The Law and the Poor Part 14

"Five shillings and costs or seven days." This familiar phrase, as Count Smorltork says, "surprises by himself" the whole philosophy of police courts. Nothing is more marked in the treatment of rich and poor in the police court than the unfair incidence of fines. Take, for instance, the common case of a motor-car driver being fined forty shillings and costs for exceeding the speed limit and driving to the danger of mankind. If his master is a Cabinet Minister, say, he writes a civil letter to the clerk to the magistrates expressing his regret and enclosing the needful, which is just two five-thousandths of his official income.

But supposing he is a taxi-cab driver who owns his cab, or is buying it on the hire system, as many do. He, too, is fined forty shillings and costs, and as he earns, let us say, forty shillings a week, he has to pay one fifty-second of his income.

If he cannot raise the money his home is distrained on, or there is the option of imprisonment. That kind of option never worries the Cabinet Minister or the chauffeur thereof. In the old t.i.the days the parson took his tenth from rich and poor alike, and was no respecter of persons; all he wanted was one-tenth of your income in cash. As between Cabinet Minister and cabman the relation of fine should be as two pounds to ninepence--that is to say, if the law in the police courts desires to treat rich and poor alike.

There is no difficulty about doing this. All that is wanted is to enact in your statute that the fine should "not exceed one-fiftieth or one one-thousandth of a man's income." Then all would be fined off the same mark. At present the poor man is the scratch man, and the greater the wealth the longer the handicap.

As to costs, they should be wholly abolished. They are not only an odious tax on the poor, but they give the officials of the court an unholy incentive to make the court a paying concern, and, what is worse, give every clerk and officer in the police court a direct pecuniary interest in convictions. As things stand to-day a council of city men are not likely to advance salaries where their police court is losing money. A G.o.dly and righteous police court should glory in losing money year by year.

And whilst I recognise that at the head of each police court there should be a stipendiary to deal with the more important cases, and always to be within call when there are cases to try in which the local magistrates have a cla.s.s interest, yet I have no desire to abolish Dogberry, nor do I take any pleasure in reading that he has written himself down an a.s.s. In our chief cities there are now excellent stipendiaries and magistrates of all cla.s.ses, including representatives of working men, and all can testify how--taking the police court system as it stands--it is worked fairly and carefully and to the advantage of all.

But these places are far ahead of the county towns and districts where the squire and parson reign supreme, and the clerk to the justices is their own faithful attorney. I believe thoroughly that these men do their best, but it is quite impossible that they can take a normal view of such horrible crimes as the rape of a pheasant's egg or the snaring of a hare.

It is from the beautiful little corners of the lovely English country that the bitter cry of injustice in the police courts makes itself heard from time to time in the public Press. Why should not every hamlet have its Village Plowden to brighten life on the country side?

There we see, let us hope, the last of a decaying and rotten system--justice administered by a cla.s.s unlearned in law, and unlearned in a far more important branch of their business--the knowledge of the works and days and temptations of the fellow sinners whose judges they have elected themselves to be. In the remote country places more than anywhere is the stipendiary a necessity. Meanwhile, why should not direct representatives of the agricultural labourer be placed upon the bench if we are not to abolish Dogberry altogether?

While these words are being written, an effort is being made with a Criminal Administration Bill to do away with some of the abuses of the police court. The imprisonment of people for non-payment of fines is really imprisonment for poverty, and the scandal of it is at last officially recognised and the necessity of reform admitted. That, at all events, is to the good, though it is to be hoped that if the Bill at present put forward is to pa.s.s it will be widely extended and simplified.

It is quite a good thing to enact that it shall be obligatory upon magistrates to grant time for the payment of fines, but seeing that the magistrates have always had this power and never used it to any useful extent it would be well that there should be less discretion about the matter. Law for lay magistrates should be automatic and fool-proof. When you enact that a magistrate is obliged to allow time for payment of fines, "unless the Court for any other special reason expressly directs that no time shall be allowed," you are surely inviting the average justice to supply himself with special reasons why he should not carry out a law which you know by his past history he dislikes. It must not be forgotten that in Manchester, although the fees legally allowed for a summons are twelve shillings, the practice has been for fees not to exceed the fine.

