Part 10 (1/2)
That is one of the short and simple tales from the annals of imprisonment for debt.
What match are confiding folk like these for the lying scallywags who tout their inferior wares round the streets? And instead of our law remembering that we pray daily to be delivered from temptation, and playing the part of a father of the fatherless and a friend of the widows, it keeps alive section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869, in the interests of about as low a cla.s.s of knaves as ever disgraced the name of English trade.
I know very well that there are many good honest folk who approve of imprisonment for debt and have fears about its abolition. These should remember that in France and Germany and a great part of America there is no such thing, and yet trade does not suffer and the working cla.s.ses do not starve. I should quite agree that if a man defrauds a tradesman by lying promises or cheating he should be punished, but imprisonment should be for fraud, not, as it is now, for poverty. As I have already pointed out, in America no honest man is likely to get into prison merely for the wickedness of owing money. We cannot say that is true here. In Germany the working man lives on a cash basis. Credit is not largely given, as there is no power of imprisonment for debt.
England is the last civilised country whose law encourages the poor to live on credit, yet nothing is more true than this, that once start living on credit and you cannot get out of it. It is a downward path leading to the Slough of Despond. But until the law is amended we must be content to look on and see the poor in the cages of prison whilst those that set the traps and catch them wax fat and s.h.i.+ne.
And as soon as a boy or a girl begins to earn wages the Evil One, in the shape of some kind of tally-man, is at his or her elbow with a watch, or a ring, or a family Bible, or a musical instrument, or a shoddy sewing machine, the possession of which can be gloriously enjoyed on payment of the first instalment. I do not say that boys and girls must not buy their experience of the world and pay for it, but the law need not a.s.sist the knave in making it more expensive than is necessary. I have known several cases of young servants leaving good places and running off in terror because they have been served with a blue paper, ”frightener” with a lot of law jargon about imprisonment upon it, threatening them with dire penalties because an instalment was due on a gold ring. More might certainly be done to prevent back-door trading, and there is no more reason why area touts should be allowed to infest the streets than the lower cla.s.s of bookmakers. Well-to-do people have very little idea of the number of firms that employ travelling canva.s.sers and touts to hawk their wares from door to door in the mean streets.
I remember once a fairly well-to-do working man--he was the doorkeeper of a public inst.i.tution in Manchester--had an action brought against him by a street tout because his dog, an Airedale terrier, had bitten the prowling fellow as he was coming in at the back door. The man was badly mauled, and the dog having been proved to have bitten several other people of a like nature, I had, much to my discontent, to give judgment for the plaintiff.
About a year afterwards--having forgotten all about the matter--I was visiting the inst.i.tution where the defendant was employed, when, as the gentleman I wished to see was engaged, the doorkeeper asked me to step into his lodge and sit down and wait.
”I've often wanted to see you, Mr. Porry,” he began, ”about that there dorg case.”
”What case was that?” I asked.
”That case where you fined me five pounds over an Airedale what tried to gobble up a tally-man.”
”I remember,” I said doubtfully.
”Well,” he continued, ”you seemed to sympathise with me like, but you found against me. You see I had bought that dorg for the very purpose of keeping those fellows off the premises whilst I'm away. So I said if the law don't let 'im bite 'em, what's the use of the dorg? and what I wanted to arsk you was, may my dorg bite 'em within reason or did I 'ave to pay five pounds 'cause 'e mauled 'im too much?”
I explained the law in relation to dogs and tally-men as well as I could, and my friend was good enough to say when I had finished:
”Well, I quite see you 'ad to make me pay as the law stands, but it don't seem to me just. If you can't 'ave a dorg, how can you keep them fellows out of the house?”
That was more than I could answer. We parted friends--and there was, I think, a mutual feeling between us that the law of dogs in relation to tally-men was not all it should be.
And many laws that are made for the best purposes are wrested from their beneficent uses by the wicked ones of the world and turned to the basest advantages. No legislation was hailed with greater delight by social reformers than the Married Women's Property Act, and yet one must admit that the fraudulent use of its provisions is a commonplace. I am not suggesting that it is mainly against the poor that it is misused, though I have known of cases under the Workmen's Compensation Act where goods were alleged to be ”in the wife's name” after an award had been made against the husband, and many a poor tradesman and small worker is swindled by this allegation, the victim not having the money to test it in a court of law, and the result being in any case so gloriously uncertain. I am sorry to put matrimony among the flat-traps, but the use of the married status among the dishonest to prevent a successful litigant from obtaining the results of a judgment brings it within this category. Even the poorer cla.s.ses themselves are beginning to make use of it as a kind of homestead law to protect their goods from execution.
