The Law and the Poor Part 17

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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d child was an a.s.set 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 n.o.ble 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 inst.i.tution 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, b.a.s.t.a.r.d children, prost.i.tutes, 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 cla.s.sification; 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 cla.s.s," 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 b.u.mble; 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sembly 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.s.sociate 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 prost.i.tute 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 cla.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sify 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 pa.s.s 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 uncla.s.sified 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 d.a.m.nation.

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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 inst.i.tuted 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 compa.s.s--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 const.i.tuencies.

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 cla.s.ses, 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 p.r.i.c.ks, 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 const.i.tuents 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 cla.s.ses 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.s inst.i.tution 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 a.s.serted 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 cla.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.set 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.

n.o.body 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.