What the Judge Saw: Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

I felt that I was in the presence of a procedure invented by a judicial genius.

CHAPTER XI

THE COMPLEAT CITIZEN

Question. What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour?

Answer. My duty towards my Neighbour, is to love him as myself, and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto me.

A Catechism. “Book of Common Prayer.”

Until each of us faithfully fulfils the first clause of his duty to his neighbour it seems unlikely that we shall see in the flesh a manifestation of the compleat citizen. I prefer the old-fashioned phrase to the modern slang of super-citizen, but I take it the idea of our seventeenth-century fathers was much the same as ours, only they knew enough English to express it in their own tongue.

And one naturally goes back for a motto for citizenship to Dr. Nowel, sometime dean of the cathedral church of St. Paul, who, “like an honest Angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed Catechism which is printed with our good old Service-book.” For, if anyone wished to study the evolution of citizenship in this country, he would, I think, for past history read the records of that ancient community of citizens that dwelt in the old days east of Temple Bar, though for the modern evidence of the continued existence of citizenship he would

have of necessity to journey towards the rugged north. For if there is one thing that stands out as typical of the north countryman of to-day, it is his pride of citizenship. Just as Paul boasted of Tarsus when he was away from his native Cilicia, so the Manchester man, away from Lancashire, the Leeds man far from Yorkshire, or the Newcastle man dreaming of his beloved Northumberland, can always remember that he too is a citizen of no mean city.