This phrase, typical of the law of to-day and eloquent of the claims of the rich to fence the poor off the face of the earth, must utterly disappear when the new spirit of the law is made manifest. We have no sense of humour. On Sunday we intone to slow music our desire to forgive our enemy his trespasses; on Monday we go down to our solicitor to issue a writ against him for the trespass we have failed to forgive. The old notice threatening prosecution is really already out of date. It ought, of course, to read, “Trespassers will be Forgiven.” For my part if I met with such a notice, I should hesitate before I walked across the owner’s land; whereas to-day, when I am threatened with prosecution, my bristles go up, I scent a right of way, and as like as not proceed in my trespassing out of pure cussedness. There are a lot of other folk besides myself who are built that way. I know a little girl of five whose chief glory in life is to walk “on the private,” as she calls it, when the park-keeper is not looking. It is that constant “Don’t!” and “You mustn’t” that rouses the rebel in us. The less forbidding there is, the easier the path of obedience.
I hold no brief for trespassers. I know it is naughty to trespass. But in the present state of my evolution there is so much of the original monkey in me that when that “monkey is up,” to use a phrase dear to Cardinal Newman, I go astray. So do many of my best friends.
I have the same belief in the evolution of the moral world and its onward movement that I have in the revolution of the physical world and its rotary movement. For this reason I expect my great-grandchildren of two thousand years hence to be much better behaved than I am. You can see it coming along in your own grandchildren unless your sight is getting dim. And I am quite clear that my own manners are an improvement on my great grandfathers, who lived in caves, and, when they had disputes, made it clubs, and battered each other strenuously until it was proved which had the thickest skull, when he of the toughest cranium was adjudged to be in the right.
The vigorous legal procedure of the cave men sounds laughable enough to us nowadays, but does anyone think that two thousand years hence superior unborn persons will not be smiling superciliously over the history books that record the doings of our judges, our hired counsellors, our sheriffs, our gaolers, and our hangman?
It was only in the recent reign of good Queen Bess that the ordeal of battle was given up. The abolition of that old-world lawsuit must have been painful to the conservative mind. And there was a lot to say for it. From a sporting point of view, what could be better than to go down to Tothill Fields in Westminster, as you might have done in 1571, to see A. B. battering C. D. to the intent that whichever knocked the stuffing out of the other gained the verdict?
If you look at it from a healthy, open-air point of view, maybe it was better for everybody than sitting in a stuffy court and listening to two bigwigs splitting hairs to the resultant financial ruin of one of their clients. One reason, no doubt, that trials by battle were abolished was that they gave the poor at least as good a chance as the rich.
I remember a good story—it is an old one, but still quite good—of a noble lord and landowner who net a collier trespassing in the neighbourhood of Wigan.
“My good man,” said my lord, “do you know you are trespassing?”
“Well, wot of it?”
“You have no right to be walking across my land.”