The Law and the Poor Part 18

Pheasants and partridges are too valuable to be so treated. Their nests are protected from any distress or execution by poachers, and their bodies are protected from arrest by watchful gamekeepers under strict laws. I want to insure under my reformed laws that the human nest should be protected in the same way, and that judges should not only be allowed, but ordered, to take care that the home is not devastated by human misfortune or even by improvidence. We want Game Laws for the poor. In future our legislators must treat them as game birds--as indeed most of them are--and not as vermin to be devoured, they and their children, by the owls and kites of the underworld in which they live.

And the second clause of my Magna Charta would be of almost simpler dimensions than the first. It would run: "Let it be enacted that the County Courts have jurisdiction in Divorce." This would at once place rich and poor on an equality that is not yet even aimed at. I should not complicate this matter with the overdue reforms proposed by the Divorce Commission, much as I should like to see those enacted. They are matters of general interest that have waited for so many years that there is not much hardship in holding them back further, but the inst.i.tution of a new tribunal of divorce is of vital and immediate importance to the poor. The Act would be a practically unopposed act of one clause. It would only touch one vested interest, the London lawyers of the Divorce Court, and it would greatly please their brethren throughout the country.

All details of costs and machinery could be left to rule committees, as is the common practice in other and more important matters that have come to the County Courts, such as Admiralty and equity jurisdiction, and a hundred other really difficult and complicated matters.

And then would follow a lot of simple but important reforms that really only need the stroke of the official pen that is never made until the man in the street rises in his wrath and knocks the official funny-bone on the official desk and wakens him up to the fact that it is officially time to do some official act.

For, of course, police court fines must be cut down and time given to pay them, and police court costs must be paid by the community, and bankruptcies must be made available to the poor, and the Treasury must cease to rob the poorest bankrupts of 13,000 a year, and the limit of such bankruptcies must be raised to 250, so that poor little business men and their creditors may get what there is, rather than it should all go in costs and fees and payments to lawyers and accountants, who must give up sparrow shooting and hunt for bigger game.

And, above all, we must remember to engross in big black text on our parchment what Joseph Chamberlain said about his Workmen's Compensation Act, that it is to be worked without lawyers, or at least, that it is to be made one of the judge's duties to see employer and workman first and endeavour to bring them together before he issues his fiat that the affair is "fit for litigation."

This little programme surprises me by its moderation. How any society of business men could palaver about it in any Palaverment for more than a week pa.s.ses my comprehension. I commend my new Magna Charta to a party in want of a programme. If they carried it in the first week of their Ministry and then adjourned for seven years to see how the world went on without them, they would be the most sensible and popular Government since the days of Alfred the Great.

CHAPTER XVI

REMEDIES OF TO-MORROW

Happy he whose inward ear Angel comfortings can hear, O'er the rabble's laughter; And, while Hatred's f.a.ggots burn, Glimpses through the smoke discern Of the good hereafter.

Knowing this, that never yet Share of Truth was vainly set In the world's wide fallow; After hands shall sow the seed, After hands from hill and mead Reap the harvests yellow.

Thus, with somewhat of the Seer, Must the moral pioneer From the Future borrow; Clothe the waste with dreams of grain, And, on midnight's sky of rain, Paint the golden morrow!

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER: "Barclay of Ury."

I remember in my youth being told in the words of Marcus Aurelius: "Be satisfied with your business and learn to love what you were bred to." At the time I may have resented the advice, but I have lived long enough to see the wisdom of it. Personally, at that period, I should have liked to have been an engine driver or at least a railway guard; later on in years I had thoughts about carpentering; and in course of time water-colour painting, etching, playing the fiddle, and even golf seemed possible of attainment. But when you really learn that these higher ranks of life are closed to you by your own natural limitations and find out that your business in life is to be a drab official in an inferior court, then Marcus Aurelius is indeed grateful and comforting.

One can, after many years of it, learn to love even the County Court. You have much the same outlook and experience of life and human nature as the old bus driver. Every day brings you new pa.s.sengers who accompany you for a few minutes on the journey of life, and you get to know many old ones and have a friendly crack with them over their domestic troubles.

Moreover, at moments your daily job brings you in near touch with the joys and sorrows and trials and daily efforts of poor people, and once in a way perhaps you can be of use, which to a child and to a grown-up who has any of the child left in him is always a jolly thing. When you have really got quite accustomed to enjoying your work the natural garrulity which your friends lovingly attribute to senile decay stimulates you to make them partners in your joy. The narrow circle in which you spend your daily life has become your only world. You find yourself quoting with approval "with aged men is wisdom, and in length of days understanding," and you begin to believe you are the only person who really does understand. Childlike, you find dragons in your path that you want to slay, pure and beautiful souls are oppressed, and you fancy that you can release them from bondage; there are giants of injustice and persecution in the land whose castles you mean to turn into peoples' palaces. Then you sit down to write your fairy tales again--but no longer for the children nowadays, since they are all grown up. These fairy tales are for journalists, philanthropists and politicians who make fairy tales and live on fairy tales; and believe me, there are no more essential fairy tales than stories about legal reform. Only to the writer are they real, and to one or two choice child spirits who never grow old and still believe in a world where everyone is going to live happily ever afterwards. The way in which Master Ogre, the Law, swallows up the poor is quite like a real fairy tale, and it would have even a happier likeness to the fiction of the nursery if we could tell of a Jack the Giant Killer cutting off the wicked monster's head and rescuing his victims.

