This was unparliamentary enough, but it was allowed to pass. It was when he began to give the names of foundered ships and their parliamentary owners and, in his own words, “to unmask the villains” who sent poor men to death and destruction, that he was promptly called to order, and, refusing to withdraw, left the House.
The result of his outburst was entirely satisfactory. The Government were obliged to bring in another Bill and to pass it without delay.
Many years later the unauthorised Radical programme of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain aroused my youthful enthusiasm, and I spent much of my then ample leisure as a missionary in that cause.
We soon lost our great leader, who went away to champion what he considered greater causes, but he was one of the first English statesmen in high places to make his main programme a reform of the law in the interests of the poor, and he left behind him mournful but earnest disciples who have not yet found such another leader. The Workmen’s Compensation Act will always, I think, be regarded as one of his greatest achievements, and mauled and mangled as it has been in the Law Courts it remains the most substantial benefit that the poor have received from the Legislature in my lifetime.
Twenty years’ service in urban County Courts has naturally given me some insight into the way in which the law treats the poor and the real wants of the latter. I agree that such a book as this would be better written by one who had actual experience of the life of the poor, rather than the official hearsay experience which is all that I can claim to have had.
I think the great want of labour to-day is an Attorney-General, a man who having graduated in the workshop comes to the study and practice of the law with a working man’s knowledge and ideals, and gaining a lawyer’s power of expressing his wants in legal accents, raises his voice to demand those new laws that the poor are so patiently awaiting.
If there be such a one on his way and this volume is of any small service to him, it will have more than fulfilled its purpose.
Originating in a series of essays published in the Sunday Chronicle, it has grown into a more ambitious project, and is now, I trust, a fairly complete text-book of the law as it ought not to be in relation to the poor.
In my endeavour to please the taste of the friend to whom I have dedicated this book I have dispensed with all footnotes, but I have added an appendix of references in case there may be any who might wish to test the accuracy of statements in its pages.
“Thus,” as my Lord Coke says, “requesting you to weigh these my labours in the even balance of your indifferent judgment I submit them to your censure and take my leave.”