“I seem to hear you asking: ‘Could I not have been granted a remedy at a price proportioned to my means? Must I, and every working man whose wife leaves him as mine did, to drink in public houses, and walk the streets at night, be condemned for ever after to live alone, or to live in immorality?’
“The answer is a simple one: ‘If all the clerks and working men, and all those wives of clerks and working men—to whom, like you, divorce was due by almost general consent, and was indeed by almost general consent deemed of a desperate importance—were enabled to obtain it at a price within their means, several thousand more divorces would each year be granted in this country. This would have a disastrous effect upon the statistics of the marriage tie. Public Opinion, formed, you must remember, exclusively amongst your betters (for on such subjects working men are, and always have been, dumb), formed exclusively by such as can afford to pay for their decrees—this great Public Opinion would feel that a backward step was being taken on the path of moral rectitude. It would feel that, in granting what you, the People, in your dumbness and short sight might be tempted to think was common justice, it would be sacrificing the substance of morals to the shadow. The immorality to which you and your like under the present law are, and ever will be, forced, need never lie open to the light of day, never become a matter of statistics, and offend the Public Eye. What is not a matter of statistics can do no damage to the country’s morals or the country’s name. Public Opinion is itself secure in the enjoyment of the rights and privileges granted by the law, and it has decided by a simple sacrifice to conserve the moral fame of all. There must—it reasons—be a sacrifice; then let us sacrifice those without the means to pay! It is an accident that they, in their thousands, are not included in ourselves; some must suffer that we may all be moral!’
“This is the answer. It is too much, perhaps, to ask you, from the marsh of suffering, with your low personal point of view, to appreciate the heights of impersonality reached in this vicarious sacrifice. But you may possibly respect its depths of common sense. Can you blame the practical wisdom of this Public Opinion, in which you have no part? If you had a part in it, would you not yourself endorse it? If you were a man of means, that is of means sufficient to enjoy the privileges of the Law, would you seriously offer to exert yourself to upset your conception of your country’s moral worth, and lose secretly a little of your self-esteem, that you might extend those privileges to such of your fellow-citizens as could not pay for them? Would you not rather feel: My own position is secure; this idea is only sentiment, mere abstract justice! If they want it they must pay for it!
“By no means think that this great principle of payment is confined merely to divorce; it underlies all justice in a greater or a less degree. It is ‘money makes the mare to go!’ It is money that dictates the measure of justice and its methods. But this is so mingled with the essence of our lives that we do not even notice it. Why, you could hardly find a man who, if you went to him in private and put your case, would not say at once that you were hardly used! To the Law you cannot go privately; and the Law is the guardian of all justice.
“I have told you the requirements of the Law. You have not fulfilled them. And, having made this error, you must, evidently, now go forth, either to enjoy your own society for the remainder of your days, or, as Nature drives you, to consort with those who at each touch will remind you of what your wife has now become; and in this journey of enjoyment, whichever of the two journeys it may be, you will be sustained, no doubt, by the consciousness that you are serving the morality of your country, and strengthening the esteem in which the marriage tie is held. You will be inspired by the knowledge that you are sharing this voyage of pleasure and of privilege with thousands of other men and women, as decent and as kind as you. And you will feel, year by year, prouder and prouder of your country that has reached these heights of justice....”
HOPE
XIX
Hope
Wet or fine, hot or cold, nothing was more certain than that the lame man would pass, leaning on his twisted oaken stick, his wicker basket slung on his shoulder. In that basket, covered by a bit of sacking, was groundsel, and rarely, in the season, a few mushrooms kept carefully apart in a piece of newspaper.
His blunt, wholesome, weather-beaten face with its full brown beard, now going grey, was lined and sad because his leg continually gave him pain. That leg had shrivelled through an accident, and being now two inches shorter than it should have been, did little save remind him of mortality. He had a respectable, though not an affluent, appearance, for his old blue overcoat, his trousers, waistcoat, hat, were ragged from long use and stained by weather. He had been a deep-sea fisherman before his accident, but now he made his living by standing on the pavement at a certain spot, in Bayswater, from ten o’clock to seven in the evening. And any one who wished to give her bird a luxury would stop before his basket, and buy a pennyworth of groundsel.