Part 9

Though in an occasional burst of atavism an uneducated man may kiss his thumb instead of the Book, the bulk of humanity take any oath that is offered without any deep feeling of religious sanction, nor any particular fear of supernatural results. It is not altogether a matter of regret that this should be so. Our ceremony of oath-taking is really a Pagan one. Our very verb “to swear” takes us back to the pre-Christian days when man’s strength and his sword were the masters, and peace and goodwill had come to conquer the earth. To swear was a vow to Heaven upon a sword. When we offer the Book to a witness to swear upon, we really tender him, not a Christian thought, but the old Pagan oath which, splendid as it was, is no longer of force. It was a fine thing in its day when a knight vowed upon his sword “to serve the King right well by day and night, on field, on wave, at ting, at board—in peace, in war, in life or death; so help him Thor and Odin, likewise _his own good sword_.” It is no use replacing the sword by the Book if you retain the spirit of the sword in the old Pagan ceremony. The word “to swear” is very closely related to the word “sword,” and the very essence of swearing, deep down in the root form of the thing and the word itself, is to take one’s sword in one’s right hand, and fight for one’s own side with an energy that will make the Pagan gods shout with joy in the Valhalla. Medical witnesses and land surveyors are real Vikings in this respect, especially as it seems to me those of Celtic origin.

But of a truth it is not only the oath and the witnesses that want amendment. For when I suggest that it would be well in Court if we obeyed the command, “Swear not at all,” and that the outward use of the Book in the County Court is undesirable, it is because I feel that some such thing as a Court on the lines of the teaching of the Book ought not to be wholly impossible after 1,900 years of endeavour. You must drive out of the Court all the folk-lore with its Pagan notions of fighting and hired champions and oaths, and witnesses and heralds, and above all you must get rid of the anachronism of a Judge, and appoint in his place a peace-maker or official reconciler. The idea is not wholly Quixotic. Lord Brougham, a very practical reformer, had hopes of constructing Courts of Reconciliation in this country seventy years ago. We shall not close the courts of litigation and replace them by courts of reconciliation in a day. But I am optimist enough to hope that I may go down to my work one morning to find that we have been taken over by a new department called the Office of Peace, and that under the Royal Arms is our new official motto, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”

CONCERNING DAUGHTERS.

“As is the mother so is the daughter.”

_Ezekiel_ xvi., 44.

I am far from thinking Ezekiel knew much about it. True he was a married man and a householder, but I remember no evidence of his being the father of daughters. At all events if he thought that the education and bringing up of daughters was an inferior thing because of the authority of mothers, I think he was gravely mistaken. When the daughters of the middle ages were part of the household plant their mothers turned them out with certain practical qualities that made them a valuable asset to the comfort of mankind.

It was when unthinking fathers began to meddle in the affair and to consider the subject of the education of their daughters that the trouble began. The fathers—particularly the middle class Early Victorian father—discovered that it was a desirable thing to be a gentleman. Remembering and misapplying one of the catch words of his own education that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, he thought it was equally important to the success of his family that as his sons were to be gentlemen his daughters should be gentlewomen.

And this is where he missed it. The word “gentlewoman” is obscure, but it is certainly not the grammatical feminine of gentleman. True it has a narrow technical dictionary meaning, but it is used popularly to signify the result of a well-to-do middle class father’s education of his daughters, as in the phrase “Gentlewoman’s Employment Association” the name of an excellent society for helping daughters of the well-to-do father when he is deceased or has ceased to be well-to-do.

Concerning daughters then, and to help their fathers to bring them up as gentlewomen I take upon myself as one who has given grave personal consideration to the subject, to offer a few suggestions of a practical nature; for I have found the gentleman father in the matter of the education of girls—like his namesake the gentleman farmer in matters of agriculture—to be an enthusiastic and amiable, but eccentric amateur.

And remember my dear sir, that there are two main objects to be kept in view in the education of a daughter. The first is to fit her for the ultimate ownership of a well-to-do husband, the second is to guard her from acquiring any knowledge or capacity that might take her out of the ranks of the unemployable.

And first of marriage. Charlotte Lucas when she has made up her mind to the inevitable Mr. Collins, “was,” writes Jane Austen, “tolerably composed. She had gained her point and had time to consider it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable: his society was irksome and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly of either man or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness must be their pleasantest preservative from want.”