Imprisonment for less than five days--which in the future is not to be permitted--has for a long time not been allowed by the practice of the Manchester justices. Where justices desire to be lenient and enforce the law temperately they can do so to-day, and therefore it is clearly no use in a new statute to leave a discretion to those who will certainly abide by old and evil customs unless they are forced to do otherwise.

The statistics of the police courts show that in one year 92,000 citizens were imprisoned in default of the payment of a fine and 80,000 imprisoned without the option. The number of persons sentenced to pay fines is no less than 460,000. Every year new statutes are pa.s.sed making new offences which can be committed with practical impunity by those whose purses are long enough. Under the heading Betting and Gaming, 3,346 persons were fined and only 738 went to prison. Under the heading Motor Cars, 10,631 were fined and only 36 went to prison in default; under the heading Sunday Trading, 6,654 were fined and only 12 went to prison by default. These offences are generally committed by persons with some money; but where the parties are poor what a terrible difference in their punishment. The mere giving of time to pay fines will not abolish this injustice unless the fines are made, as has been suggested, in some ratio proportionate to a man's income. If it were enacted that a fine should not exceed a day's wage earned by the prisoner, that would be a method of doing away with the burden of useless imprisonment that has to be borne by the poor. It is no use enacting that the Court in fining an offender shall take into consideration the means of the offender. I make no doubt that this is done already to a large extent by stipendiaries and the more enlightened magistrates. What is wanted is an actual printed tariff of fines fairly proportioned to the means of the offender, beyond which the magistrates may not go. Measures that depend on the sympathetic working by the members of the bench will be in many districts a dead letter, and inasmuch as the folk who go to prison in these cases are always poor people, very little will be known of their trouble except by those few persons who study blue books and statistics.

This habit of the magistracy to ignore the good intentions of Parliament and the Home Office is in nothing more marked than in the refusal of many country benches to give bail to poor people charged with offences that have to be tried at Sessions or a.s.sizes. Many judges have called the Grand Juries' attention to the large number of prisoners who are left in prison awaiting trial, some of whom are ultimately acquitted. But this is one of the matters where magistrates must of necessity have discretion, and although they receive Home Office circulars calling attention to their duties in the matter of bail they prefer to go their own wrong-headed way and unnecessarily keep a large number of poor persons in prison who might quite safely be allowed to remain out on bail.

It is curious how history repeats itself and how a lay magistracy, as a type, always tends to act without sympathy or consideration for the poor.

A hundred years ago the Yorkshire magistrates came to the conclusion that it was a most improper thing that poor people committed for trial to the House of Correction should be allowed to idle their time away at the expense of the county, so they actually required them to work for their living, and as the treadmill was the only apparatus of a commercial character in the gaol the poor untried prisoner was put to walking round a wheel in company of his convicted brother. The way in which the matter was put by Mr. John Headlam, M.A., Chairman of the Quarter Sessions for the North Riding of the County of York, is a perfect specimen of the true Dogberry temperament: "With respect to those sentenced to labour as a punishment, I apprehend, there is no difference of opinion. All are agreed that it is a great defect in any prison where such convicts are unemployed. But as to all other prisoners, whether debtors, persons committed for trial, or convicts not sentenced to hard labour, if they have no means of subsisting themselves, and must, if discharged, either labour for their livelihood or apply for parochial relief; it seems unfair to society at large, and especially to those who maintain themselves by honest industry, that those who, by offending the laws, have subjected themselves to imprisonment, should be lodged and clothed and fed, without being called upon for the same exertions which others have to use to obtain such advantages."

