The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

Until more is known of these new schemes and their workings we must write of the present system as we know it, for any change in it will certainly be slow enough and it is something to understand the circumstances of the present in order to see what changes are really required.

You may remember that George Eliot in “The Mill on the Floss” describes Mr. Tulliver as saying, “that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of cock-fight in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.”

I do not say for a moment that Mr. Tulliver was right, but I think George Eliot shrewdly described in his words the attitude of mind of the man in the street towards the High Court of Justice. Cock-fighting was always a popular, cruel, and exciting sport, and now that it is done away with the next best thing is to squeeze into the Divorce Court and witness a real set-to between Chanticleer, K.C., and young Cockerel, who, they say, will be taking silk himself very soon and will knock the older bird out of the ring.

Certain it is that the poor have a notion, in which there is doubtless some truth, that the fact that the other side had a better and more expensive counsellor gave them a greater chance in the legal lottery. The side that can put Carson on to bowl at one end and F. E. Smith at the other must start at a better price than the side which has to rely on an unknown amateur in the back row. Of course, A. N. Other may take some wickets, but the public have a very business-like belief that money talks, and that the verdict of the jury, like most of the verdicts in life, will turn out to be on the side which can put in the field the most expensive team.

Certainly I can say without hesitation that working men would never have got their due from the Workmen’s Compensation Acts if each particular poor workman had had to fight for his rights at his own expense. It is to the trade unions and their co-operative litigation that the thanks of the workmen are due for preserving their rights under the Act.

Mr. Lysons was a Pendleton collier, and had only worked for a few days when he received an injury. This happened in 1901, and at that time the old Act said that no compensation could be recovered until a man had been off work for two weeks. It was argued before me that this being so, unless a man was employed for more than fourteen days he could not come within the Act at all. The argument did not appeal to me, but it did to the Court of Appeal, and later on again it did not to the House of Lords. So the man got his money.

But the point of the case is that had not the union come forward to take his case to the House of Lords, Lysons would have lost his compensation, and the Act of Parliament would have been construed to limit the rights of the poor for all time.

This particular case cost the union six hundred pounds to fight, and the point in dispute was whether the injured man was, or was not, to receive six shillings a week for five weeks. Several cases have run the same course. The Act is obscurely drafted and capable of many interpretations. Some of these that still stand on the books remain precedents only because the workman has not money enough to carry the case higher and has no union behind him.

And, though in the first instance a workman might often make shift to state his case in the County Court himself and rely on his own advocacy as to the facts and the judge’s knowledge of the law, it is absurd to suppose he could argue a legal point in the Court of Appeal or House of Lords without assistance. Unless a trade union is ready to take up the case, the only hope of a man getting his rights is through the aid of a speculative solicitor.

Such a system has its drawbacks to the litigant and the profession, and leads to unpleasant and undesirable incidents, but it is no use shutting one’s eyes to what is going on every day in every Court. Dodson and Fogg have always been looked down upon ever since Sam Weller gave them away by blurting out in Court that it was “a wery gen’rous thing of them to have taken up the case on spec. and to charge nothing at all for costs unless they got them out of Mr. Pickwick.”