The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

Not that this makes the slightest difference as to any actual reform being done. The feeling of security that nothing is ever going to come of it makes it a safe and reasonable thing to print the most advanced views at the expense of the State. The physical weight and size of these volumes have been carefully considered and the whole format cunningly designed to repel readers. Nothing ever comes of blue books, and I do not suppose anything ever will come of them. When I turn over their dreary pages I find myself humming Kipling’s chorus—

And it all goes into the laundry,
But it never comes out in the wash,
’Ow we’re sugared about by the old men
(’Eavy sterned amateur old men!)
That ’amper an’ ’inder an’ scold men
For fear o’ Stellenbosh.

Dickens had the same impatience of the heavy sterned brigade and invented his immortal Circumlocution Office, and doubtless genius is entitled to deride these substantial State institutions. Personally, I find them very English and valuable. The more energetic of us may take our pleasure in giving friendly shoves to these heavy sterned Christians, but their inert services to the community are not to be undervalued. But for this immovable official wall who knows what reforms, unnecessary and ill-advised, might have been carried through. If Lord Brougham could have had his way much that I am writing about to-day would long ago have happened. The heavy sterned ones sitting on the lid prevented the opening of the Pandora box with its promises of affliction for the human race in the shape of legal reform. They have left these things over until to-day and brought me amusement for idle vacation hours. At least, let me be thankful to them and sing their praises.

I remember when I was planning out these chapters being the victim of a most terrible nightmare. A newspaper with a King’s speech in it was thrust before me and every one of the reforms I had already written about was promised to be passed within the Session. I remember smiling in my dream, knowing what parliamentary promises were, and then as I was gliding down the Strand a silent phantom newsboy handed me an evening paper. There it was in black and white, every bill was passed—there was nothing left to write about. I awoke with a cry. It was a terrible shock, and it was some moments of time before I could realise that such a thing was absolutely impossible. And, of course, when you think of the large number of things that you want done and recollect that nothing ever is done that a man really cares about in his own lifetime it was absurd of me, even in a dream, to believe that anything was coming between me and my little book. Indeed, I have hopes that for many years to come it may be regarded as a popular primer about legal reform for future generations who wish to while away idle hours in the luxury of vain imagination.

I should like to interest the man in the street about legal reform and to see him at work remedying some of the more obvious of the existing abuses I have referred to, but I am under no delusion that such reforms would bring about the millennium. It is good to do the pressing work in the vineyards on the slopes of the mountain, but it is permissible for poor human man to have his day off now and then to climb on the hilltops and gaze out on the limitless ocean of the future and indulge in wild surmises of the after-world.

The remedies of to-day are really tiresome parochial affairs compared to the remedies of to-morrow and hardly seem worth troubling about when one considers that even if you passed them all this year in a century or two your new statutes would be out of date and only fit for the scrap heap.

Bacon tells us that Time is the greatest of all innovators, but he does not explain to us why, unlike all human innovators, Time is in no hurry about it. I have quite distinct beliefs, which to me are certainties, as to how Time will reconcile the law and the poor in the centuries to come, when our social absurdities and wrong-doing will not even be remembered to be laughed at. The law will never be a really great influence for good until it is utterly conquered, put in its proper place in the world and based on the principle of Love. In other words, when the Law of Love receives the Royal Assent no other law will be necessary.

Nineteen hundred years ago a new principle was introduced into the world. It was the principle of unselfishness, and its apostles were labour men. In relation to man’s personal life it has made some progress, but in practical social politics its business value is not yet fully recognised. Still, a beginning has been made, and that old snail, Time, is doubtless satisfied with the pace of things. Let us remember hopefully that two thousand years ago unselfishness as a basic principle of life, doing to others as you would be done by, promoting peace and good will instead of strife and ill will—these ideas as business propositions were as unknown then as railways, telegraphs, motor cars, and aeroplanes. A vision of to-day would have been a wild fairy tale to Marcus Aurelius, a vision of two thousand years hence would be incomprehensible to us.

One does not mean, of course, that unselfishness had never before been preached as an ideal, but a society based on the common quality of all its members placing the interests of others above their own was a new notion, and the novelty of it has not yet worn off. Nevertheless, love and unselfishness have achieved sufficient lip-service already to make me hopeful of their future, and I foresee a time when they will be the foundation of the laws of the world, and the preamble to every statute will be “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”

Some day when the Chinese send over a mission to heathen England, missionaries will go about the country destroying all the boards on which are written the wicked words “Trespassers will be Prosecuted.” But I hope we may not have to wait for a foreign mission to teach us our duty.