The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

There is no gainsaying that once in the dock all men are equal or very nearly so, but one may harbour a suspicion whether all men have equal opportunities of getting there. Theoretically, the dock, like the Bench and the Cabinet and all other British institutions, is approached by an ever open door; but in practice more goats wander through the opening than sheep. Yet your sheep is a born trespasser. There are some who believe that his immunity from punishment is due to the wool on his back.

I doubt if this is altogether true. Crimes of violence and brutality are naturally the crimes of the less fortunate of mankind, and your sheep is more peaceably disposed than your goat. But when we come to the more modern crime of swindling we find that the criminal law is not very successful in punishing the fraudulent well-to-do. Fraud is a more complicated offence than larceny, and defrauders sometimes get the better of the law. Cheating is not always a crime, and successful cheating is a question of better education. That is why the rich so often keep out of the dock. The law is somewhat old and decrepit, and the modern well-to-do swindler is very much up to date. Therefore I fear it is as true to-day as it was in the days of Lord Chief Justice Coke, to say that the law “maketh a net to catch little birds and letteth the great ones go.”

If you cast your eye down the police news you will many times come upon the case of a low-down man or woman who goes round collecting for a mission that does not exist, thereby cheating the well-disposed of a few pounds or shillings. It is quite right they should be run in and sent to prison. They are pests stealing money that would otherwise relieve real distress.

But if they had had a little more money, and hired a house in some remote place, and kept half-a-dozen real orphans there, and called it The St. Anonymous Orphanage, they might have collected as many thousands a year as they liked for their excellent charity, and no one would have worried them by asking how the orphans were looked after, nor would anyone have wanted to know how much was spent on the orphanage and how much on the founder and his family, and their houses and carriages and furniture and upkeep. The poor orphan has many uses in the world. One of them is to enable the swindler to found orphanages and make his living thereby.

At first blush the crime seems the same as that of the house-to-house cadger who gets six months, but note that the uneducated man has told a lie and made a false pretence of an existing fact. The good Founder of St. Anonymous’s never did that. He had an orphanage with real orphans in it. True, there were not very many of them, and the orphanage was rather a stuffy, insanitary sort of place, though photographed on end it looks imposing enough. And that is the mot juste, as the French have it; that is what the orphanage was, and what the good founder was—imposing.

If you tell no actual fibs the law does not mind you imposing as much as you like. You may transfer the savings of the working class into your pockets by promises of the wildest character and schemes of the silliest and most romantic sort, and if you do it successfully enough the nearest you will ever get to the dock will be a seat on the borough bench, from which altitude you may sentence the poor, mean criminal who never had any capital, and had no one to advise him as to the law of false pretences. This is not a fancy picture. There was at least one such a magistrate on the bench once, and for aught I know there may be some J.P.’s to-day whose wealth has been made by stealing the savings of the working classes within the law.

Certainly in this country we have been free from the subordination of the Criminal Courts to the power of gold that is said to exist in other civilised places. Any preferential treatment that exists is of a class character—snobbish if you will, but not corrupt. As an Irish barrister said to me at Liverpool—he was a great Home Ruler with a grand hatred of England and a real affection for many Englishmen: “My dear Parry, you’ll never convince me that the Government ever meant to hang Mrs. Maybrick. They’re a cowardly lot of snobs, and anyhow they couldn’t hang a woman they might have to meet out at dinner afterwards.”

And there is undoubtedly running through all our English institutions, even the administration of the criminal law, a certain amount of class snobbery which it would be better should be eliminated. Judges and magistrates are, of course, only human. The wrong doing of a man or woman of our own class naturally appeals to our bump of forgiveness more readily than that of a slum dweller whose temptations and environment we know nothing about.

Thus we can remember cases where lady shoplifters were discovered by eminent physicians to be suffering from some extraordinary form of neurasthenia—not insanity, of course—but one of those nervous breakdowns that made an acquittal and a rest cure in a nursing home the only appropriate course. Magistrates seem to grasp the medical facts about these well-to-do unfortunates almost too readily; but had it been a drunken woman snatching a pair of boots from a shop-nail in the street no eminent physician would have diagnosed her peculiar form of neurosis. Even if her husband had tendered evidence that of late the poor lady had been strange in her manner, he would scarcely have been listened to with much sorrowful attention. The good magistrate would have felt bound in the interests of the poor tradesman to make an example of this criminal. Such cases are not cases for acquittal, and the rest cure is generally three months hard.

There are certainly too many cases where the wealth and position of a prisoner leads to favoured treatment in the Criminal Courts. I am glad to note that these are always pilloried in the Press and publicity is given to them, and in a way nothing could be better because it is the open door that has done so much to keep our courts free from the taint of any suspicion of real corruption. I firmly believe that when these cases do occur they are generally the outcome of a spirit of humanity on the part of the presiding judge coupled to a certain extent by a class feeling of tenderness on account of the terrible downfall of a man or woman in his own social position. Such cases, too, are rare. No special note is taken of any case where the law takes its ordinary course and the rich criminal is treated in the same way as his poorer brother. These are, of course, the great majority, and there are also many cases I am glad to know where leniency and mercy is extended to the poor criminal and he is helped by societies and personal aid to regain his position among honest men.