The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

One exception to this rule seems to me very fair. There is no exemption of anything the purchase price of which was the subject of the judgment proceeded upon. Thus a man cannot buy a sideboard, refuse to pay the price of it, and claim exemption of the sideboard from execution by the furniture dealer who sold it, though he could claim exemption of the sideboard against a money lender who had obtained a judgment against him, and wanted to recover his debt by sweeping his home away. Here in England people are driven to shifts and evasions by means of bills of sale, goods put in the wife’s name, and a number of other semi-dishonest devices to protect their homes. The sight of a home broken up and the furniture that has cost so many years of saving slaughtered at a third-rate auction for little more than the costs and fees of the bailiffs is no great incentive to a working man to spend his savings on good, home-made chattels. Cheap foreign shoddy on the hire system is the order of to-day, and as a mere matter of encouragement of the better class home trade in furniture, carpets, drapery and household goods generally, we might consider the advisability of taking a leaf out of the Statute book of Manitoba.

That debt should never be allowed to utterly destroy a family and a home seems to me such a clear and sane idea that it has always been a puzzle to me to try and understand the point of view of those who cannot see the matter in the same light. I know it is a degrading confession for anyone with even the pretence of a judicial mind to have to make but it is best to be honest about it. I rather gather I am a little obsessed, or abnormal, or feeble-minded, or senile perhaps nowadays about anything that touches home or home life.

The home to me is the great asset of the nation. I do not want to see the home superseded by State barracks or common hostels or district boarding schools. On the contrary, I think individual homes are good for the development of citizens. For this reason I would protect the home from ruin by an extravagant husband or an extravagant wife in the interests of the children, who are the next generation of citizens, and whose welfare is, therefore, a debenture of the State.

Nobody would think of distraining on a pheasant’s nest, or breaking up the home of a couple of partridges, or imprisoning the birds at breeding time in separate coops and cutting down their food merely because one of the birds had run up a bill for too many mangel wurzels or the other had run into debt for some fine feathers beyond her means.

Pheasants and partridges are too valuable to be so treated. Their nests are protected from any distress or execution by poachers, and their bodies are protected from arrest by watchful gamekeepers under strict laws. I want to insure under my reformed laws that the human nest should be protected in the same way, and that judges should not only be allowed, but ordered, to take care that the home is not devastated by human misfortune or even by improvidence. We want Game Laws for the poor. In future our legislators must treat them as game birds—as indeed most of them are—and not as vermin to be devoured, they and their children, by the owls and kites of the underworld in which they live.

And the second clause of my Magna Charta would be of almost simpler dimensions than the first. It would run: “Let it be enacted that the County Courts have jurisdiction in Divorce.” This would at once place rich and poor on an equality that is not yet even aimed at. I should not complicate this matter with the overdue reforms proposed by the Divorce Commission, much as I should like to see those enacted. They are matters of general interest that have waited for so many years that there is not much hardship in holding them back further, but the institution of a new tribunal of divorce is of vital and immediate importance to the poor. The Act would be a practically unopposed act of one clause. It would only touch one vested interest, the London lawyers of the Divorce Court, and it would greatly please their brethren throughout the country.

All details of costs and machinery could be left to rule committees, as is the common practice in other and more important matters that have come to the County Courts, such as Admiralty and equity jurisdiction, and a hundred other really difficult and complicated matters.

And then would follow a lot of simple but important reforms that really only need the stroke of the official pen that is never made until the man in the street rises in his wrath and knocks the official funny-bone on the official desk and wakens him up to the fact that it is officially time to do some official act.

For, of course, police court fines must be cut down and time given to pay them, and police court costs must be paid by the community, and bankruptcies must be made available to the poor, and the Treasury must cease to rob the poorest bankrupts of £13,000 a year, and the limit of such bankruptcies must be raised to £250, so that poor little business men and their creditors may get what there is, rather than it should all go in costs and fees and payments to lawyers and accountants, who must give up sparrow shooting and hunt for bigger game.

And, above all, we must remember to engross in big black text on our parchment what Joseph Chamberlain said about his Workmen’s Compensation Act, that it is to be worked without lawyers, or at least, that it is to be made one of the judge’s duties to see employer and workman first and endeavour to bring them together before he issues his fiat that the affair is “fit for litigation.”