Part 11 (1/2)

No doubt it is very difficult to draft laws that the wicked cannot wrest from their righteous purpose and use for iniquity. But the law plays into the hands of the knave by its verbosity and diffuseness and the great ma.s.s and complexity of it, which the knave studies with as great care and astuteness as the lawyers and judges whose duty it is, within the four corners of the law, to prevent his wrongdoing. When it is enacted ”Thou shalt not steal,” the Court knows where it stands, but that is a far more easy statute to construe than anything the parliamentary draftsman turns out to-day. If we could get a short statute of one clause, ”Thou shalt not cheat,” with an appropriate schedule containing a tariff of fines and imprisonment, I think magistrates could do a good deal to cleanse the cities of a great many low ruffians who make their living by swindling the poor and make the law as it stands their attorney to collect the spoils.

CHAPTER IX

POVERTY AND PROCEDURE

Therefore I counsel you, ye rich, have pity on the poor.

Though ye be mighty at the law be ye meek in your deeds.

The same measure ye mete wrong or right Ye shall be weighed therewith when ye go home.

To the poor the Courts are a maze if he plead there all his life, Law is so lordly and loth to end his case; Without money paid in presents Law listeneth to few.

PIERS PLOWMAN.

We have moved along a little since the days of Edward III., and if Piers Plowman were with us to-day he would see no visions of ”money paid in presents” to State servants, at all events not to the judiciary. Bacon was the last Lord Chancellor who indulged this evil habit, and if, as his admirers tell us, he was at the time producing his own plays on sharing terms with impecunious actors, one can understand the necessity of it whilst condemning the practice. Although we have made justice pure enough in this country and not directly purchasable, yet the rest of Piers Plowman's indictment is true enough of the present time, and law is still a maze wherein the rich are guided by the clever ones who know the way and the poor too often get lost for want of an honest guide.

There are many signs that the public conscience is being slowly awakened to the iniquity of one side in a law suit having all the legal aid that money can buy and the other side nothing. In criminal cases something is already done and a beginning is being made on the civil side in the High Court to give the poor legal aid. These reforms do not amount to very much as yet, but they are the first steps towards remedying Piers Plowman's grievances and, considering that it is less than six hundred years since that excellent visionary made his moan over the law and the poor, and the drawback poverty has in the procedure of the Courts, there seems to have been no very unusual delay in Government taking the matter up. We may at least congratulate ourselves that we have got a scheme of some sort which can be amended and put into a business shape instead of the Select Commission which reformers are generally offered to keep them quiet. Old Piers would be awfully happy--”bucked,” I think, is the modern word--if he could know that after five hundred and fifty years we were tackling the problems of life that worried him so greatly. In another six hundred years or so a lot of the little matters referred to in this book will get smoothed out. If you can get into the habit of thinking of the world's progress in centuries instead of months you will find it very comforting.

Until more is known of these new schemes and their workings we must write of the present system as we know it, for any change in it will certainly be slow enough and it is something to understand the circ.u.mstances of the present in order to see what changes are really required.

You may remember that George Eliot in ”The Mill on the Floss” describes Mr. Tulliver as saying, ”that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of c.o.c.k-fight in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.”

I do not say for a moment that Mr. Tulliver was right, but I think George Eliot shrewdly described in his words the att.i.tude of mind of the man in the street towards the High Court of Justice. c.o.c.k-fighting was always a popular, cruel, and exciting sport, and now that it is done away with the next best thing is to squeeze into the Divorce Court and witness a real set-to between Chanticleer, K.C., and young c.o.c.kerel, who, they say, will be taking silk himself very soon and will knock the older bird out of the ring.

Certain it is that the poor have a notion, in which there is doubtless some truth, that the fact that the other side had a better and more expensive counsellor gave them a greater chance in the legal lottery. The side that can put Carson on to bowl at one end and F. E. Smith at the other must start at a better price than the side which has to rely on an unknown amateur in the back row. Of course, A. N. Other may take some wickets, but the public have a very business-like belief that money talks, and that the verdict of the jury, like most of the verdicts in life, will turn out to be on the side which can put in the field the most expensive team.

Certainly I can say without hesitation that working men would never have got their due from the Workmen's Compensation Acts if each particular poor workman had had to fight for his rights at his own expense. It is to the trade unions and their co-operative litigation that the thanks of the workmen are due for preserving their rights under the Act.

Mr. Lysons was a Pendleton collier, and had only worked for a few days when he received an injury. This happened in 1901, and at that time the old Act said that no compensation could be recovered until a man had been off work for two weeks. It was argued before me that this being so, unless a man was employed for more than fourteen days he could not come within the Act at all. The argument did not appeal to me, but it did to the Court of Appeal, and later on again it did not to the House of Lords. So the man got his money.

But the point of the case is that had not the union come forward to take his case to the House of Lords, Lysons would have lost his compensation, and the Act of Parliament would have been construed to limit the rights of the poor for all time.

This particular case cost the union six hundred pounds to fight, and the point in dispute was whether the injured man was, or was not, to receive six s.h.i.+llings a week for five weeks. Several cases have run the same course. The Act is obscurely drafted and capable of many interpretations.

Some of these that still stand on the books remain precedents only because the workman has not money enough to carry the case higher and has no union behind him.

And, though in the first instance a workman might often make s.h.i.+ft to state his case in the County Court himself and rely on his own advocacy as to the facts and the judge's knowledge of the law, it is absurd to suppose he could argue a legal point in the Court of Appeal or House of Lords without a.s.sistance. Unless a trade union is ready to take up the case, the only hope of a man getting his rights is through the aid of a speculative solicitor.

Such a system has its drawbacks to the litigant and the profession, and leads to unpleasant and undesirable incidents, but it is no use shutting one's eyes to what is going on every day in every Court. Dodson and Fogg have always been looked down upon ever since Sam Weller gave them away by blurting out in Court that it was ”a wery gen'rous thing of them to have taken up the case on spec. and to charge nothing at all for costs unless they got them out of Mr. Pickwick.”

No doubt it is very unprofessional to make such an agreement, but with the law as it is, and the poor with rights under the law, how on earth are they to get their rights unless there is a speculative solicitor ready to risk a certain amount of out-of-pockets in the hope of getting them back with advantages from Mr. Pickwick? Unless a speculative solicitor is ready to back the poor man's case with gratuitous services and money enough for counsel's honorarium, surveyor's plans, doctor's and Treasury fees, how can the case be launched at all?

Indeed, could one be certain that such a solicitor never undertook any case unless he was satisfied that his client had right on his side, should we not have to admit that the speculative solicitor was a ministering angel engaged in a practice of delivering the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him?

And as day by day the poor have more laws made to guide them into the way of righteousness, and more statutes are pa.s.sed with the intention of making the life of the poor healthier, brighter, and better, and as, moreover, in this imperfect world the servants of the Evil One are always prowling round to cheat the poor of their rights, it would seem to follow that if Law Courts and litigation are to be the order of the day we must each of us have a panel lawyer to whom we can go when we want an injunction and our _habeas corpus_ is not up to the mark.

For years and years there have been speculative doctors. No one thought any the worse of doctors because they founded hospitals and gave their services free of charge and entered a _caveat_ against disease and death without first getting something on account of costs. And why should not we have legal hospitals and out-patient departments attached to the County Court where the house physician is the young man who has taken the best degrees in law and the visiting surgeon is the great leader of the legal profession?

The idea is no more ludicrous in one profession than it is in another.