Hopwood was a much-abused reformer, but he kept a stout heart, and went his way remitting hundreds upon hundreds of years of imprisonment in mercy to his fellow-creatures. There is no evidence that his methods injured any class of the community. He preached the cause of criminal appeal to deaf ears, but since he has gone we are all converts to his view, and wonder how we could have hindered the reform so long. What was it that began to awaken Lancashire folk to the belief that Hopwood had not only a warm heart, but a clear head, and was talking business sense? Sometimes I think it was the statement in one of his later charges that in not inflicting long sentences he had already saved the taxpayer £28,000. If there is one thing Lancashire does understand it is figures.
Looking back on my recollections of the men on circuit, I think he was undoubtedly the greatest man I knew. I say great, inasmuch as he fulfils Longfellow’s
words, for his life indeed reminds us of the greater possibilities of our own humbler lives. Even now that he has departed his footsteps re-echo along the hopeless corridors of the gaol as of one who brought glad tidings to the oppressed. When the social history of the nineteenth century comes to be written the man who, by his fearless example and persevering energy, proved to society that the existing treatment of the smaller criminal was unnecessarily cruel will have a higher place than many more ambitious reformers.
And in spite of his tenacity and the outspokenness of his unpopular opinions we all loved him on circuit, though not all of us were his disciples, and I shall never forget the cheers of laughter and delight that went up when an Irish colleague thus concluded an after-dinner peroration in his honour: “Hopwood has indade taught us what a beautiful thing it is to temper mercy with justice.”
After all, like many a “bull,” it really expresses very clearly what Hopwood was doing.
And though I have never more than half believed the extravagant claims of the almost mesmeric power of the Press over the common horde of us, yet as a mere “man in the street”—to use a phrase that Greville brought from Newmarket—I have seen enough of the inner chambers of journalism to know that if a journalist may not do much to educate the public he can do something towards the education of himself. The discussions you enter into with men of all parties, the books you have to read, and
the plays you cannot stay away from, ought to cultivate in you a better sense of charity. If it does not, then the fault is in the seedling and not in the soil.
I have never been under any delusion about the scribendi cacoethes. It is not a pleasant disease, but it has comparatively good points about it. When the fit is upon you, you do not worry your family and your neighbour with the details of it, as you do when you have an attack of the spleen, or the rheumatism, or the slice, or the pull, or whatever recent manifestations of neuritis you may be suffering from. You only wish, like any other well-mannered sick mammal, to be left quietly and undoubtedly alone till the fever leaves you. I know I have wasted a lot of my spare time in writing; it soothes my particular fancies, it is the form of indolent amusement that I enjoy.
I daresay if I had tackled the higher things of life, and given the industry of my overtime to more serious pursuits, I could have reduced my golf handicap below the mediocre twelve at which it stands, or lost more money on horses than I have on books. But this I can say with honesty, that when I write finis on the last page, and my time is over, the best of it has been the “overtime.”