The Law and the Poor

an eternal; by the comparison and application of other men's fo

eigh: "History

. Vol. II., Pr

ems a pity to take it with you across the ferry into the silence merely because you have a bashful and retiring disposition. It is right, of course, to give your views and services to Select Commissions and the like,-but that is no better than hiding a lump of gold in a hole in the ground. The wiser plan is to try and tell the law-makers of the future-the men in the street-what is wrong with the machine, so that when they take it over, as they must do some day, they will not scrap it in mere despair, but tune it up to a faster and nobler rhythm. Job, great, good, patient soul that he was, had his sour moments-a medical friend of mine believes that he had a liver,-I am sorry not to take the patriarch's advice, but I do not see my way to hold my peace

to design a symbolic statue of Nature, I should model a plumber. Slow, hesitating, occasionally mixing the taps and flooding the world's bathroom or exploding the gas mains in the cellars of the earth, but in the end doing the job somehow-such is the way of Nature. You cannot cinematograph the growth of the world or its rocks and trees and human beings-to study Nature you want long life and a microscope. And the only way to make out whether the tide is coming in or out is to place a mark upon the shore and wait and see. It is the sa

longer intervals. This puts me in good heart for the happy youths whose lot it will be to set their faces towards the morning breezes of the futur

Johnson; or, even as late as the days of Charles Dickens, go round the parish with Mr. Bumble. You will learn in this way better than in any other how the law has treated the poor in the good old days. I have

ch other idle persons are, says the anonymous legal author, "a large Br

e and who is to be

s to be don

agabond is a man and a brother. You are taught first to diagnose him as Izaak Walton would teach the young angler how to discover the singling that did n

skill in telling of fortunes by the marks or figures on the hands or face, Egyptians or Gypsies. All Jugglers or Slight-of-hand Artists pretending to do wonders by virtue of Hocus Pocus, the Powder of Pimper le Pimp, or the like; all Tinkers, Pedlars, Chapmen, Glassmen, especially if they be not well known or have a sufficient testimonial. All collectors for Gaols or Hospitals, Fencers, Bearwards, common players of interludes, and Fiddlers or Minstrels wandering a

in their own way were rogues and vagabonds. And it is not without interest to run your eye over this list, for the statutory rogue and vag

was liable to a fine of ten shillings for every neglect. Moreover, if you were a stalwart fellow, you co

(or do it himself), That such Rogues and Vagabonds, etc., be stript Naked from the middle upwards and openly Whipped till their Body be bloody and then forthwith to be sent away from Constable to Constable, the next straight way to the place of their Birth; and if that cannot be known then to the place where they last Dwelt, by

and and Seal of the Constable or Tything-man and the Minister testifying the day and place of his Punishment; as also the place to which he is to be conveyed, and the time

u had suggested that the players or the fiddlers were a more wholesome amusement for the people than these cruel sights, you would not only have shocked the minister but would have rendered yourself liable to be treated as a vagrom man and to receive a testimonial from the

who have never known the blessings of the particular religion we profess. When Fynes Moryson was travelling in Turkey at the end of the sixteenth century, he set down with reasonable detestation some of the gruesome things he observed. "Touching their Corporal and Capital Judgment

see a poor wretch being whipped at the cart's tail. In ordinary cases the journey was from Newgate to Ludgate, or from Charing Cross to Westminster, but for really bad cases it was extended from Newgate to Charing Cross. And not only did these punishments exist in England, but the populace enjoyed them. One of the sights of London was to see the women whipped in the Bridewell. The Court of Governors hel

tormented by fiends; indeed, there needs not a very extravagant imagination to form that idea; for of all the scenes on earth that of Bridewell approaches nearest the notion I had always entertained of the infernal regions. Here I saw nothing but rage, anguish and impiety; and heard nothing but groans, curses and blasphemy. In the midst of this hellish crew I was subjected to the tyranny of a barbarian w

were, of course, just as many good and charitable men and women then as there are now, but the possibility that a Bridewell was a thing that the world had then no use for

ble to make. In the few years of hustling life and in the scanty hours that he can spare from earning his daily bread the average citizen has little time and opportunity to investigate the social system of which he is a unit, or to understand how or why the wheels of the world machine are grinding unevenly. When we read of the horrors of two or three hundred years

ruel beast. Moryson tells us with honest reprobation, but in gruesome detail, of the Turkish methods of impaling, where a "man may languish two or three days in pain and hunger; if torment will permit him in that time to feel hunger for no man dares give him meat," and of casting down malefactors to pitch upon ho

receive his punishment by the law, to be extended and then to have weights laid upon him no more than he was able to bear which were by little and little to be increased. For the second, that he was to be exposed in an open place near the prison in the open air, being naked. And; lastly, that he was to be preserved with the coarsest bread that could be got, and water out of the next sink or puddle to the place of execu

an adjournment of three or four days, of the law of procedure as laid down by Lord Chief Justic

satisfied the lust of the unspeakable Turk! The peine forte et dure remained one of the pillars of our law until the reign of George III. and was carried into execution

to state a fact which seems in all ages to have been universally true. I do not suppose that in the middle of the eighteenth century anyone in the least recognised the actual horrors that

proportion of the people (said he) are suffered to languish in helpless misery that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed; a decent provision for the poor is the test of civil

he remembered of it in the morning-I doubt not that if Dr. Johnson had lived in 1670, or 1870, or 1970, or had flourished under Caligula or Nero, he would have rolled out the sa

system, that it was at least as good as any other system, that nothing anyhow could be learned from the hated foreigner, and that to pander to dreamers and busybodies, who found fault and wanted to alter things, was to start down the broad road of destruction. Oliver Goldsmit

wisdom was about; "the age is running mad after innovations; all the business of the wo

a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don't answer their purpose. The old met

tant old gentleman lays down the law about something of which he knows perhaps even a little less than we do a

o, if he still courted popularity, scoffed openly, shouting to his friends on St. Sepulchre's steps where they stood with their nosegays to give their pal a last greeting. What a solemn impressive scene! All the way up Holborn there is a crowd so great that every twenty or thirty yards the cart is pulled up, and now s

t safe from the fury of innovation!" Fancy that! What a terrible outlook! The law deserting the poor and givi

or the County Court of our own time. The belief that the world is the best possible of worlds has its value in making for the stability of things, but mere ignorance of the facts of life, coupled with that stran

ew abuses to remedy and trying in some small way to rid the law of some of those traits of barbarism which linger in its old-world features. To each new generation the terrors of the past iniquity of the law are

doubt that the judges of the time, with very few exceptions, administered the law as humanely as they do to-day. Sir Thomas Starkie, the learned Chairman of the Salford Epiphany Quarter Sessions in 1824, no doubt felt very grieved when he sentenced Martha Myers, aged sixteen, and Mary Mason,

he show, so to speak, and the public know nothing of the difficulties under which the judges labour. It is their duty to administer the complicated modern laws turned out by Parliament in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and they are bound to keep alive old-world laws that ought long ago to have been shot on to the rubbish heap. Nearly all the law relati

than crossbows and arquebuses would be to the War Office, or coracles to the Admiralty. And, instead of cursing the judges, who, poor fellows, are doing their best, I wish our parliamentary masters would look into the history of the matter. They would find, I think, that in the last few years enormous reforms have been made in modifying the