“And I’ll tell you why,” said Crompton Hutton. “I’ve read those affidavits, and unless the defendant swears the necessary additional facts you’ve no case, and if he swears the necessary additional facts I’ll commit him for trial for perjury. That’s all!”
There was a lot of common sense about Crompton Hutton.
CHAPTER IX
FIRST BRIEFS
At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre.
Spenser: “Faerie Queen.”
I suppose in early days the “stranger” must have been a sadly persecuted individual, else why should there be so many texts persuasively commending him to the care of the righteous. Even now there are some communities and clubs where to be a “stranger” is to be set apart and treated like a leper. Those out-houses in which guests are housed in some of the pre-historic London clubs are examples of what I mean. In earlier cannibal times no doubt the “stranger” was merely a welcome addition to the larder, but even then there seem to have been ceremonies and rites in the fattening and final presentation of the guest which students of folk-lore would regard as the early manifestations of hospitality. However that may be, there is no doubt that in the treatment of the stranger within the gates the north country is farther removed from barbarism than the south. In London, for instance, every man is a stranger. I have met fellow-countrymen from the Colonies who found the welcome secured by introductions to London to be an entirely
formal and cold-blooded affair compared with that extended to them by a similar class in the north. Not only in London, but taking its anti-social note from London, the surrounding south is chilly and aloof towards its fellow-man, especially if the fellow-man talks broadly with an open accent, and has not attained that weary, blurred, mincing tongue which serves the southerner in lieu of speech. It is not so much that in these sunny latitudes we have forgotten our duty to our neighbour, but rather that we have never had any neighbours, that we have made it a religion not to have neighbours, and continue to live for years and years in our semi-detached surburban villas without exchanging a word with the man next door, whose ties and trousers do daily offence to such creeds as we still possess. Whereas the gospel seems to have taught the uncultivated men and women who live on those wild stretches of railway beyond Rugby and Crewe that everyone is a neighbour, and must be treated according to the text in that case made and provided.