How refreshing in these neurotic days is Charlotte’s old-fashioned commonsense. And once recognising that marriage is the “pleasantest preservative from want” a father may be wise to leave the affair to mothers and daughters and chance. Holding, as I do, the extreme doctrine that anything that a mother does is of necessity absolutely right, I do not propose to enlarge upon this branch of the subject. There is a belief, however, among social naturalists that the solvent son-in-law is fast becoming extinct. This may be from the fact that he has been hunted with too great rigour in the past. The handsome but non-solvent variety though ornamental in the house is vastly expensive. Then there is the larger question of grandchildren. Here, too, sentiment finds itself again opposed by considerations of economy.

The problem of training one’s daughters to become in Charlotte Lucas’s phrase “well educated” or as Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth so constantly word it “gentlewomen” is a far easier matter, and may therefore be the more safely left in the hands of a father. Still in this, as in the more serious amusements of life, there are principles to be followed.

The main object of such education to-day should be to give girls what their brothers describe as “a good all round time.” Avoid anything that hints of serious work, eschew “grind,” choose a multitude of accomplishments rather than any one serious study, encourage the collection of useless objects and the manufacture of much fancy-work, and by this means there will be little fear of your girls attaining any real knowledge of affairs. So may your daughter be as one of the polished corners of the Temple, in the world and of the world, and in her you will see reflected the delightful patterns of the society by which she is surrounded.

But to descend to particulars. In early life commence with home-training. Beware of kindergartens. They are too often taught by women trained from early life in habits of work. They are apt to instil ways of industry, and to cultivate a socialistic tendency towards unselfishness, and might even at an early age suggest to the girl baby that the mission of women is to work as well as to weep. The poet must not however be taken too literally about this. Men _must_ work and women _must_ weep, but intervals ought clearly to be allowed for joint amusement, and the length of these is for one’s own decision. In her young days then let the girl be taught that she alone exists in the world, and that other human beings are mere dream persons. The difference, never to be bridged over, between herself and the household servants, ought to be constantly insisted upon. A nursery governess is a suitable companion. Some of these neither know nor desire to know how to scrub a nursery, and teaching is not their mission. Obtain one if possible, who is a nursery governess only in name, she will be cheap, and what is more important to you—ladylike. In a few years a school becomes a necessity; partly from the irksomeness of constant association with a spoiled child, but more immediately in the real interests of the girl herself. Choose by all means a school that you cannot well afford. Here your daughter will meet with companionship that must fill her young mind with ideals of life and society that cannot possibly be attained by her in after life. Be careful, too, not to thwart her expenditure in dress or amusement. Shun the modern craze—sprung up now I fear even among the wealthiest—for instruction in such subjects as cookery, dressmaking, and the like. A camera is a necessity. It enables inaccurate representations to be produced without skill or labour, and checks that desire for detailed information, which might easily develop into scientific study. The presence of a camera has saved many a young person from serious attention to art. It is an excellent plaything. By all means let your daughter learn French, for it is the language of the _menu_, and there is no great harm in a little Latin, but let it be ladylike. Whenever you are in difficulties, Mrs. Malaprop—who is always with us—will be only too glad to tell you in further detail what kind of education becomes a young woman, and the school where it can be found.

If you are “carriage people”—and by all means be “carriage people” if your wealthier neighbours are—then of course your daughter will not learn to cycle, but will rather learn to regard the cyclist as the curse of the highway, which was obviously built for her pleasure. The omnibus or tramcar will, I hope, always be regarded as impossible. Remember that people who nowadays possess motor-cars are not necessarily “carriage people.” It is becoming daily more difficult to diagnose “carriage people” by the symptoms of their outward circumstances.

When your daughter leaves school, if your income is less than £_x_, and you are spending more, you should certainly have your daughter presented at Court. She will naturally desire it, and it may for the moment go far towards appeasing your creditors who, I take it, will by this time be pressing you after the vulgar fashion of such people.

Bring out your daughter at a ball, similar in cost and style—but especially the former—to that given by Mrs. Goldberg Dives, when your daughter’s dear school friend, Aurora “came out,” as the saying is. You remember that on that occasion young Dives brought home Lord Bareacre’s youngest son from Oxford, and the marriage that ensued, was followed by that entertaining case so recently decided in the third division of the Probate and Admiralty Court. Who knows what good fortune your daughter may have if you follow these high examples.

