The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

For if you get an actual sovereign from a moneylender you have at all events got some concrete thing that you can exchange for food and drink or clothing, and the token has an ascertained value; moreover, if you know a little arithmetic you know what you are paying for it. But if you buy clothing from a tally-man or a watch from a travelling jeweller, or a walnut suite from an instalment furniture dealer, or a family Bible in parts from an area tout, you can have no idea whatever of the value of the thing purchased or the percentage of profit on the deal.

And, though I should like to see all this class of trading done away with, and know that it causes great ruin and misery, yet to my mind the moneylender and even the lower class of tally-men are angels of light compared with the directors of insolvent collecting societies, who take the savings of the thrifty poor on promises that any sensible person must know to be incapable of performance.

As I have shown elsewhere, the bulk of the smaller flat-trap poachers could be quietly exterminated by the abolition of imprisonment for debt. That alone is the artificial manure which enables these social weeds to flourish. Withhold it from them and they would wither and die, and the world would be well rid of them.

If the man in the street could listen, as I have had to do for the last twenty years, to tales of misery and wretchedness brought about by our absurd credit system he would understand something of my impatience at its continuance. I remember a small household that was ruined by a gramophone. A poor woman, a widow, earned twelve shillings a week, and a son was doing well at fifteen shillings a week. There were two little children. As things go in their world they were well-to-do. The Devil, in the form of a tout, came down the street one Saturday afternoon, with a beautiful gramophone. It was only a shilling a week, and all that was to be done was for mother and son “to sign just there at the bottom of the paper, and, of course, if they did not want to keep it they could send it back.”

However, later on, they found that they had signed to buy it; the boy fell out of work, the case was put in Court, and judgment was entered against both mother and son in default of appearance for two or three pounds. Then the son enlisted and went to India, and I first heard of the case when they brought the widow up on a judgment summons. I asked her why she had signed the guarantee, and her reply was: “Tom was such a good lad and he was in work, and he was that keen to have it I couldn’t deny him.” Anyone who has ever been any kind of a father or mother will not cast a stone at her for her folly.

That is one of the short and simple tales from the annals of imprisonment for debt.

What match are confiding folk like these for the lying scallywags who tout their inferior wares round the streets? And instead of our law remembering that we pray daily to be delivered from temptation, and playing the part of a father of the fatherless and a friend of the widows, it keeps alive section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869, in the interests of about as low a class of knaves as ever disgraced the name of English trade.

I know very well that there are many good honest folk who approve of imprisonment for debt and have fears about its abolition. These should remember that in France and Germany and a great part of America there is no such thing, and yet trade does not suffer and the working classes do not starve. I should quite agree that if a man defrauds a tradesman by lying promises or cheating he should be punished, but imprisonment should be for fraud, not, as it is now, for poverty. As I have already pointed out, in America no honest man is likely to get into prison merely for the wickedness of owing money. We cannot say that is true here. In Germany the working man lives on a cash basis. Credit is not largely given, as there is no power of imprisonment for debt.

England is the last civilised country whose law encourages the poor to live on credit, yet nothing is more true than this, that once start living on credit and you cannot get out of it. It is a downward path leading to the Slough of Despond. But until the law is amended we must be content to look on and see the poor in the cages of prison whilst those that set the traps and catch them wax fat and shine.

And as soon as a boy or a girl begins to earn wages the Evil One, in the shape of some kind of tally-man, is at his or her elbow with a watch, or a ring, or a family Bible, or a musical instrument, or a shoddy sewing machine, the possession of which can be gloriously enjoyed on payment of the first instalment. I do not say that boys and girls must not buy their experience of the world and pay for it, but the law need not assist the knave in making it more expensive than is necessary. I have known several cases of young servants leaving good places and running off in terror because they have been served with a blue paper, “frightener” with a lot of law jargon about imprisonment upon it, threatening them with dire penalties because an instalment was due on a gold ring. More might certainly be done to prevent back-door trading, and there is no more reason why area touts should be allowed to infest the streets than the lower class of bookmakers. Well-to-do people have very little idea of the number of firms that employ travelling canvassers and touts to hawk their wares from door to door in the mean streets.