Of course the whole question is begged when an untried prisoner is called an offender against the laws. The Headlam view of him always has been, and is to-day, that the mere fact that a policeman has arrested him is proof that he is an offender; this for all time has been justices' law, but it is doubtful whether the old doctrine that a man is to be deemed innocent until found guilty by a jury of his peers is not still sound law and ought not to be more fully recognised by the lay magistrates.

Of course the particular wrong that Mr. Headlam was contending for has long been abolished, not indeed without much argument and trouble, but we still punish an untried man by imprisoning him before trial, and in very many cases this is wholly unnecessary. The idea of keeping a man in prison is that he should be forthcoming on the day of trial. In some serious cases it is obviously necessary to keep a man in custody, but in many small cases if a cheap bail was fixed there would be no difficulty in finding the sureties and the prisoner could be outside arranging for his defence and earning money for the support of his family until the day of the trial.

Of 598 people acquitted at a.s.size Courts only 294 were allowed bail, so that there is a clear admission in the official figures of three hundred innocent persons--or persons not provably guilty--remaining in prison because the justices will not carry out the Home Office suggestions as to bail. Remember too that in some remote places there are very few a.s.sizes and eighteen of these unhappy persons remained over three months in prison awaiting trial. At Quarter Sessions the figures are even more remarkable.

Of 1,586 prisoners acquitted only 688 had been granted bail. Here you have a large number of innocent men and women kept in gaol charged with offences that are not of the most serious character, and this is done not because in this peculiar instance the law itself is harsh--because the law permits bail and the government office calls on the magistrates to make use of the law--but because the law is administered by well-meaning but incompetent men who have a fixed delusion, handed down to them from their forbears of hundreds of years ago, that a man arrested for a crime by the police and awaiting trial is, to use Mr. Headlam's phrase, "an offender against the laws." Where there are no stipendiary magistrates it would not be a bad plan to give any prisoner a right to appeal on refusal of bail to a judge of the County Court who lives within the district and is of necessity a magistrate though he seldom has much time to sit at petty sessions.

Before we leave the Police Court I should like to draw attention to a well-founded complaint against police methods that the Home Office might certainly take into their consideration when they are reforming the administration of the criminal law. I refer to the practice of identification which has come so prominently before public notice in recent criminal trials. I never met a prisoner who felt that it was fairly done. For myself, I have the firmest belief that the police endeavour as a rule to do what is right and straight, but after all we must not lose sight of the fact that the police are there to clear up the crime and to run in somebody--the real criminal of course for choice--and it seems hardly right to put them at this very critical moment into the position of a judicial authority deciding the most important point for or against the man they have arrested and believe to be guilty.

I have always wondered what legal right a policeman has to put you in a row with a lot of other men and bring people to look at you. Suppose a prisoner refused to undergo the ordeal and the policeman used force to compel him, could the prisoner recover damages for a.s.sault. These are recondite, and in a sense absurd points; but they do, I think, help one to see how wrong the present system is. At the ceremony of identification it is obviously necessary that there should be a presiding magistrate to see fair play and to take a record of what happened. It is really a part of the trial and a most important part of the trial. That a witness should identify a prisoner in a police yard in the absence of a judicial authority is clearly an unjust thing. Once he--or more especially she--has done so, the further swearing to the prisoner when he is in the dock is nothing. What the magistrate ought to see is the demeanour of the identifier when he first recognises the prisoner and especially ought a justice to be present to see that there is no suspicion of unfairness in the methods employed by the police.

We have had so many tragedies brought about by so-called identification, that it is more than time that the business of it was taken out of the hands of the police and made an integral part of the trial before the magistrate to which it in truth belongs. These reforms will not, I think, come about until we have stipendiary magistrates on the county benches, but though I wish to see this I do not want the old office of Justice of the Peace to be abolished. There is, and rightly ought to be, a keen desire among laymen to attain to this position, and it is an office of much dignity and respect and one in which a good man under sound legal advice can do worthy public service. I have been a local justice of the peace for many years and can testify to the number of occasions upon which a magistrate residing in his district is called upon for small services that would cost the applicant time and money if there was no available magistrate.

