Chapter II: Part 2

Having dealt with these serious disadvantages to education, let me hasten to say a little more about that grave disadvantage to education, the schoolmaster himself. The schoolmaster is generally a man who, having learnt to teach, has long ago ceased to learn. It is the past education of the schoolmaster that generally stands in his way. He believes in education, and thinks it a good thing in itself; he believes in rules and orders and lessons as desirable, whereas they are only the necessary outcome of Adam’s misconduct in the Garden of Eden. I cannot quite agree with Tolstoi’s suggestion that all rules in a school are illegitimate, and that the child’s liberty is inviolable. I do not think anarchy in a school is more possible to-day than anarchy in a state. But I do think that the schoolmaster of to-day should rule as far as possible by the creation of a healthy public opinion among his scholars and make the largest use of that public opinion as a moral and educational force. Looking back on my own experience, it is not what I learnt from my schoolmasters but what I learnt from my companions that has been of any real value to me in after life.

A child should go early to some good kindergarten presided over by some delightfully bright and pleasant lady, merely to learn the lesson that there are other children in the world besides itself. How important it is in life to learn to sit cheerfully next to someone you cordially detest without slapping him or her. And yet such a lesson, to be really mastered, should be learnt before five or seven at the latest. After that it can only be learned by much prayer and—dining out. At dinner parties, and particularly public dinners, one can get the necessary practice in this kind of self-control, but it is better to learn it whilst you are young, when alone it is possible to master the great lessons of life thoroughly and with comparatively little pain. Men have reached the position of King’s Counsel without attaining this simple moral grace.

If you come to think of it, all the really important things in life must of necessity be self-taught. I suppose schoolmasters, being experts in education, have never given serious thought to the fact that the child teaches itself, with the aid of a mother, all the best and necessary lessons of life in the first few years of its being. It learns to eat, for instance. I have watched a baby struggling to find the way to its mouth with a rusk, with intense interest and admiration. How it jabs itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and clothes with the debris, and kicks and fights in disgust and loses the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother, finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed energy on its way, and at length is rewarded by success. What a smile of victory, what a happy relapse into the dreamless sleep of the successful. The child has learned a lesson it will never forget. It has found its way to its mouth. One never learns anything as good as that from a schoolmaster. And indeed if you think of it the baby is learning useful things on its own every day of its life, and working hard at them. It learns to talk, and that in spite of its father and mother, who insist on cooing at it, and talking a wild baby language that must greatly irritate and impede a conscientious self-educating baby endeavouring to master the tongue of the land of its adoption. It learns to walk, too, not without tumbles, and tumbles which inspire it to further effort. I have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there were no schoolmaster?

If you were to abolish the schoolmaster what would happen? I think the answer is that the Burns, the Milton and the Sam Weller of a nation would profit by the stimulus to self-education. The child whose father was a musician or a carpenter or a ploughman who loved his art or craft, would be found striving to become as good an artist or craftsman as his father, and perhaps in the end bettering the paternal example. The school and the schoolmaster can do little but hinder the evolution of any worker in any art or craft. The real worker’s work must be the result of self-education, and he must live from early childhood among the workers. Read, for instance, the delightful account given by Miss Ellen Terry of her early days in “The Story of My Life.” “At the time of my marriage,” she writes, “I had never had the advantage—I assume it is an advantage—of a single day’s schooling in a real school. What I have learned outside my own profession I have learnt from environment. Perhaps it is this that makes me think environment more valuable than a set education and a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity.” Lives there even the schoolmaster who believes that there was any school or schoolmistress in Victorian days that could have done anything but hinder Miss Terry in the triumph of her artistic career? A born actress like Miss Terry could not be aided by Miss Melissa Wackles, with her “English grammar, composition and geography,” even though in that day of lady’s education it was tempered by the use of the dumb-bells.

In the same way, if we could assure to a boy or girl an apprenticeship from early days to a craftsman or farmer, it would probably be better for the children and the State than any other form of education they receive to-day. It is quite unlikely the world will ever see the minor arts and crafts ever restored to their former glory, unless it encourages parents who are themselves good craftsmen to keep their children away from the schoolmaster in the better atmosphere of a good workshop.

We talk largely about the melancholy increase of unemployment, but how much of this is caused by the education of masses of people in useless subjects. The bad boy who gets into trouble and has the good fortune to be put in a reformatory and there learns a trade has a much better chance of a useful and pleasurable life than the good boy who gains a County Council prize in geography.

I came across a servant in Cumberland whose education had resulted among other things in a knowledge of the catechism and a list of the rivers on the East coast of England, but who did not know the name of the river she could see from the window and who had not the least idea how to light a fire. What is the good of learning your duty to your neighbour when you cannot light a fire to warm him when he is wet through, without wasting two bundles of sticks and a pint of paraffin oil?

