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

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

And I am not one of those who, because he is a magisterial or judicial person, thinks his mouth is closed as a citizen from reporting the evil things by which he is surrounded. It is true one can report them as one does to one’s pastors and masters in Royal Commissions and elsewhere, but these high ones of the earth are too engrossed in greater affairs to attend to such a small matter as the sending to gaol of some eight or more thousand of the thriftless and shiftless of their fellow-countrymen. And one has the great army of the lower middle-class shopkeepers, who think it is to their advantage to give credit where there is no credit, and they are right up against reform; and behind them stand the wholesale traders who sell to the little shopkeepers, but have the sense themselves to see that they get their money regularly on the second Tuesday of the next month. And I suppose those of us who are interested in this

matter will go on uttering ineffectively our protests in evidence before commissions and in reviews and magazines and occasional addresses to students of social science until at last a public opinion is formed strong enough to be heard in the lobbies at Westminster.

I have often wondered how many tons of waste-paper filter through the waste-paper basket and solidify into one grain of public opinion. But it is better so than that some tragedy should happen, some death in gaol or some horrid act of violence which would startle the comfortable classes into a recognition of the injustice of the system. However good and necessary a reform may be, it is probably not much use having it before the large majority of citizens are really ready for it. The working classes could abolish imprisonment for debt at once, but some of their number think it enables credit to be obtained in times of labour disputes, and are listless about it; the middle classes think that any form of compulsion to make the working classes pay for the goods they sell to them is a just and righteous thing; whilst as for the upper classes, the few I have come in contact with seem to think that imprisonment for debt, don’t you know, was abolished, and that when a fellow was really “stony”—​I think I have the phrase right—​he went bankrupt, don’t you know, and started afresh. And that, indeed, is a true statement of the different way in which the English law treats the affairs of debtors, according to whether they be rich or poor—​for the poor man has no effective bankruptcy law.

And another thing that seems to me to bear very hardly on the workers, and makes it increasingly difficult for them to keep out of debt, is the heavy proportion of their income that goes in rent. If a man with £1,000 a year spent two hundred or two hundred and fifty in rent he would be regarded as extravagant. But that is what a working man has to do out of his slender income before he can find food and clothing for his wife and family. And the curious affair is that wherever you go, whether it be Manchester, Salford, Lambeth or Dartford, the problem seems to remain the same. Where, as in London, wages are rather better, rent is very much higher, as though in some weird economic way the fact that a man earns more money in London than he does in Manchester at the same trade entitles his landlord to a higher rent for even worse accommodation. And how this is going to be remedied is for those professors of social economics who have studied the question to say, but one who has discussed with many thousands of poor folk their ways and means, and the burdens of their life, may at least point out what seems to be the fact, that in increasing the wage of a man, you do not make him necessarily a citizen with a better chance in life unless you can manage to stop the automatic increase of his rent. For the landlord, like the daughter of the horse-leech, on hearing of a rise in wages, cries, “Give! Give!” and there is nothing for it but to obey.

And another thing which is constantly before my

mind in the work of the County Court is that, like all institutions that were intended in the first instance for the service of the poor, the County Courts have gradually interested themselves in the affairs of better-class people, and to some extent their earlier clients are being edged out. Of course, that is the history of many English institutions, and one must suppose that to some extent it is a natural evolution, and accept it as such. Pious Bishop Ridley was a suitor to Sir William Cecil “in our Master Christ’s cause” to grant him the Palace of Bridewell, “that he might therein house the naked and hungry that starved in the London streets.” This noble charity by natural evolution degenerated into one of the most degraded and brutal of prisons, as Hogarth has reminded us forever in one of his prints in “The Harlot’s Progress.” In the same way, if you read the early histories of many colleges and schools and charities, you will find that the pious founders had in their minds the advancement and interests of the poorer classes, but to-day the benefits of these institutions are almost entirely in the hands of the middle and upper classes. I daresay they make better use of them, and that it is all to the good that it should be so, but one cannot shut one’s eyes to the fact that something of this sort has been the general history of our attempts to equip the poor with social institutions for their benefit.

And although I am not against the making of the County Court a valuable district court for the settlement of disputes of importance, I cannot help

thinking that something might be done to make the courts of greater value to the poor. As at present, apart from the debt-collecting about which I have said my say, the Court is mainly used by the poor to settle very small and domestic quarrels. But so swollen have the rules and orders and forms of the Court grown, so intricate are its ways, that for an uneducated man to find his correct path among its mazes without a legal guide would be impossible. No doubt the Registrar and his clerks give every assistance in their power. Certainly the poor man who wants to maintain trover for a wheelbarrow cannot be expected to spend twenty-five shillings on a “County Court Practice” and read its thousand pages in search of the answer to the riddle of procedure that the law has set him. Yet unless he employs a solicitor or casts his cares on the overburdened chief clerk to the Registrar, I suppose that is what the State expects him to do.

The County Court as a tribunal for doing justice between poor disputants is an ill-equipped machine, and, without doubt, if these poorer cases were tried by the judge on strict legal lines, and if he merely listened to the plaintiff and heard such portions of his and his friends’ wandering narratives as came within the rules of evidence, the almost universal result would be to non-suit the plaintiff on the ground that he proved no case. But in practice this does not happen. The wind is tempered to the shorn lamb. The judge puts his legal telescope to his blind eye. He listens to

everything and everybody and both sides speaking at once. He takes a hand at the game himself with such worldly knowledge of the man in the street as he happens to possess, and in the end gropes his way through a mass of prejudice and hearsay and hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, and conveniently forgets that no one has complied with this section of a statute or that rule or that order, and business of a kind is done.