A great many lay benches with a clerk of sound learning and legal education administer excellent justice throughout the country. But there are cla.s.ses of cases connected with property that would be better tried by a stipendiary unconnected with county society. I have a pa.s.sion for old-world things, and grieve over the disappearance of the parish constables, the head boroughs, the t.i.thing-men, the aletasters, the beadles, and the reeves. I do not wish to abolish the Justice of the Peace. I only wish to put him in his proper place. Of course, if he cannot be happy there, then I am afraid he will have to go.

CHAPTER XII

LANDLORD AND TENANT

At number seven there's n.o.b'dy lives, they left it yesterday; Th' b.u.m-baylis coom an' marked their things, an' took 'em a' away.

They hardly filled a donkey cart--aw know nowt wheer they went-- But they say th' chap spent his bra.s.s o' drink instead o' payin' th'

rent.

SAMUEL LAYc.o.c.k: "Bowton's Yard."

In this branch of the law it cannot honestly be said that the legal position of the poor is very different from the legal position of the rich. Given private ownership of land and the right of a landlord to distrain for rent in arrear, and seize and sell his tenant's goods to pay himself, it does not seem that the law or the way in which it is administered is better or worse for rich or poor. The law of distress is, as its name implies, a harsh and cruel remedy and the shadow of it hangs nearer and darker over the cottage porch than over the doors of the eligible mansion, but it is there in both places. To a weekly wage owner paying an exhausting rent out of a pitiful wage, the ever present right of his landlord to distrain, whilst it nerves him to make every effort to keep a clean rent book, must be one of the sad and depressing elements of daily life that the middle cla.s.ses do not experience so directly. It is pleasant to record--what is in fact my experience--that whatever may have been true of the cruelty of landlords in other times and places the landlords of to-day owning cottage property are not a harsh race. They themselves, especially the poorer ones, have their own troubles. The rates have to be paid, the by-laws to be observed, the notices of the sanitary inspector to be obeyed, and perhaps the fact that they themselves have to ask for time to pay and to sue for leniency from corporations and other officials leads them to be tender with their own underlings. Certain it is that in the putting in force of the right to evict a tenant the landlord is very long-suffering. This last step is not usually taken until the rent is many weeks, or often months, in arrear. Even when an eviction order is granted, I have known many cases where a landlord renews the tenancy and collects the arrears at small instalments.

Eviction orders are very often asked for not in the landlord's own interest but in the community's. The necessity to do the sanitary requirements of public bodies is a constant source of eviction. The tenant having no neighbouring house to go to clings to the undesirable shelter he has got until the forces of the law turn him out in the interests of hygiene. Another curious cause of eviction is a woman's tongue. A lady with what is technically known as "a tongue" will set all her neighbours by the ears; houses on each side of her domicile rapidly empty, and at length the whole street comes to the landlord demanding that she shall go or threatening to depart themselves.

The lady with "the tongue" of our day was, and as far as I know still may be, known to the law as a common scold, and according to Chief Justice Holt was punishable by ducking. Mrs. Foxby, of Maidstone, was, if I remember, the last lady who was indicted at common law for this offence and sentenced to be ducked. She moved, in Trinity Term, 1703, in arrest of judgment because they had called her in the indictment "_calumniatrix_"

and not "_rixatrix_" and insisted on her motion, although Chief Justice Holt in kindly warning reminded her that ducking in Trinity Term was pleasanter than ducking in Michaelmas. As the Court pointed out, mere scolding was not the offence, it was the constant repet.i.tion that was the nuisance. In the result, after a year's litigation the flaw in the indictment saved the Maidstone lady a ducking in the Medway.

