The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

When Fielding was made a magistrate for the county of Middlesex in 1748 the popular notion of the office was expressed in the nickname, “The trading justice.” He was paid by fees and had a direct interest in the prosperity of crime. The fees, moreover, were very small, and it was a recognised thing that he should make his office a lucrative one by methods exemplified by Mr. Justice Squeezum in Fielding’s farce. Although the great writer fulfilled the duties of his office with honour, fidelity, and zeal, he has left us in no doubt about the immorality and ignorance of many of his fellow justices. It is a relief to turn from the justice room in Bow Street in the eighteenth century with its rogues and vagabonds on their way to the whipping posts of the Bridewell, and its highwaymen and thieves starting for Tyburn by way of Newgate, and to look on the comparatively civilised picture of a metropolitan police court of to-day.

A century and a half has worked wonderful reforms for us in the world of police and police courts, but one cannot honestly say that nothing remains to be done. Direct bribery is no doubt abolished, justice is fearlessly administered, but there are still traditional methods of imposing fines and imprisonment which cause the poor to think that carriage folk go more easily along the turnpikes of the law than those humble ones who travel perforce on foot.

I am not writing of the police court as the antechamber of the Old Bailey. In relation to the grave crimes against society we may fairly boast that rich and poor are treated much alike. But the police court in matters within its own jurisdiction is a machine for teaching better manners to the poor. It is a somewhat harsh machine, perhaps, but in the main just and necessary at the present state of our evolution.

When folk are naughty and violent and ill-mannered and ultra-selfish, and become a nuisance to their neighbours, the police, if they are poor, take them in hand, but if they are rich they are dealt with differently. Unless they are so extravagantly and absurdly naughty as to become a public as opposed to a private nuisance, there is no necessity for the police to tackle the rich. When two “lydies” go for each other in the gutters of Whitechapel the police step in, but when the same thing happens in Mayfair, society—with a big S—maintains its own discipline.

The reason why rich folk are not so outwardly naughty as poor folk is very much a matter of education and environment. As Lord Haldane in his valuable speech in America explained to us, there is a “system of habitual or customary conduct, ethical rather than legal, which embraces all those obligations of the citizen which it is ‘bad form’ or ‘not the thing’ to disregard.”

Thus in the days of Sir Anthony Absolute it was “bad form” not to get drunk after dinner, and it was “not the thing” to refuse to fight a duel. These laws of conduct were not enforceable before magistrates, but they were laws all the same, and rich people dared not disobey them for fear of being “cut” by society.

And as the years roll on better education, better housing, better wages, and less of that repressive Sabbatarianism that drives the poorer youngsters into natural mischief will make the police court less and less necessary as a school of manners. The conscience and good manners of all classes attain a higher ideal every day, and the only reason the rich arrive at a better standard of outward manners than the generality of the poor is that they have been caught young and made to practise at it for generations. It is not a matter entitling them to praise, but we are out to set down and discuss facts, and undoubtedly it is so.

For instance, you would expect an Eton boy to play better cricket than a St. Andrews caddie, but the caddie would probably beat the other’s head off at golf. It is environment that does it, and the lesson to be learned is to improve in every way the material surroundings of the poor to the utmost of our ability. Meanwhile the police court seems to me as necessary a part of our equipment as a sewage works or an ashpit.

Crime is not only a matter of heredity and education, it is also a question of geography. This geographical distribution of crime is an intensely interesting subject. You will find that Cardigan, for instance, is the whitest county in England and Wales for crimes of all kind, whether against property, morals, or of a violent character. Glamorgan, on the other hand, is only beaten by Monmouth in records of crimes against property; in crimes of violence Glamorgan is easily first; in crimes against morality Glamorgan again is only beaten by Dorset, Berks, Lincoln and Huntingdon, the latter taking the 1905-09 record very comfortably. Monmouth, happily, in this latter class of crime is in a far better case than her neighbour.

If you can trace the history and causes of different crimes in different districts I believe you may hope to sterilise a county of certain crimes by moral sanitation and stamp them out just as we have rid counties of typhus and the plague. In dealing with uncivilised crimes of mischief and destruction we should always bear in mind that the poor who do these acts are very often only human beings who have not been cultivated up to modern standards. Some crimes are traditional in certain districts, and the imitative faculty being strong in criminals, heredity and mimicry work together to cause a certain historicity in crime.