Why, then, do I commend the future of the County Court to the attention of the legal reformer? Because I see in the County Court, and in that Court only, a growing and popular tribunal favoured by the business men of the country. Because in that Court there is a crying abuse calling aloud for reform, namely, imprisonment for debt, which abuse, when abolished or mitigated, will release Judges from odious duties, and give them time for more honourable services. Because in great urban centres there has long been a demand for continued sittings, which the High Court has been unable to comply with, but which the County Court already satisfies to some extent, and with reasonable equipment could supply in full measure. The record of the County Courts in the last fifty years is a very remarkable one. In the face of keen professional opposition, Parliament has given them year by year more important and onerous duties. These have been carried out in the main to the satisfaction of the business man in the business centres. It is because the urban County Courts are live business concerns, carrying on their business to the satisfaction of their customers, that I believe in the future of the County Court.
THE PREVALENCE OF PODSNAP.
“The question about everything was would it bring about a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was that according to Mr. Podsnap she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all.”
—Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend.
There seems an alarming recrudescence of Podsnappery at the present moment. Perhaps in a measure it is a protest against things that are wrong. If some novel-writers exceed the limits of reasonable plain speech, and some dramatists seek publicly to exhibit the results of moral leprosy, they challenge the latent Podsnap, that is a valuable asset in our national character, to flourish its right arm and say, “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” With every proper contempt for Podsnap, there are some excesses about which he is right when he sweeps them away with the verdict, “Not English!” But having tasted too much success by reason of the excesses of his enemies, he is beginning not only to reform our morals, but has started upon our manners.
A “Town Vicar,” writing a letter to a Church paper, recently lifted up his voice in the following complaint: “It is not long ago that I heard a Dean declare that ‘we were not going to take it lying down,’ and more than one Bishop has in preaching lately had recourse to ‘the bottom dog.’ But these are mere details in the alarming spread of vulgarity where culture and right feeling used to be.”
What would Charles Kingsley have said or His Honour Judge Hughes to a parson who shrank from a simile drawn from the noble art of self-defence? Seeing, too, that the phrase has attained esoteric political value in respect of its use by the leader of Birmingham state-craft, the Podsnap in our good Vicar takes too much upon itself when it declares that the sporting Dean who used it was wanting in “culture and right feeling.”
The reference by more than one Bishop to the “bottom dog” is less easy to defend. The “Town Vicar” no doubt regards a Bishop as so far removed from the everyday affairs of the world that the phrase should never have polluted his ears, far less his lips, and that if he has indeed heard of the existence of “bottom dogs,” and he desires to express himself about them, he should allude to them on the platform as the “submerged tenth,” and in the pulpit as “our poorer brethren.”
To many of us it will come as a pleasant surprise to know that there is more than one Bishop whose courage is stronger than his culture. Not that one desires to see in Bishops or in anyone else a tendency towards the patronage of meaningless slang or dull expletive. I remember a story of the seventies that used to be told with equal inaccuracy of Canon Farrar and Bishop Fraser. The Bishop—let us say—travelling in a third-class carriage with some workmen, took occasion to reprove one on his constant and meaningless use of the adjective “bloody.”