I am under no delusions that this little volume is going to do any particular good in any particular hurry. I know by historical study that the way of reform lies through official mazes of docket and precis and pigeon holes, that legislative decisions are hatched out in some bureaucratic incubator that the eye of common man has never seen. I reverence the mystery that surrounds these high matters. It is really good for us that we should know so little of the reason why things are no better than they are. And then how good our rulers are to us in the matter of Royal Commissions and Blue Books! At our own expense we may really have as many of these as we ask for. I wish I could get folk to understand what a lot of sterling entertainment there is in blue books. All the earnest ones, all the clever ones, all the cranky ones of this world set down their views and opinions on any subject at any distance from that subject, and wrangle and argue and cross-examine each other, and then the good Government prints it for us all verbatim and sells it to us very very cheap. Practically, I dislike the shape of a blue book, and aesthetically they do not match my library carpet when they are lying around, which is a disadvantage, but I must own that if I were banished to a desert island I would rather have my blue books than much of what is called cla.s.sical literature.

The evidence is the best reading--and when one comes to the final report I generally find the minority report to be the thing one is looking for, as it is usually the minority who want to do something. But in some subjects, divorce for instance, things are moving so hurriedly during these last few hundred years that actually there is a majority in favour of legislation and reform.

Not that this makes the slightest difference as to any actual reform being done. The feeling of security that nothing is ever going to come of it makes it a safe and reasonable thing to print the most advanced views at the expense of the State. The physical weight and size of these volumes have been carefully considered and the whole format cunningly designed to repel readers. Nothing ever comes of blue books, and I do not suppose anything ever will come of them. When I turn over their dreary pages I find myself humming Kipling's chorus--

And it all goes into the laundry, But it never comes out in the wash, 'Ow we're sugared about by the old men ('Eavy sterned amateur old men!) That 'amper an' 'inder an' scold men For fear o' Stellenbosh.

d.i.c.kens had the same impatience of the heavy sterned brigade and invented his immortal Circ.u.mlocution Office, and doubtless genius is ent.i.tled to deride these substantial State inst.i.tutions. Personally, I find them very English and valuable. The more energetic of us may take our pleasure in giving friendly shoves to these heavy sterned Christians, but their inert services to the community are not to be undervalued. But for this immovable official wall who knows what reforms, unnecessary and ill-advised, might have been carried through. If Lord Brougham could have had his way much that I am writing about to-day would long ago have happened. The heavy sterned ones sitting on the lid prevented the opening of the Pandora box with its promises of affliction for the human race in the shape of legal reform. They have left these things over until to-day and brought me amus.e.m.e.nt for idle vacation hours. At least, let me be thankful to them and sing their praises.

I remember when I was planning out these chapters being the victim of a most terrible nightmare. A newspaper with a King's speech in it was thrust before me and every one of the reforms I had already written about was promised to be pa.s.sed within the Session. I remember smiling in my dream, knowing what parliamentary promises were, and then as I was gliding down the Strand a silent phantom newsboy handed me an evening paper. There it was in black and white, every bill was pa.s.sed--there was nothing left to write about. I awoke with a cry. It was a terrible shock, and it was some moments of time before I could realise that such a thing was absolutely impossible. And, of course, when you think of the large number of things that you want done and recollect that nothing ever is done that a man really cares about in his own lifetime it was absurd of me, even in a dream, to believe that anything was coming between me and my little book. Indeed, I have hopes that for many years to come it may be regarded as a popular primer about legal reform for future generations who wish to while away idle hours in the luxury of vain imagination.

I should like to interest the man in the street about legal reform and to see him at work remedying some of the more obvious of the existing abuses I have referred to, but I am under no delusion that such reforms would bring about the millennium. It is good to do the pressing work in the vineyards on the slopes of the mountain, but it is permissible for poor human man to have his day off now and then to climb on the hilltops and gaze out on the limitless ocean of the future and indulge in wild surmises of the after-world.

The remedies of to-day are really tiresome parochial affairs compared to the remedies of to-morrow and hardly seem worth troubling about when one considers that even if you pa.s.sed them all this year in a century or two your new statutes would be out of date and only fit for the sc.r.a.p heap.

Bacon tells us that Time is the greatest of all innovators, but he does not explain to us why, unlike all human innovators, Time is in no hurry about it. I have quite distinct beliefs, which to me are certainties, as to how Time will reconcile the law and the poor in the centuries to come, when our social absurdities and wrong-doing will not even be remembered to be laughed at. The law will never be a really great influence for good until it is utterly conquered, put in its proper place in the world and based on the principle of Love. In other words, when the Law of Love receives the Royal a.s.sent no other law will be necessary.

