The Law and the Poor

INDEX 311

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INTRODUCTION

"But, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed."

"Which nation?" asked the younger stranger, "for she reigns over two."

The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.

"Yes," resumed the stranger after a moment's interval. "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws."

"You speak of--," said Egremont, hesitatingly.

"The Rich and the Poor."

Benjamin Disraeli: "Sybil, or The Two Nations."

The rich have many law books written to protect their privileges, but the poor, who are the greater nation, have but few. Not that I should like to call this a law book, for two reasons: firstly, it would not be true; secondly, if it were true, I should not mention it, as I want people to read it.

You cannot read law books, you only consult them. A law book seeks to set out the law, the whole law, and nothing but the law on the subject of which it treats. There are many books on Poor Law, there are hundreds of volumes about the Poor, and many more about the Law, but the Law and the Poor is a virgin subject.

It is a wonder that it should be so because it is far more practical and interesting than either of its component parts.

It is as if poetry had dealt with beans or with bacon and no poet had hymned the more beautiful associations of beans and bacon. In the same way the Law and the Poor is a subject worthy of treatment in drama or poetry, but that that may be successfully done someone must do the rough spade work of digging the material out of the dirt heaps in which it lies, and presenting it in a more or less palatable form. When this has been done the poet or the politician can come along and throw the crude metal into the metres of sonnets or statutes or any form of glorious letters they please.

From the very earliest I have taken a keen interest in this subject. I remember well when I was a schoolboy the profound impression made upon me by Samuel Plimsoll's agitation to rescue merchant seamen from the horrible abuses practised by a certain class of shipowner. My father, Serjeant Parry, was engaged in litigation for Plimsoll, and I heard many things at first hand of that great reformer's hopes and disappointments.

There were a class of traders known as "ship knackers," who bought up old unseaworthy vessels and sent them to sea overloaded and over-insured. Plimsoll, for years, devoted himself to prevent this wickedness. There was the usual parliamentary indifference, the customary palavering and pow-wowing in committees until, after six or seven years of constant fighting, the public conscience was awakened, and, in 1875, Disraeli produced a Merchant Shipping Bill. But then, as now, there was no parliamentary time for legislation dealing with the poor, and the Bill was one of the innocents to be sacrificed at the annual summer massacre.

This would have been the end of all hope of reform had not Samuel Plimsoll, in a fine frenzy of rage and disgust, openly charged the Government with being parties to the system which sent brave men to death in the winter seas and left widows and orphans helpless at home, "in order that a few speculative scoundrels, in whose heart there is neither the love of God nor the fear of God, may make unhallowed gains."

This was unparliamentary enough, but it was allowed to pass. It was when he began to give the names of foundered ships and their parliamentary owners and, in his own words, "to unmask the villains" who sent poor men to death and destruction, that he was promptly called to order, and, refusing to withdraw, left the House.

The result of his outburst was entirely satisfactory. The Government were obliged to bring in another Bill and to pass it without delay.

Many years later the unauthorised Radical programme of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain aroused my youthful enthusiasm, and I spent much of my then ample leisure as a missionary in that cause.

We soon lost our great leader, who went away to champion what he considered greater causes, but he was one of the first English statesmen in high places to make his main programme a reform of the law in the interests of the poor, and he left behind him mournful but earnest disciples who have not yet found such another leader. The Workmen's Compensation Act will always, I think, be regarded as one of his greatest achievements, and mauled and mangled as it has been in the Law Courts it remains the most substantial benefit that the poor have received from the Legislature in my lifetime.

Twenty years' service in urban County Courts has naturally given me some insight into the way in which the law treats the poor and the real wants of the latter. I agree that such a book as this would be better written by one who had actual experience of the life of the poor, rather than the official hearsay experience which is all that I can claim to have had.

I think the great want of labour to-day is an Attorney-General, a man who having graduated in the workshop comes to the study and practice of the law with a working man's knowledge and ideals, and gaining a lawyer's power of expressing his wants in legal accents, raises his voice to demand those new laws that the poor are so patiently awaiting.

If there be such a one on his way and this volume is of any small service to him, it will have more than fulfilled its purpose.

Originating in a series of essays published in the Sunday Chronicle, it has grown into a more ambitious project, and is now, I trust, a fairly complete text-book of the law as it ought not to be in relation to the poor.

In my endeavour to please the taste of the friend to whom I have dedicated this book I have dispensed with all footnotes, but I have added an appendix of references in case there may be any who might wish to test the accuracy of statements in its pages.

"Thus," as my Lord Coke says, "requesting you to weigh these my labours in the even balance of your indifferent judgment I submit them to your censure and take my leave."

EDWARD A. PARRY.

Sevenoaks,