One must not however blame the girl, nor indeed her schoolmistress, for probably she too could not light a fire, and both regarded the lighting of a fire as a degrading thing to do. No doubt if you had pursued your educational researches in Cumberland to the source of things, you would have found that the committee could not light fires, and the inspector of schools could not light fires—it may be the Minister of Education himself cannot light a fire—and though there is plenty of material for fires in every board room there is nothing in the code about teaching children to make use of it. Yet I can conceive nothing a child would like better, in his or her early days in school, than being a fire monitor and having charge of the fire and learning to light and look after it. I have made much of this little incident because it is typical of the school education of to-day.

In the old days of family life boys and girls, and especially the latter, learnt in a good home a great deal of domestic work, and the boys could help in their father’s shop or farm or inn as the case might be, and learnt thereby many things that you cannot learn in schools. Mr. Squeers, though not a moral character, was possessed of a practical mode of teaching. “C-l-e-a-n clean, verb active to make bright, to scour. W-i-n win, d-e-r der, winder a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book he goes and does it.” And if you come to think of it, it is far more important that a boy should know how to keep a window clean than that he should know how to spell it.

The schoolmaster of an elementary school therefore should be a man of good domestic tastes, who wishes to see his home neat and clean and well kept and tidy, who insists on having his food well cooked, and prefers that his wife and daughter should be well dressed at the smallest possible cost to himself. These virtues he should be urged to put before scholars as being the first duties of life and the chiefest honour of a good citizen. The false notion that reading and writing are in themselves higher attainments than carpentering, cooking and sewing should be sternly discouraged, and only teachers should be chosen capable of some technical excellence in the practical work of crafts. For the same reasons teachers should never be chosen for any academic degree they possess, for every day it becomes more certain that the man who obtains these degrees is the man who has deliberately failed to make himself a master of any one subject. He is a man who has wasted precious hours in getting a smattering of many useless branches of learning, and has been forced by the sellers of degrees to abandon all hope of having sufficient leisure to study music or painting or the workmanship of a craft, or even to have read widely of English literature. In the education of the young the man who can play the piano, or better still, the fiddle, is more important to my purpose than the man who can make Latin verses; and the man who can model a toy boat with a pocket-knife whilst he is telling you a fairy tale is, from the standpoint of real education, a jewel of rare price. The schoolmaster of to-day is one of the disadvantages of education because he is interested mainly in subjects of smaller importance and is not really a sound man in any one real pursuit, such as music or drawing.

Another disadvantage of English elementary education is that it places the school course and literary things above the playing fields and physical things. All men who have thought about education at all, and who had any capacity for thinking wisely, have recognised that in training a child to make and keep his body a healthy body we are proceeding upon lines that experience tells us are right and sound lines. Here we can teach something we know. Plato tells us that the experience of the past in his day had discovered that right education consisted in gymnastics for the body and music for the mind. I do not know that we can say with certainty that we have ascertained to-day much more about education than Plato knew. In our day I should put the arts and crafts of home life and the practice—not preaching—of its virtues, first in the programme, and secondly, to use Plato’s word, gymnastics. These should include cricket, football, running, jumping, wrestling, dancing, fives, tennis, and all manly and womanly associated games which exercise and develop the body, and have by the public opinion of the players to be played with modesty and self-restraint, and with a reasonable technical skill that can only be arrived at by taking pains. All these things are far more useful than any subjects that can be taught in a schoolroom. One of the great advantages of middle-class public school life is that these things are taught, and that the boys work at them in a healthy spirit of emulation and a magnificent desire to succeed that would turn the whole nation into a Latin-speaking race, if by any misfortune its motive power were diverted into the schoolroom.

Elementary education and its schoolmasters have but small opportunities to foster this natural healthy training of the body in which all young people are willing and ready to co-operate with their teachers. Unfortunately, the men who obtain positions on educational committees are too often men who have amassed wealth at the expense of their livers, and who would look askance at the ideas of Plato, Roger Ascham, or Tolstoi. Still, I think a day is coming when playing-fields and playgrounds will be attached to every elementary school, and used not only by existing scholars, but by the old boys and girls, who will thereby keep in touch with the school and its good influences.

