And surely we may ask, Why should this miserable cheat flourish among decent citizens of to-day? Should not a man or woman be made to trade in his or her own name? In a business community it is almost impossible to make adequate inquiries before you start trading, and why, if you come to think of it, should an individual desire to trade in any but his own name? The frauds that are committed may not be very serious, but all forms of cheating and sharp dealing are detrimental to trade, and trade, after all, is the basis of our national pre-eminence. It seems particularly undesirable in a nation that prides itself on its domestic purity that “the wife’s name” should be a symbol of dishonesty. If we cannot attain to a decent code of commercial morality without it we shall have to ask our four-hundred-pound legislators for yet another statute. “One man, one name, and make him trade in it,” would be well received by all the honest, rich and poor, throughout the country.
I have dealt at some length with this question of putting goods in the wife’s name because I doubt if folk whose business does not take them into the County Court have any idea how prevalent it is and what a very present help it is to the man who is living upon his neighbours by some semi-fraudulent business. Every now and then the setter of flat-traps catches a victim too strong and lusty to remain in the trap. The shoddy gold watch is returned, the bogus business is thrown back on the exploiter’s hands, the company promoter who has annexed the savings of the victim by false promises is sued for damages for deceit. In some of these cases by pertinacity and the spending of more money a triumphant judgment will be obtained by the fly against the spider. But there it ends. When the high bailiff visits the web he is politely informed that it is part of the wife’s separate estate, every thread in the web is covered by a bill of sale, and if you try to imprison the old spider for debt you would find the greatest difficulty in proving his means to the satisfaction of the Court. Bankruptcy has no terrors for the old fellow. You will probably find that he has been there before and rather likes its old-world dusty crannies and the peaceable formulæ of its schedules and accounts.
No doubt it is very difficult to draft laws that the wicked cannot wrest from their righteous purpose and use for iniquity. But the law plays into the hands of the knave by its verbosity and diffuseness and the great mass and complexity of it, which the knave studies with as great care and astuteness as the lawyers and judges whose duty it is, within the four corners of the law, to prevent his wrongdoing. When it is enacted “Thou shalt not steal,” the Court knows where it stands, but that is a far more easy statute to construe than anything the parliamentary draftsman turns out to-day. If we could get a short statute of one clause, “Thou shalt not cheat,” with an appropriate schedule containing a tariff of fines and imprisonment, I think magistrates could do a good deal to cleanse the cities of a great many low ruffians who make their living by swindling the poor and make the law as it stands their attorney to collect the spoils.
CHAPTER IX
POVERTY AND PROCEDURE
| Therefore I counsel you, ye rich, Though ye be mighty at the law The same measure ye mete Ye shall be weighed therewith | have pity on the poor. be ye meek in your deeds. wrong or right when ye go home. | |
| ········ | ||
| To the poor the Courts are a maze Law is so lordly Without money paid in presents | if he plead there all his life, and loth to end his case; Law listeneth to few. | |
| Piers Plowman. | ||
We have moved along a little since the days of Edward III., and if Piers Plowman were with us to-day he would see no visions of “money paid in presents” to State servants, at all events not to the judiciary. Bacon was the last Lord Chancellor who indulged this evil habit, and if, as his admirers tell us, he was at the time producing his own plays on sharing terms with impecunious actors, one can understand the necessity of it whilst condemning the practice. Although we have made justice pure enough in this country and not directly purchasable, yet the rest of Piers Plowman’s indictment is true enough of the present time, and law is still a maze wherein the rich are guided by the clever ones who know the way and the poor too often get lost for want of an honest guide.
There are many signs that the public conscience is being slowly awakened to the iniquity of one side in a law suit having all the legal aid that money can buy and the other side nothing. In criminal cases something is already done and a beginning is being made on the civil side in the High Court to give the poor legal aid. These reforms do not amount to very much as yet, but they are the first steps towards remedying Piers Plowman’s grievances and, considering that it is less than six hundred years since that excellent visionary made his moan over the law and the poor, and the drawback poverty has in the procedure of the Courts, there seems to have been no very unusual delay in Government taking the matter up. We may at least congratulate ourselves that we have got a scheme of some sort which can be amended and put into a business shape instead of the Select Commission which reformers are generally offered to keep them quiet. Old Piers would be awfully happy—“bucked,” I think, is the modern word—if he could know that after five hundred and fifty years we were tackling the problems of life that worried him so greatly. In another six hundred years or so a lot of the little matters referred to in this book will get smoothed out. If you can get into the habit of thinking of the world’s progress in centuries instead of months you will find it very comforting.