Much as I am in favour of seeing the poor man's home protected to a larger degree than it is at present I do not care to see it achieved at the expense of the character of the occupants. Any law that is a constant temptation to dishonesty is an evil, and there is no doubt that when the day comes for legal reform on a large scale, the various questions relating to the position of the married woman in the eye of the law will have to be considered. In many cases, of course, the reforms will be towards the enlargement of women's liberty, but in the matter of holding property it is clear that where a wife or a husband is tacitly allowing credit to be obtained on his or her appearance of property that property should be available to discharge the debt notwithstanding that it is claimed as the special property of one or the other.
Menander, the Greek poet, in one of his comedies makes someone say, ”To marry a wife, if we regard the truth, is an evil, but it is a necessary evil.” If this was true in 300 B.C. it became more convincingly the truth in 1882 A.D., when the Married Women's Property Act became law, and the ”peculiar gift of heaven” was welcomed by the unscrupulous trader as a statutory stay of execution. Since that day the Micawbers of this world have put all their available a.s.sets ”in the wife's name.”
The legal privileges of the married woman are not sufficiently well known.
Like ”the infant” she is, indeed, the darling of the law. What a fine commercial spree an ”infant” could have who looked older than his years and had an elementary knowledge of the law of ”infants”! Luckily they do not teach anything useful at educational establishments, and the ”infant”
never learns about his glorious legal status until it is too late to exploit it.
But a married woman can, and does, have a real good time at the expense of her own particular tyrant, man. Recently at Quarter Sessions a man was accused of stealing the spoons, and his wife was accused of receiving the property knowing it to have been stolen. But it was pointed out that it was one of the rights of a married woman to receive whatever her husband happened to bring home, and the judge directed an acquittal.
There are several pretty little distinctions in the criminal law in favour of the married lady, but perhaps it is not seemly to advertise them overmuch. When we come to so-called civil matters, the lady who does not know and exercise her legal privileges is indeed a _rara avis_. How many of the debt-collecting cases in the County Court are concerned with the good lady who runs into debt with the tally-man or other tradesman to the husband unknown? True, in many of these the husband has a possible defence, but the good man is generally a sporting, careless fellow, and pays his five s.h.i.+llings a month in the belief that debt is a natural sequence of matrimony.
But when it comes to committing wrongs--or torts, to use the Norman slang of the law--the married woman is the only legal personality that is privileged to forget her duty to her neighbour at someone else's expense.
Her unhappy husband is always liable for the damages and costs, although he may have done his best to hinder the wrong that has been done. If in his absence on the daily round the good lady slanders her neighbour's wife, or trespa.s.ses on her neighbour's garden to commit the further wrong of slapping her neighbour's infant, the husband, for the purposes of paying damages, is regarded by the law as being a joint offender. The law supposes that a wife acts under her husband's directions. When they told Mr. b.u.mble that, he replied in the immortal phrase, ”If the law supposes that, the law is a a.s.s--a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law's a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience.”
It does seem a bit hard on the poor man certainly. If he keeps a dog the animal may have his first bite at his neighbour free of expense, and when he gets to hear about it he can send the dog away. But with a wife there is no question of _scienter_. You may not suspect that your good lady is given to slander, a.s.sault and such like indiscretions, but, if it so happens, you have to pay. Nor do I see what steps you can take to hinder the lady from trespa.s.ses which she has the mind to commit. For if you were to place her under lock and key I believe a sentimental High Court judge would grant her a _habeas corpus_ that she might go out again into the wide, wide world and exercise her undoubted right of committing wrong at her husband's expense.
And I set down these disadvantages of husbandry as some sort of excuse for the meanness and dishonesty of the man who uses ”his wife's name” to protect his a.s.sets and injure his creditors. I have in my mind a commercial married man auditing in his debit and credit mind the matrimonial balance sheet. ”See,” he says, ”my liabilities under the law of husband and wife. Surely there must be some a.s.sets of the relations.h.i.+p in which I am ent.i.tled to partic.i.p.ate!” Then he studies the Married Women's Property Act, and chuckles. Whether this is so or not, there is no doubt that, since the Act of 1882, ”Everybody's doing it,” and when the bailiffs come in the furniture and the stock-in-trade are always found to be ”in the wife's name.” It is a form of conspiracy, you would say, and the police should put a stop to it, but ”Old Father Antic the Law” has his answer for you there--a wife cannot be guilty of conspiracy with her husband, for husband and wife are one.