo.

7_s._ 6_d._ _net._

What the Judge Saw:

Being 25 years in Manchester, by One who has done it.

_Pall Mall Gazette._--"A rollicking story. A book full of frolic and fun.

This is the best book of legal recollections, we believe, since the

'Leaves' of Montagu Williams, and we know no higher praise."

_Daily Chronicle._--"The book is diverting and well strewn with

personalities. 'If your lordship pleases,' give us another volume like

this. It bespeaks a human man with a good heart as well as a clever head."

The Scarlet Herring, And Other Stories.

Illustrated by Athelstan Rusden. 253 pp.

Bound in specially designed Cloth Cover.

Price 6_s._

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Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

The following misprints have been corrected:

" ast" interpreted as "past" (page 18)

"suceed" corrected to "succeed" (page 111)

"gods" corrected to "goods" (page 138)

"absolutley" corrected to "absolutely" (page 184)

"Paliament" corrected to "Parliament" (page 248)

Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and

hyphenation have been retained from the original.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Law and the Poor, by Edward Abbott Parry