Nineteen hundred years ago a new principle was introduced into the world.

It was the principle of unselfishness, and its apostles were labour men.

In relation to man's personal life it has made some progress, but in practical social politics its business value is not yet fully recognised.

Still, a beginning has been made, and that old snail, Time, is doubtless satisfied with the pace of things. Let us remember hopefully that two thousand years ago unselfishness as a basic principle of life, doing to others as you would be done by, promoting peace and good will instead of strife and ill will--these ideas as business propositions were as unknown then as railways, telegraphs, motor cars, and aeroplanes. A vision of to-day would have been a wild fairy tale to Marcus Aurelius, a vision of two thousand years hence would be incomprehensible to us.

One does not mean, of course, that unselfishness had never before been preached as an ideal, but a society based on the common quality of all its members placing the interests of others above their own was a new notion, and the novelty of it has not yet worn off. Nevertheless, love and unselfishness have achieved sufficient lip-service already to make me hopeful of their future, and I foresee a time when they will be the foundation of the laws of the world, and the preamble to every statute will be "Blessed are the Peacemakers."

Some day when the Chinese send over a mission to heathen England, missionaries will go about the country destroying all the boards on which are written the wicked words "Trespa.s.sers will be Prosecuted." But I hope we may not have to wait for a foreign mission to teach us our duty.

This phrase, typical of the law of to-day and eloquent of the claims of the rich to fence the poor off the face of the earth, must utterly disappear when the new spirit of the law is made manifest. We have no sense of humour. On Sunday we intone to slow music our desire to forgive our enemy his trespa.s.ses; on Monday we go down to our solicitor to issue a writ against him for the trespa.s.s we have failed to forgive. The old notice threatening prosecution is really already out of date. It ought, of course, to read, "Trespa.s.sers will be Forgiven." For my part if I met with such a notice, I should hesitate before I walked across the owner's land; whereas to-day, when I am threatened with prosecution, my bristles go up, I scent a right of way, and as like as not proceed in my trespa.s.sing out of pure cussedness. There are a lot of other folk besides myself who are built that way. I know a little girl of five whose chief glory in life is to walk "on the private," as she calls it, when the park-keeper is not looking. It is that constant "Don't!" and "You mustn't"

that rouses the rebel in us. The less forbidding there is, the easier the path of obedience.

I hold no brief for trespa.s.sers. I know it is naughty to trespa.s.s. But in the present state of my evolution there is so much of the original monkey in me that when that "monkey is up," to use a phrase dear to Cardinal Newman, I go astray. So do many of my best friends.

I have the same belief in the evolution of the moral world and its onward movement that I have in the revolution of the physical world and its rotary movement. For this reason I expect my great-grandchildren of two thousand years hence to be much better behaved than I am. You can see it coming along in your own grandchildren unless your sight is getting dim.

And I am quite clear that my own manners are an improvement on my great grandfathers, who lived in caves, and, when they had disputes, made it clubs, and battered each other strenuously until it was proved which had the thickest skull, when he of the toughest cranium was adjudged to be in the right.

The vigorous legal procedure of the cave men sounds laughable enough to us nowadays, but does anyone think that two thousand years hence superior unborn persons will not be smiling superciliously over the history books that record the doings of our judges, our hired counsellors, our sheriffs, our gaolers, and our hangman?

It was only in the recent reign of good Queen Bess that the ordeal of battle was given up. The abolition of that old-world lawsuit must have been painful to the conservative mind. And there was a lot to say for it.

From a sporting point of view, what could be better than to go down to Tothill Fields in Westminster, as you might have done in 1571, to see A.

B. battering C. D. to the intent that whichever knocked the stuffing out of the other gained the verdict?

If you look at it from a healthy, open-air point of view, maybe it was better for everybody than sitting in a stuffy court and listening to two bigwigs splitting hairs to the resultant financial ruin of one of their clients. One reason, no doubt, that trials by battle were abolished was that they gave the poor at least as good a chance as the rich.

I remember a good story--it is an old one, but still quite good--of a n.o.ble lord and landowner who net a collier trespa.s.sing in the neighbourhood of Wigan.

"My good man," said my lord, "do you know you are trespa.s.sing?"

"Well, wot of it?"

"You have no right to be walking across my land."

"I'm like to be walking across somebody's land, I've noan o' me own."

"Well, you must not come across mine."

"How do I know it is yours, and who gave it you?"

"Well, this land," replied the n.o.ble lord, "belonged to my father and grandfather and his father for many generations."

"But how did thi' first grandfeyther get it?" persisted the collier.

"Well, as a matter of fact, it was granted by the King for services rendered. I may say," my lord added proudly, "that my ancestors fought for this land."

"Did they, now?" said the collier, "then tak off thi' coat an' I'll feight thee for a bit."