But if during the prolonged pursuit of pleasure—which after her careful education your daughter ought now to be able to plan and carry out for herself—no son-in-law solvent or insolvent appears, then when you have departed to another sphere leaving behind assets insufficient to meet your worldly liabilities, or—as we may hope will be your case, dear reader,—when you have called together the callous creditors into an upper chamber of some persuasive accountant who can explain to them cheerily the true inwardness of your estate, and tender, with fitting apology, the pence that now represent the pound that was,—think not with the austere moralist that this costly education of your daughter has been a rash and hazardous speculation. Let us be thankful that the world is not at one with the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy with his sallow views of the possibilities of life. True your daughter will know nothing, and be fit for nothing, true it will take her years of misery to make herself capable of the meanest employment. She has eaten dinners she cannot cook, she has worn dresses she cannot make, she has lived in rooms she cannot sweep, and she has grumbled at the service of others she could not herself perform, but at least you can say that she has been brought up as other gentlewomen are, and that shall be your boast.

THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTY COURT.

“Had I God’s leave, how I would alter things!”

—_Robert Browning._

The County Court like the poor in whose interests it was invented is always with you if you have one of those perverted minds that wastes its moments on dreams of legal reform. Seventeen years ago I studied the question with earnest enthusiasm under the strange hallucination that it was a real business question ripe for a business solution. It seemed to me nearer to the lives of people than the Veto, or Tariff Reform or the Ornaments Rubric. That is the result of leading a narrow self-centred life. In a word, without knowing it, I must have been a Whig, for, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, “Whigs will live and die in the heresy that the world is ruled by little pamphlets and speeches, and that if you can sufficiently demonstrate that a line of conduct is most consistent with men’s interest you have therefore and thereby demonstrated that they will at length after a few speeches adopt it of course.” Thus for many years I have pegged away with papers and speeches and like a true Whig find myself still hopefully at it, playing the same game perhaps but with slightly increased handicap. To-day I have learned by experience that the future of the County Court is not to come in my time and to doubt if I shall ever climb into some sufficiently high place to see the promised land that I shall certainly never enter.

I have come to regard the question with the same child-like affection and belief in its possibility, but also in a sense archæologically, as becomes one whose first childhood is but a dream and who feels himself pausing on the threshold of a second. Had I any political foresight seventeen years ago I should have recognised that the reform of the County Court system is not a party matter, it is eminently a matter of greater interest to the poor than to the rich, to the business man than to the man of leisure. Now, more and more, Parliament has become a machine for registering the decrees of the prevailing party and one cannot find that the poor are in any way directly represented in Parliament and business men only in a small degree, whilst the interests of the rich and of men of leisure have an overwhelming representation. Moreover Legal Reform has to fight for its hand against that band of brothers, the lawyers in Parliament, who from generation to generation we find stalwart and faithful in their clear-sighted optimism that all is well with the law—and lawyers.

The story of the evolution of the County Court is not without entertainment for those who are interested in the practical affairs of the community. In its struggle for existence we find a warfare being carried on between the business man and the lawyer in which, foot by foot, the business man gains and places his pet tribunal in a more secure position whilst he takes breath for a new encounter. Still, although the building up of the County Court to its present story of usefulness has been the work in the main of business men, yet few realise that the County Court of to-day with its £100 jurisdiction is only a belated attainment of the ideals of Lord Brougham in 1830. It was in that year that Brougham brought in a Bill in the Commons—he was then member for Yorkshire—to establish “Local District Courts,” with a jurisdiction limited to £100 in contract, £50 in injury to person or property, and an unlimited jurisdiction by consent. It has taken us seventy-five years to arrive at the position that was thought practicable by a great reforming Chancellor in 1830. And yet there are many Englishmen in daily terror lest we should reform anything too hurriedly. Lord Brougham’s ruling idea was free law. He was in a sense a legal socialist. Law to him was one of those things that every member of an ideal community should have without paying for it individually, like fresh air and sunshine, and the Church of England and the British Museum, and gaslight (in urban streets), and roads, and the police, and the education of your children—all which things an English citizen is entitled to have to-day without the payment of any fees. He admitted the over-ruling necessity of fees in his day, owing to the poverty of the Exchequer, but he said, “he must enter his protest against the principle, and insist that any tax no matter what, for the purpose of drawing the payment from the public rather than from the suitor would be better than fixing it on legal proceedings.” Free law is, of course, a grand ideal, and may again attract legal reformers; but, without attaining that ideal, it might be possible to abandon in a great measure the fees collected from poor suitors. Law, like medicine and surgery, might be free to the poor—not merely to paupers, but to all who are unable to pay fees and costs without running into debt. It will take a Savonarola to convert the Treasury to this view, but it is an enticing subject for a youthful legal missionary full of ardent zeal and possessed of what the insurance world calls “a good life.”