But though the common scold and the ducking stool no longer figure in the quarter sessions calendar--though it would rest with the Court of Criminal Appeal to decide if they are yet entirely obsolete--the woman with a tongue, the "_rixatrix_," or lady brawler is undoubtedly still existent and has to be dealt with by the landlord of small property by County Court eviction.

What is called a possession summons is taken out, and in the hearing of it the lady always appears and protests vigorously against the treatment meted out to her, arguing that the street is in a conspiracy against her, and that she is the one quiet peaceful woman in the neighbourhood. Any doubt as to the correctness of the judicial decision in making an eviction order is solved as soon as the order is made, when, self-restraint being no longer necessary, the full force of "the tongue" is turned upon the landlord, the judge who is in league with him, and the two stalwart members of the force who with some difficulty show the lady the door. Next to dry rot and vermin, a tenant with "a tongue" is the greatest enemy of the landlord of mean streets.

But what has long been recognised about the status of landlord and tenant, is that under present economic circ.u.mstances it is impossible for a wage-earner to obtain at the expenditure of a reasonable proportion of his income proper housing for himself and his wife and children. The duty of the State to the poor in this matter is gradually dawning on people's minds, they are waking up to the fact that it cannot be done solely by individual effort, and on this subject the law, I am glad to report, is beginning to make serious efforts to set its houses in order.

At present legislation has taken upon itself three objects: (1) The clearing of slum areas and rebuilding new dwellings, with powers of compulsory purchase granted to local bodies. (2) The granting to corporations and councils power to close insanitary houses, and to make their owners repair them. (3) The permission to local authorities to build houses for the working cla.s.ses where there is an insufficiency.

We are a slow moving race. We generally do our legislative reforms by a succession of statutes vigorously fought over and hacked about by gay party spirits whose nearest idea of patriotism is to queer the other fellow's pitch and spoil his budding statute by crimping amendments that he knows will make it unworkable. We have only gone a little way with the Housing business as yet, and if the next statute on the matter could be put in the hands of a small committee of both parties to draft and bring before the House, perhaps we should get somewhat nearer finality.

It is rather melancholy reading to pick up the latest pamphlet of the bookstall on the Housing Question and find much of the writer's ingenuity wasted in trying to prove that his party, and his only, has in the past made any effort to better the housing of the people, and that in the future there is only one honest capable scheme which is worthy of consideration. There is not much real help in these essays. Their burden is always the same. Recollect at the Election time--"Short's very well as far as he goes, but the real friend is Codlin--not Short."

The truth is that neither party has done very much. The history of the matter is much as follows: Writers of all parties and creeds in the Early Victorian days wrote eloquently of the slum dwellings of our great cities.

Some of deeper insight than the rest saw that all was not well, even with the rose-covered cottage of the country-side. It is only within our own lifetime that we have begun to learn that it is morally and economically wicked for a nation to own slums. This truth has not been taught us by the priests and politicians of our time, but by our men of letters.

d.i.c.kens knew all about it and prophesied in despair that we should have to wait for five hundred years for reform. You remember Tom-all-Alone's where Jo lives: "It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who, after establishing their own possessions took to letting them out in lodgings. Now these tumbling tenements contain by night a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years--though born expressly to do it."

Maybe you could not find to-day an exact replica of Tom-all-Alone's; certainly we have swept away acres of them, but it is still worth while to read and remember such descriptions, if only to remind ourselves what the poor have to suffer if the law remains powerless and inert in the compulsory provision of decent housing. People grumble at State interference, but they forget what made it necessary. Rampant individualism led to housing workmen in the tailor's shop, described by Alton Locke "a low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspirations, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, sc.r.a.ps of stuff and ends of threads, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook of chimney-tops and smoke."

When we are wondering how far it is our right and duty to interfere between a man and his house property or whether it is inc.u.mbent upon the nation to take upon itself the burden of housing its people, it is useful to look on these pictures of England in the glorious days of Queen Victoria and Albert the Great and Good. The problems were there then, but it was not the statesmen who saw them and urged their solution.

