CHAPTER VI
BANKRUPTCY
“In a lofty room, ill lighted and worse ventilated, situate in Portugal Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there sit nearly the whole year round, one, two, three or four gentlemen in wigs, as the case may be, with little writing desks before them, constructed after the fashion of those used by the judges of the land, barring the French polish. There is a box of barristers on their right hand; there is an enclosure of insolvent debtors on their left; and there is an inclined plane of most especially dirty faces in their front. These gentlemen are the Commissioners of the Insolvent Court, and the place in which they sit is the Insolvent Court itself.”
Charles Dickens: “Pickwick.” Chap. XLIII.
A bankrupt is not a person who breaks the bank, as is popularly supposed. On the contrary, he is, or ought to be, by his derivation a person whose bank is broken by others. A learned professor tells me that the Florentines of old had some sort of ceremony in which they marched to their insolvent neighbour’s office and broke up his bank, or bench, or money table to show the world that he was no longer commercially sound. Until recently in English law bankruptcy was merely a trader’s remedy designed to protect an unfortunate business man from life-long imprisonment for debt resulting from unfortunate business ventures. Latterly the privilege of bankruptcy has been extended to every citizen that has a debt of fifty pounds and ten pounds to pay the fees necessary to filing his petition.
But, in order to become insolvent, it is a condition precedent that at some time or another one should have been solvent. And one difficulty about applying any form of bankruptcy laws to the poor is that they are too often born insolvent, live insolvent, and die insolvent. There must be many fellow citizens in this country of ours who never knew what it was for twelve months of their life to have a living wage and be out of debt. As long as we have imprisonment for debt credit of some kind and on some terms ruinous or otherwise is always obtainable. At the present, bankruptcy is almost regarded as a sign of grace, a condition of honourable martyrdom into which the careless and good-natured ones of the world find themselves after a short struggle in the slough of solvency. To the rich it is a very present help in time of trouble, but the poor, never having been sufficiently solvent, can never make use of its aid.
When the worker has a living wage guaranteed him by the State it will be necessary to make him a new bankruptcy law so that the living wage cannot be attached and converted to the use of the Shylocks of this world. The law protects the infant and the idiot from the results of their own foolishness, and we shall find it advisable in the future to extend similar protection to the grown-up idiots and infants who are all too prevalent in the world. Antonio was a normal business man, but he was no match for Shylock, and, though no lawyer can approve of the way in which the Courts treated Shylock, the real lesson of the story is that laws are necessary to protect Antonio, the fool, from Shylock, the knave.
In order, then, that the full blessings of bankruptcy may be made available to the poor, we must certainly tackle the problem of the living wage, which to my mind is the most urgent social question of our time. So many things seem to hang upon it. Rent, taxation, education, physical and moral improvement, eugenics, all the social discussions of the time, land you back on the question of the living wage. Sometimes, I think, we are on the eve of a new era when every capable honest citizen will have the same right to a living wage that he now has to free board and lodging and stone breaking in the workhouse. I would rather have a legal right to a living wage than a vote, unless I was clear that I could use the latter to obtain the former and many better things to boot.
As a matter of dull, dry, literary history all the prophets and singers and poets, from King David, Isaiah and Jeremiah down to Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Dickens and Tom Hood, have said or sung the praises of the living wage. There are many who regard Jeremiah as a kind of gloomy dean, but for my part I find him most encouraging. When he says: “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages and giveth him not for his work,” I think that he is absolutely right on the spot. I cannot believe that it was his view that woe would providentially descend upon the man who paid sweating wages and that it would come in the shape of lions and bears or lightning and earthquakes; on the contrary, I read it, that, in Jeremiah’s view, it was the duty of citizens to see that their fellows did not behave like this. The prophet intended to tell us that our first duty was to persuade our fellow citizens employing labour to give their workmen a living wage, but if we could not achieve this by reasoning and exhorting them, then it was our duty to give such anti-social churls statutory woe, just as we mete out statutory woe to the naughty ones who get drunk and beat their wives, and, indeed, for the same social reasons.
David and all his biblical backers were as eager as Mr. Philip Snowden and his Socialist friends to promote the living wage, and, as they put it, to “deliver the poor from him that is too strong for him.” That, in a phrase, is the modern problem of the living wage. The trust, the combine, the limited company, the corporation or Government office are bound in the nature of things to become the spoilers of the poor and needy unless there is some power delegated by the State to some judicial authority to “deliver the poor from him that is too strong for him.”