The Law and the Poor Part 1

The Law and the Poor.

by Edward Abbott Parry.

INTRODUCTION

"But, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed."

"Which nation?" asked the younger stranger, "for she reigns over two."

The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.

"Yes," resumed the stranger after a moment's interval. "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws."

"You speak of----," said Egremont, hesitatingly.

"THE RICH AND THE POOR."

BENJAMIN DISRAELI: "Sybil, or The Two Nations."

The rich have many law books written to protect their privileges, but the poor, who are the greater nation, have but few. Not that I should like to call this a law book, for two reasons: firstly, it would not be true; secondly, if it were true, I should not mention it, as I want people to read it.

You cannot read law books, you only consult them. A law book seeks to set out the law, the whole law, and nothing but the law on the subject of which it treats. There are many books on Poor Law, there are hundreds of volumes about the Poor, and many more about the Law, but the Law and the Poor is a virgin subject.

It is a wonder that it should be so because it is far more practical and interesting than either of its component parts.

It is as if poetry had dealt with beans or with bacon and no poet had hymned the more beautiful a.s.sociations of beans and bacon. In the same way the Law and the Poor is a subject worthy of treatment in drama or poetry, but that that may be successfully done someone must do the rough spade work of digging the material out of the dirt heaps in which it lies, and presenting it in a more or less palatable form. When this has been done the poet or the politician can come along and throw the crude metal into the metres of sonnets or statutes or any form of glorious letters they please.

From the very earliest I have taken a keen interest in this subject. I remember well when I was a schoolboy the profound impression made upon me by Samuel Plimsoll's agitation to rescue merchant seamen from the horrible abuses practised by a certain cla.s.s of shipowner. My father, Serjeant Parry, was engaged in litigation for Plimsoll, and I heard many things at first hand of that great reformer's hopes and disappointments.

There were a cla.s.s of traders known as "ship knackers," who bought up old unseaworthy vessels and sent them to sea overloaded and over-insured.

Plimsoll, for years, devoted himself to prevent this wickedness. There was the usual parliamentary indifference, the customary palavering and pow-wowing in committees until, after six or seven years of constant fighting, the public conscience was awakened, and, in 1875, Disraeli produced a Merchant Shipping Bill. But then, as now, there was no parliamentary time for legislation dealing with the poor, and the Bill was one of the innocents to be sacrificed at the annual summer ma.s.sacre.

This would have been the end of all hope of reform had not Samuel Plimsoll, in a fine frenzy of rage and disgust, openly charged the Government with being parties to the system which sent brave men to death in the winter seas and left widows and orphans helpless at home, "in order that a few speculative scoundrels, in whose heart there is neither the love of G.o.d nor the fear of G.o.d, may make unhallowed gains."

This was unparliamentary enough, but it was allowed to pa.s.s. It was when he began to give the names of foundered ships and their parliamentary owners and, in his own words, "to unmask the villains" who sent poor men to death and destruction, that he was promptly called to order, and, refusing to withdraw, left the House.

The result of his outburst was entirely satisfactory. The Government were obliged to bring in another Bill and to pa.s.s it without delay.

Many years later the unauthorised Radical programme of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain aroused my youthful enthusiasm, and I spent much of my then ample leisure as a missionary in that cause.

We soon lost our great leader, who went away to champion what he considered greater causes, but he was one of the first English statesmen in high places to make his main programme a reform of the law in the interests of the poor, and he left behind him mournful but earnest disciples who have not yet found such another leader. The Workmen's Compensation Act will always, I think, be regarded as one of his greatest achievements, and mauled and mangled as it has been in the Law Courts it remains the most substantial benefit that the poor have received from the Legislature in my lifetime.

Twenty years' service in urban County Courts has naturally given me some insight into the way in which the law treats the poor and the real wants of the latter. I agree that such a book as this would be better written by one who had actual experience of the life of the poor, rather than the official hearsay experience which is all that I can claim to have had.

I think the great want of labour to-day is an Attorney-General, a man who having graduated in the workshop comes to the study and practice of the law with a working man's knowledge and ideals, and gaining a lawyer's power of expressing his wants in legal accents, raises his voice to demand those new laws that the poor are so patiently awaiting.

If there be such a one on his way and this volume is of any small service to him, it will have more than fulfilled its purpose.

Originating in a series of essays published in the _Sunday Chronicle_, it has grown into a more ambitious project, and is now, I trust, a fairly complete text-book of the law as it ought not to be in relation to the poor.

In my endeavour to please the taste of the friend to whom I have dedicated this book I have dispensed with all footnotes, but I have added an appendix of references in case there may be any who might wish to test the accuracy of statements in its pages.

"Thus," as my Lord c.o.ke says, "requesting you to weigh these my labours in the even balance of your indifferent judgment I submit them to your censure and take my leave."

EDWARD A. PARRY.