The dramatic duel between Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst over the former’s Bill in 1833 is full of historical interest, but Lord Brougham was unsuccessful, and it remained for Lord Cottenham in 1847 to establish County Courts with a jurisdiction of £20. These are the Courts that we use to-day, with an enlarged jurisdiction up to £100 in common law, £500 in equity matters, and the added jurisdictions given by the Workmen’s Compensation Acts and many other statutes which have chosen for their tribunal the County Court.

Throughout the country we are face to face with two statistical facts which, if our reforms were moved by scientific considerations, would lead the legal reformer to turn his serious consideration to the County Court. We find in the great centres of population in the north and the midlands, firstly, that there is a slight shrinkage or perhaps only stagnation in the world of the High Court, and secondly, that there is a continuous increase of business keeping pace with the growth of population in the County Courts. I am far from saying that all the expansion of County Court work is progress—much of it is the reverse and in order to understand how far it is good and how far it is bad, it is worth while trying to understand what the County Courts do.

These Courts lead as it were a double life. They have extended their energies along two different branches of business. Each Court has become a huge debt-collecting machine for minor tradesmen and at the same time has developed into an important and trusted tribunal for deciding disputes between citizens. Both these functions are important ones, but the two branches have nothing to do with each other. In the debt-collecting branch the cases are, for the most part, undefended; in the other branch the cases are nearly all fought out. In the first branch the judicial work is unimportant, the machine works automatically; in the second branch the vitality of the Court depends almost entirely on the quality of the judicial work.

In considering the future of the debt-collecting branch of the Court it will be necessary to consider the whole question of imprisonment for debt, which is the ultimate sanction of the business. The point to be considered is, I think, How far is it right for the State to provide a machine to collect the class of debts that are, in fact, collected by the County Courts? The point is a practical one, for if imprisonment for debt were abolished or mitigated, a great deal of the work of the County Courts would undoubtedly fall away, leaving reasonable time at the disposal of the Courts to try cases under the present extended jurisdiction, and possibly making room for a further extension, if that were thought desirable.

Let me try and describe the present system in a few words. A grocer, draper, or jeweller hands over to a debt-collector a large number of debts to collect; the customers are, from a business point of view, the “undesirables.” The debt-collector makes some effort to collect the debts outside the Court, and then issues a batch of summonses against all who are or pretend to be impecunious. It is no uncommon thing for one collector to issue a few hundred summonses in one day. On the day of trial the cases are either undefended, or the wife appears and consents to judgment, and an order is made of so many shillings a month. The defended cases are, I should say, less than five per cent. of the total summonses issued, and those successfully defended are a negligible quantity. In Manchester and Salford, where we used to divide this class of work from real litigation, the lists were seldom less than 400 cases a day. When the judgments are obtained, the duty of the defendant is to pay the monthly instalment into Court, and a ledger account is opened, the Court becoming a sort of banker for the purpose of collecting and paying out the money. Whenever the debtor fails to pay an instalment, the collector is entitled to take out a judgment summons, calling on the debtor to show cause why he should not be committed to prison for non-payment. On proof that the debtor has means to pay, or has had means since the judgment, the judge’s duty is to commit him to prison.

Two things are clear about this system. It is not a system of deciding disputes, but a system of collecting debts, and in the cases of workpeople without property it could never be carried out without imprisonment for debt. When the legal reformer looks at the figures relating to imprisonment for debt, he will see at a glance that if he could get rid of a large quantity of the debt-collecting, there would be more time for the real litigation. Many people still seem to think that imprisonment for debt is abolished. In France and the United States and in most civilised countries I believe it is, but in England it is not only not abolished, but is greatly increased. The actual number of debtors imprisoned has recently decreased, owing no doubt to the fact that Judges are more and more inclined to temper the wind of the statute to the shorn lamb. But the number of summonses issued and heard increases, and there is no doubt the credit habit grows upon the working classes, and is encouraged by the system of imprisonment for debt. In 1909, the last year of statistics before me, no less than 375,254 summonses were issued. It is the commercial and domestic waste which lies hid in these figures that distresses me. They reduce me to the despair of those two immortals, the Walrus and the Carpenter, who

“Wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand. ‘If this were only cleared away,’ They said, ‘it would be grand.’”