Nowadays there is a tendency among the less discerning of mankind to set down all the rough edges and inequalities of the law to the fault of the judges, though in truth they have but a small part in the making of new laws, and I do not think they can be rightly blamed for harsh administration. They get the blame because they are the figure-heads of the show, so to speak, and the public know nothing of the difficulties under which the judges labour. It is their duty to administer the complicated modern laws turned out by Parliament in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and they are bound to keep alive old-world laws that ought long ago to have been shot on to the rubbish heap. Nearly all the law relating to the poor will be found to be defective to our modern sympathies, just because it is a patching up of the ancient cruel pagan law of past ages and does not break bravely away from the old superstitious uses and close for ever the volumes of laws that were made in the days when liberty and equality and fraternity were words of anarchy and rebellion.
The poor are suffering to-day at the hands of the law because in the evolution of things we have a lot of old derelict law made by slaveowners for slaves, by masters for serfs, by the landlords for the landless. It is law that has no more relation to the wants of to-day, and would be of no more purpose to a Ministry of Justice—if we had one—than crossbows and arquebuses would be to the War Office, or coracles to the Admiralty. And, instead of cursing the judges, who, poor fellows, are doing their best, I wish our parliamentary masters would look into the history of the matter. They would find, I think, that in the last few years enormous reforms have been made in modifying the cruelty of the law to the poor, and might discover, by marking back on the track of past reform, the lines upon which further evolution may be hastened. One thing, I think, they will be convinced about: it is not the judges who are hard on the poor, it is the law. It is the sins of the lawgivers of the past that the poor are expiating to-day.
CHAPTER II
THE ANCIENTS AND THE DEBTOR
| My thoughts are with the Dead, with them I live in long-past years, Their virtues love, their faults condemn, Partake their hopes and fears, And from their lessons seek and find Instruction with a humble mind. Robert Southey: “My Days among the Dead are past.” |
I find this question of the debtor, and our modern method of imprisoning the poorer variety of the genus, in the forefront of any consideration of the problem of the law and the poor, because to my mind it is a clear and classic instance of the way in which it comes about that the law with us is a respecter of persons.
The physiological tutor will take his pupils into the laboratory and cut up a rabbit to show them where their livers ought to be, the microscopist will choose a newt to exhibit to you the circulation of the blood, and in like manner, for my purposes, the debtor seems to me to possess all the necessary legal incidents in him through which one can give an excellent object lesson on the law and the poor. There is no legal mystery about a debtor; he is a common object of our legal seashore, as ancient of lineage as the periwinkle and sometimes almost as difficult to get at. Everyone has in his life at some time or other been a debtor, though not all of us have attained to the dignity of a co-respondent, a mortgagor, a garnishee, a bankrupt or a cestui que trust.
It seems to me that to demonstrate to the man in the street the unfairness of our law of imprisonment for debt is such a feasible proposition, that I have come to regard the subject as very fitting for the citizen’s kindergarten education on legal reform. Once understand the history, and the causes of the continued existence, of imprisonment for debt, and its evil effect on right action, conduct and social life, and you will find it easier to diagnose the more obscure legal diseases which are partially the outcome and partially the cause of much real distress among the poor. Carlyle tells us to “examine history for it is philosophy teaching by experience,” and, if we take his advice in this matter of imprisonment for debt, we shall, I think, be bound to admit that what is going on among us day by day in the County Courts of this country is in historical fact a relic of a very ancient barbarism.