The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

And many laws that are made for the best purposes are wrested from their beneficent uses by the wicked ones of the world and turned to the basest advantages. No legislation was hailed with greater delight by social reformers than the Married Women’s Property Act, and yet one must admit that the fraudulent use of its provisions is a commonplace. I am not suggesting that it is mainly against the poor that it is misused, though I have known of cases under the Workmen’s Compensation Act where goods were alleged to be “in the wife’s name” after an award had been made against the husband, and many a poor tradesman and small worker is swindled by this allegation, the victim not having the money to test it in a court of law, and the result being in any case so gloriously uncertain. I am sorry to put matrimony among the flat-traps, but the use of the married status among the dishonest to prevent a successful litigant from obtaining the results of a judgment brings it within this category. Even the poorer classes themselves are beginning to make use of it as a kind of homestead law to protect their goods from execution.

Much as I am in favour of seeing the poor man’s home protected to a larger degree than it is at present I do not care to see it achieved at the expense of the character of the occupants. Any law that is a constant temptation to dishonesty is an evil, and there is no doubt that when the day comes for legal reform on a large scale, the various questions relating to the position of the married woman in the eye of the law will have to be considered. In many cases, of course, the reforms will be towards the enlargement of women’s liberty, but in the matter of holding property it is clear that where a wife or a husband is tacitly allowing credit to be obtained on his or her appearance of property that property should be available to discharge the debt notwithstanding that it is claimed as the special property of one or the other.

Menander, the Greek poet, in one of his comedies makes someone say, “To marry a wife, if we regard the truth, is an evil, but it is a necessary evil.” If this was true in 300 B.C. it became more convincingly the truth in 1882 A.D., when the Married Women’s Property Act became law, and the “peculiar gift of heaven” was welcomed by the unscrupulous trader as a statutory stay of execution. Since that day the Micawbers of this world have put all their available assets “in the wife’s name.”

The legal privileges of the married woman are not sufficiently well known. Like “the infant” she is, indeed, the darling of the law. What a fine commercial spree an “infant” could have who looked older than his years and had an elementary knowledge of the law of “infants”! Luckily they do not teach anything useful at educational establishments, and the “infant” never learns about his glorious legal status until it is too late to exploit it.

But a married woman can, and does, have a real good time at the expense of her own particular tyrant, man. Recently at Quarter Sessions a man was accused of stealing the spoons, and his wife was accused of receiving the property knowing it to have been stolen. But it was pointed out that it was one of the rights of a married woman to receive whatever her husband happened to bring home, and the judge directed an acquittal.

There are several pretty little distinctions in the criminal law in favour of the married lady, but perhaps it is not seemly to advertise them overmuch. When we come to so-called civil matters, the lady who does not know and exercise her legal privileges is indeed a rara avis. How many of the debt-collecting cases in the County Court are concerned with the good lady who runs into debt with the tally-man or other tradesman to the husband unknown? True, in many of these the husband has a possible defence, but the good man is generally a sporting, careless fellow, and pays his five shillings a month in the belief that debt is a natural sequence of matrimony.

But when it comes to committing wrongs—or torts, to use the Norman slang of the law—the married woman is the only legal personality that is privileged to forget her duty to her neighbour at someone else’s expense. Her unhappy husband is always liable for the damages and costs, although he may have done his best to hinder the wrong that has been done. If in his absence on the daily round the good lady slanders her neighbour’s wife, or trespasses on her neighbour’s garden to commit the further wrong of slapping her neighbour’s infant, the husband, for the purposes of paying damages, is regarded by the law as being a joint offender. The law supposes that a wife acts under her husband’s directions. When they told Mr. Bumble that, he replied in the immortal phrase, “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law’s a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

It does seem a bit hard on the poor man certainly. If he keeps a dog the animal may have his first bite at his neighbour free of expense, and when he gets to hear about it he can send the dog away. But with a wife there is no question of scienter. You may not suspect that your good lady is given to slander, assault and such like indiscretions, but, if it so happens, you have to pay. Nor do I see what steps you can take to hinder the lady from trespasses which she has the mind to commit. For if you were to place her under lock and key I believe a sentimental High Court judge would grant her a habeas corpus that she might go out again into the wide, wide world and exercise her undoubted right of committing wrong at her husband’s expense.

And I set down these disadvantages of husbandry as some sort of excuse for the meanness and dishonesty of the man who uses “his wife’s name” to protect his assets and injure his creditors. I have in my mind a commercial married man auditing in his debit and credit mind the matrimonial balance sheet. “See,” he says, “my liabilities under the law of husband and wife. Surely there must be some assets of the relationship in which I am entitled to participate!” Then he studies the Married Women’s Property Act, and chuckles. Whether this is so or not, there is no doubt that, since the Act of 1882, “Everybody’s doing it,” and when the bailiffs come in the furniture and the stock-in-trade are always found to be “in the wife’s name.” It is a form of conspiracy, you would say, and the police should put a stop to it, but “Old Father Antic the Law” has his answer for you there—a wife cannot be guilty of conspiracy with her husband, for husband and wife are one.

There was a story illustrating the prevalence of this custom in the precincts of Strangeways, Manchester. Mr. Isaacs, who had been absent from business for some time, returned to his workshop looking pale and white and very weak. A sympathetic neighbour put his head in at the door, and, full of pity, said: