The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

One man may know at first hand the story of a home ruined by reckless credit and imprisonment for debt, another may know a cruel case of lives blighted by our unequal divorce laws, a third may have seen the sad spectacle of an injured workman sinking from honest independence to neurasthenic malingering by reason of the poisonous litigious atmosphere of the Workmen’s Compensation Act.

I can never understand why men and women hunger after the tedious, unreal, drab scandals portrayed in a repertory theatre when they could take a hand at unravelling the real problem plays of life in the courts and alleys of the city they live in. Real misery and wretchedness is at least as pathetic as the sham article, and if you do your theatre-going in a real police court you may learn to become a better citizen.

Not that I advise all men and women to spend their leisure in these squalid surroundings. I recognise that the man in the street cannot at first hand study all these problems, and that is why I have set down something of the disabilities of the poor under the law, in the hope that my political pastors and masters may take an interest in these domestic reforms.

There are many, I know, who think that a judge, like a good child, should in matters of this kind be seen and not heard. But for my part I am not of that opinion, for if a judicial person knows that the machine he is working is out of date and consuming unnecessary fuel, blacking out the moral ether with needless foul smoke, and if, moreover, he thinks he knows how much of this can be put right at small expense, should he not mention the matter not only to his foreman and the frock coat brigade in the office—who are the folk who supply the bad coal—but to the owner of the machine who has to pay for it and live with it—the man in the street?

Now there is a great deal that might be done to make the law less harsh to the poor without any very elaborate legislation, and certainly without any of those absurd inquiries and commissions which are the stones the latter-day lawgivers throw at the poor when they ask for the bread of justice.

I like to read of Lord Brougham, as far back as 1830, shivering to atoms the house of fraud and iniquity known as the Court of Chancery. I like to picture him pointing his long, lean, skinny fingers at his adversaries, and to see the abuses he cursed falling dead at his feet. Could he have had his way, the very County Court system which we have to-day would have sprung into being within a few months of his taking his seat on the woolsack, and he would have instituted Courts of Conciliation for the poor, to hinder them from wasting their earnings in useless costs.

But the petty men who walked under his huge legs and peeped about were too many for Colossus. And, to be fair to the fools of his time, the great giant was not himself a persuasive and tactful personality. Sane, wise, and far-reaching as were the legal reforms he propounded, too many, alas, still remain for future generations to tackle.

Pull down your Hansard debates of to-day, read them if you can, and say honestly in how many pages you find political refreshment for the man in the street. The small reforms of existing laws that weigh hardly on the poor are worth at least as much of parliamentary time as many of the full dress debates about ministers’ investments and tariff reform and the various trivial absurdities that excite the little minds of Tadpole and Taper, but have no relation whatever to the works and days of the power citizens of the country.

And if I were called upon to draw up a new Magna Charta for the poor—and I could draft all the reforms I want in a very small compass—I should put at the head of the parchment—“Let it be enacted that no British subject may be imprisoned for a civil debt.” I do not believe that if Members of Parliament would vote on this subject as I know many of them would really wish to vote that there would be a dozen voters in the “No” lobby, and I am firmly convinced, though here I must own my parliamentary friends are in disagreement with me, that they would not injure their hold on their constituencies.

If there were any machinery in our unbusiness-like Parliament for dealing with social subjects on a non-party basis, imprisonment for debt would have been abolished long ago. The proposal is, however, a proposal to ameliorate the bottom dog, and the human bottom dog is poorly represented in the great inquest of the nation. The foreign bird whose plumes adorn the matinee hats of our dearly beloveds, the street cur who might find a sphere of utility in the scientist’s laboratory, the ancient cabhorse who crosses the Channel to promote an entente cordiale by nourishing the foreigners—all these have friends, eloquent and vigorous for the lives and liberties of their especial pets; but the poor man who goes to gaol because he cannot pay the tally-man has few friends.