We have had so many tragedies brought about by so-called identification, that it is more than time that the business of it was taken out of the hands of the police and made an integral part of the trial before the magistrate to which it in truth belongs. These reforms will not, I think, come about until we have stipendiary magistrates on the county benches, but though I wish to see this I do not want the old office of Justice of the Peace to be abolished. There is, and rightly ought to be, a keen desire among laymen to attain to this position, and it is an office of much dignity and respect and one in which a good man under sound legal advice can do worthy public service. I have been a local justice of the peace for many years and can testify to the number of occasions upon which a magistrate residing in his district is called upon for small services that would cost the applicant time and money if there was no available magistrate.

A great many lay benches with a clerk of sound learning and legal education administer excellent justice throughout the country. But there are classes of cases connected with property that would be better tried by a stipendiary unconnected with county society. I have a passion for old-world things, and grieve over the disappearance of the parish constables, the head boroughs, the tithing-men, the aletasters, the beadles, and the reeves. I do not wish to abolish the Justice of the Peace. I only wish to put him in his proper place. Of course, if he cannot be happy there, then I am afraid he will have to go.

CHAPTER XII

LANDLORD AND TENANT

At number seven there’s nob’dy lives, they left it yesterday;
Th’ bum-baylis coom an’ marked their things, an’ took ’em a’ away.
They hardly filled a donkey cart—aw know nowt wheer they went—
But they say th’ chap spent his brass o’ drink instead o’ payin’ th’ rent.
Samuel Laycock: “Bowton’s Yard.”

In this branch of the law it cannot honestly be said that the legal position of the poor is very different from the legal position of the rich. Given private ownership of land and the right of a landlord to distrain for rent in arrear, and seize and sell his tenant’s goods to pay himself, it does not seem that the law or the way in which it is administered is better or worse for rich or poor. The law of distress is, as its name implies, a harsh and cruel remedy and the shadow of it hangs nearer and darker over the cottage porch than over the doors of the eligible mansion, but it is there in both places. To a weekly wage owner paying an exhausting rent out of a pitiful wage, the ever present right of his landlord to distrain, whilst it nerves him to make every effort to keep a clean rent book, must be one of the sad and depressing elements of daily life that the middle classes do not experience so directly. It is pleasant to record—what is in fact my experience—that whatever may have been true of the cruelty of landlords in other times and places the landlords of to-day owning cottage property are not a harsh race. They themselves, especially the poorer ones, have their own troubles. The rates have to be paid, the by-laws to be observed, the notices of the sanitary inspector to be obeyed, and perhaps the fact that they themselves have to ask for time to pay and to sue for leniency from corporations and other officials leads them to be tender with their own underlings. Certain it is that in the putting in force of the right to evict a tenant the landlord is very long-suffering. This last step is not usually taken until the rent is many weeks, or often months, in arrear. Even when an eviction order is granted, I have known many cases where a landlord renews the tenancy and collects the arrears at small instalments.

Eviction orders are very often asked for not in the landlord’s own interest but in the community’s. The necessity to do the sanitary requirements of public bodies is a constant source of eviction. The tenant having no neighbouring house to go to clings to the undesirable shelter he has got until the forces of the law turn him out in the interests of hygiene. Another curious cause of eviction is a woman’s tongue. A lady with what is technically known as “a tongue” will set all her neighbours by the ears; houses on each side of her domicile rapidly empty, and at length the whole street comes to the landlord demanding that she shall go or threatening to depart themselves.

The lady with “the tongue” of our day was, and as far as I know still may be, known to the law as a common scold, and according to Chief Justice Holt was punishable by ducking. Mrs. Foxby, of Maidstone, was, if I remember, the last lady who was indicted at common law for this offence and sentenced to be ducked. She moved, in Trinity Term, 1703, in arrest of judgment because they had called her in the indictment “calumniatrix” and not “rixatrix” and insisted on her motion, although Chief Justice Holt in kindly warning reminded her that ducking in Trinity Term was pleasanter than ducking in Michaelmas. As the Court pointed out, mere scolding was not the offence, it was the constant repetition that was the nuisance. In the result, after a year’s litigation the flaw in the indictment saved the Maidstone lady a ducking in the Medway.