Nor was it only sentimental Radicals who painted in lurid colours the horrible houses of the people. D'Israeli, in "Sybil," draws an eloquent picture of the narrow lanes of the rural town of Marney, which might be any country town of the South of England--the rubble cottages with gaping c.h.i.n.ks admitting every blast, with rotten timbers, yawning thatch letting in the wind and wet, and open drains full of decomposing animal and vegetable refuse, spreading out here and there with stagnant pools--these things were common-places in the homes of rural England in 1845.

"These wretched tenements," writes D'Israeli, "seldom consisted of more than two rooms, in one of which the whole family, however numerous, were obliged to sleep, without distinction of age or s.e.x or suffering. With the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter, the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of child-birth gives forth another victim to our thoughtless civilisation, surrounded by three generations, whose inevitable presence is more painful than her sufferings in that hour of travail; while the father of her coming child, in another corner of the sordid chamber, lies stricken by that typhus which his contaminating dwelling has breathed into his veins, and for whose next prey is perhaps destined his new-born child. These swarming walls had neither windows nor doors sufficient to keep out the weather or admit the sun or supply the means of ventilation, the humid or putrid roof of thatch exhaling malaria like all other decaying vegetable matter. The dwelling rooms were neither boarded nor paved; and whether it were that some were situate in low and damp places, occasionally flooded by the river and usually much below the level of the road, or that the springs, as was often the case, would burst through the mud floor, the ground was at no time better than so much clay, while sometimes you might see little channels cut from the centre under the doorways to carry off the water, and the door itself removed from its hinges, a resting place for infancy in its deluged home. These hovels were, in many instances, not provided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed the dung heap on which every kind of filth was acc.u.mulated for the purpose of being disposed of for manure, so that when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dung-hills."

Science, medicine, philanthropy, sanitary engineering and enlightened local government have done something to remove many of the horrible things D'Israeli describes, but one cannot say that the law has co-operated with much vigour in this beneficent crusade. Without law and compulsion the work will never be done as thoroughly as is necessary throughout the length and breadth of the land.

The eloquent outcry, from writers of all creeds and parties, demanding better houses for the people at length made itself heard within the walls of Westminster. But it was not until 1868 that the Torrens Act was pa.s.sed, the first attempt of the Legislature to deal with slum property. This was followed by the Artisans Dwelling Act of 1875, which enabled local authorities to compulsorily purchase slum areas and re-build sanitary dwellings. In Birmingham, where Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was mayor, magnificent use was made of these powers to the great present benefit of the city. In Liverpool, Manchester, and other towns something was done, but as the business depended in the main on local initiative, and the spending of money, much more remained undone.

A few small measures were pa.s.sed, but they did not lead to any great practical work being put in hand, and again it was the man of letters who wakened the national conscience. I remember well in the eighties the appearance of "How the Poor Live" by George R. Sims and the interest and sympathy it aroused. There is no exaggeration in the book, but merely a graphic record of fact, and it proves with melancholy certainty the small progress that had been made since the days of d.i.c.kens, Kingsley and D'Israeli.

It was with a great chorus of self congratulation and the loud braying of journalistic trumpets that on March 4th, 1884, a Royal Commission was announced to inquire into the Housing of the Working Cla.s.ses. It is almost forgotten to-day, but in its time it aroused great hopes in the breast of social reformers. Sir Charles Dilke was Chairman, the Prince of Wales himself was a working member of the commission, Cardinal Manning, Lord Salisbury, Samuel Morley, Jesse Collings, Henry Broadhurst and other great public men of the day were his colleagues.

The overcrowding, the immorality and disease and waste caused by bad housing, the terrible tax of rent on the incomes of the poor were all rehea.r.s.ed in painful detail before these great ones of the earth. But when one comes to remedies and recommendations, there is nothing except the most trivial and inadequate propositions that the eminent ones can agree upon.