The Law and the Poor Part 16

"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 a.s.sisted this natural evolution by hara.s.sing 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 cla.s.ses 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses of people are tending to temperance and sobriety, but the consumption of exciseable articles is increasing--last year there was an increase of 5,128,000 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 munic.i.p.ality--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 munic.i.p.ality will not do it for him, and the more civilised brewers should be a.s.sisted and encouraged by the licensing authorities to build big, s.p.a.cious 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 cla.s.s that has so little real pleasure by enforcing the licensing and other laws to interfere with their amus.e.m.e.nts. On the contrary, we should seek to use their example and better our own licensing circ.u.mstances 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 la.s.ses 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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. Amus.e.m.e.nt 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 amus.e.m.e.nt out of the dingy tavern which is the only public inst.i.tution 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 subst.i.tution 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-cla.s.s 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 inst.i.tution where one can have his cup of tea and a m.u.f.fin, and the other his gla.s.s of ale and a sandwich, and both sit at one table in a s.p.a.cious 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 pa.s.sed 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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d-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 appet.i.te 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 amus.e.m.e.nt is one for Bishops, Law Lords, philanthropists and the leisured cla.s.ses--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 c.u.mbrous 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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. c.o.ke in his Inst.i.tutes 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.

c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke 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 cla.s.s, 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.