SEVENOAKS, 1914.

THE LAW AND THE POOR

CHAPTER I

PAST AND PRESENT

In a word we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal; by the comparison and application of other men's fore-pa.s.sed miseries with our own like errors and ill-deservings.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH: "History of the World."

Oxford edition. Vol. II., Preface v. and vi.

I often feel that if that excellent patriarch Job had been alive he would have sent me a postcard indited, "O that ye would altogether hold your peace and it should be your wisdom." I have an anonymous friend who sends me frank criticisms of that kind on postcards. The sentiments are the same as Job's text, but the language is fruitier. Nevertheless, I like to hear from him, for he is an attentive reader of all I write. But, honestly, although I was always sorry for Job and glad when he came into his camels and donkeys in the last chapter, yet I never sympathised with his att.i.tude of taking his troubles lying down. After all, if one has gained a little practical experience of the law and the poor by living and working with them for twenty years it seems a pity to take it with you across the ferry into the silence merely because you have a bashful and retiring disposition. It is right, of course, to give your views and services to Select Commissions and the like,--but that is no better than hiding a lump of gold in a hole in the ground. The wiser plan is to try and tell the law-makers of the future--the men in the street--what is wrong with the machine, so that when they take it over, as they must do some day, they will not sc.r.a.p it in mere despair, but tune it up to a faster and n.o.bler rhythm. Job, great, good, patient soul that he was, had his sour moments--a medical friend of mine believes that he had a liver,--I am sorry not to take the patriarch's advice, but I do not see my way to hold my peace about the law and the poor, and that is why I propose to try and point out how and why the law as a system is hard on the poor, and wherein the governors and great ones of the earth may further temper the wind to the shorn lamb. I myself do not expect to enter into the promised land of legal reform, but I am as sure that the younger generation will see it, as I am sure that they will see the rising sun if they ever get up early enough. The man at the door of the booth who beats the drum and calls out to the young folk in the fair to walk up and see the show plays a helpful part, though the old gentleman knows that he is doomed to stand outside and never make one of the audience. Moses was like that, but he did useful work in booming the promised land.

An eminent socialist complained to me with tears in his eyes that nothing was being done for the poor. I do not agree. Not enough, certainly, but something, and every day more and more. The world is a slow world, and Nature, like all such artisans, does her building and painting and decorating with exasperating deliberation. Geology is slower than the South Eastern Railway. But no doubt Providence intended each of them to go at the pace they do for our good. And it is impious to grumble.

Nevertheless, if I were a sculptor called upon to design a symbolic statue of Nature, I should model a plumber. Slow, hesitating, occasionally mixing the taps and flooding the world's bathroom or exploding the gas mains in the cellars of the earth, but in the end doing the job somehow--such is the way of Nature. You cannot cinematograph the growth of the world or its rocks and trees and human beings--to study Nature you want long life and a microscope. And the only way to make out whether the tide is coming in or out is to place a mark upon the sh.o.r.e and wait and see. It is the same if you are travelling an unknown road--you measure your progress by the milestones. In this matter of the law and the poor, if we want to know where we are to-day and where we are likely to be three hundred years hence, the only sane way to make the experiment is to go back to what we know of things in the past, and, by measuring the progress made in bygone centuries, take heart for the morrow. That is what Sir Walter Raleigh meant when he told us how to gather a sane policy for to-day out of the blunders and troubles of yesterday.

As I grope my way back along the main road of the history of the law into the dark ages I seem to find the milestones of reform set at longer and longer intervals. This puts me in good heart for the happy youths whose lot it will be to set their faces towards the morning breezes of the future. Their milestones will come at shorter intervals every day, until the burden of the law drops from the shoulders of the poor at the wicket gate.

There is no greater folly than to sing the praises of the good old days.

Anyhow, the law had no good old days for the poor. Stroll down to the dockyards with Samuel Pepys; take a walk down Fleet Street with Dr.

Johnson; or, even as late as the days of Charles d.i.c.kens, go round the parish with Mr. b.u.mble. You will learn in this way better than in any other how the law has treated the poor in the good old days. I have a quaint little volume written for the Dogberries of the early eighteenth century called "The Compleat Constable." It is amazing to read of the tyranny of the law towards the poor and the homeless of those days.

The statutes made for punishing rogues, vagabonds, night walkers and such other idle persons are, says the anonymous legal author, "a large Branch of the Constable's Office, and herein two things are to be known:--

"(1) What is a Rogue and who is to be accounted a Vagabond?

"(2) What is to be done unto them?"

The charming impersonal technical spirit of this little work is beyond all praise. Not a word is ever used to remind you that, after all, a rogue and a vagabond is a man and a brother. You are taught first to diagnose him as Izaak Walton would teach the young angler how to discover the singling that did not usually stir in the daytime, and having captured your rogue and vagabond, you are then enlightened as to the various methods of killing or curing him.