But, you will say, nothing has been said hitherto about any lessons. Are reading, writing, and arithmetic to be considered wholly as disadvantages? It would be easy to take up such a position and hold it in argument but it is not necessary. The advantages of educating the masses in the three R’s are obvious and on the surface, but the grave disadvantages are also there. It is no use teaching a person anything that he is likely to make a bad use of, and experience tells us that many people are ruined by learning to read. Since the Education Act of 1870, a mass of low-class literature and journalism has sprung up to cater for the tastes of a population that has undergone a compulsory training in reading. Betting and gambling have been greatly fostered by the power of reading and answering advertisements. In the same way quack remedies for imaginary ailments must have done a lot of harm to the health of the people, and the use of them is the direct result of teaching ignorant people to read and not teaching them to disbelieve most things they may happen to read. Writing in the same way by being made popular and common has become debased. One seldom sees a good handwriting nowadays and spelling is a lost art. Writing, however, must in a few years go out in favour of machine writing. Penmanship will hardly be taught some years hence when everyone will have a telephone and typewriter of his own. I cannot see that the universal habit of writing has done very much for the world. The great mass of written matter that circulates through the post, the vast columns of newspaper reports that are contradicted the next day—these things are the fruits of universal writing. There is no evidence that in the past anything worth writing ever remained unwritten. But there is strong evidence that since 1870 much has been written that had better have remained unwritten, and would have so remained but for State encouragement through its system of education. As to arithmetic—if you saw the books of the small shopkeepers in the County Court—you would recognise its small hold on the people. One chief use of it by the simpler folk seems to be the calculations of the odds on a horse race. In France and other more civilised countries this is done more honestly by a machine called a totaliser, and gambling is thereby kept within more reasonable limits. Elementary arithmetic has been profitable to the bookmaker—but to how many besides? If you teach a boy cooking or carpentering he is very unlikely to make an evil use of these accomplishments in after life because they naturally minister to the right enjoyment of life. Whereas if you teach a boy reading, writing, and arithmetic, the surroundings of youth being what they are, he is at least as likely to misuse these attainments as to use them to the benefit of himself and his fellow creatures. Once recognise this and you must admit not that the three R’s should be discontinued, but that much more should be done to teach the young persons to whom you have imparted these pleasant arts how to make use of them legitimately and honourably. It is no use teaching young people any subject unless you see that in after life they are to have opportunities of using their attainment for the benefit of the State. Our fathers and grandfathers were all for education as an end. We are face to face with the results of a national system of elementary education with no system whatever of helping the educated to make good use of their compulsory equipment. It is as though you gave a boy a rifle and taught him to shoot and turned him out into the world to shoot at anything he felt inclined. Such a boy would be a danger to the community, whereas if you placed him in a cadet corps when he left school he and his rifle might be a national asset.

That learning without a proper outlet for its use may be a grave danger to the individual and to the community is seen in the present state of India, and Lord Morley of Blackburn, one of the greatest supporters of education himself, called attention to the necessity of a community which provides an education to a certain class allowing the citizens so educated a proper opportunity of exercising the faculties it has developed. As he said in the House of Lords, “I agree that those who made education what it is in India are responsible for a great deal of what has happened since.” And what is true of India is equally true of England.

It is in providing healthy outlets and uses for the educational power that has been created that the Boards and Committees who govern these matters will have to turn immediate attention if they wish to justify their existence.

I know that these detached remarks of mine on education must necessarily appear heretical—and they are to some extent intentionally so. I do not agree with Mr. Chesterton that the heretic of old was proud of not being a heretic, and believed himself orthodox and all the rest of the world heretics. If he did he was indeed a madman. But there is a place in the world for the utterer of heresies if only to awaken the orthodox from slumber and to make him look around and see if there is any reform that can be made without destroying the whole edifice. Reforms come slowly and we, for our part, shall only see the dawn of a better era whose sunshine will gladden the lives of our grandchildren. I am not a pessimist about the English school though I have chosen to speak of its disadvantages. I think, to use an American phrase, it is a “live” thing.

If you go into an English village you find three great public institutions, the Church, the Inn, and the School. Each is licensed to some extent by the State and each is burdened by the connection. You find as a rule that the Church has voluntarily locked its doors and put up a notice that the key may be found at some old lady’s cottage half a mile away. You go into the Inn and find it struggling to make itself hospitable in spite of the mismanagement of brewers and the unsympathetic bigotry of magistrates. But from the door of the School troop out merry children, who some day will look back to that time of their life as the happiest of all, and who will recognise the debt of gratitude they are under to the schoolmaster, who in spite of the limitations of his system and himself encourages his pupils to effort and self-reliance and teaches them lessons of duty, reverence, and love.

I am not greatly interested in the Church or the Inn, both of which institutions seem well able to guard themselves from the disestablishment they are said to deserve. But I am interested in the School—and I wish to see it housed in fairer and more ample buildings with larger playing fields around them. And I want to see a race of schoolmasters not only better paid—but worth more. Men and women to whom the State can fairly give a free hand, knowing that their object in education would be to mould their pupils into self-reliant citizens rather than to teach them scholastic tricks. “The schoolmaster is abroad,” said Lord Brougham, “and I trust to him armed with his primer.” For my part, a schoolmaster armed with a primer is an abomination of desolation standing in a holy place. I differ from a Lord Chancellor with a very natural diffidence but his Lordship was wrong. The schoolmaster of 1828 was not abroad, he was in the same predicament as the schoolmaster of 1911—at sea.

If I were Minister of Education, I would write over the door of every school in the country the beautiful words, “Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto Me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Let us beware lest we forbid them by dogmas and creeds that lead only to hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; let us take heed lest we forbid them by lessons and learning dull for to-day and dangerous for to-morrow. Let us at least teach them as our grandmothers taught children when there were no schools in the land, the simple duties of life that we all know the meaning of, and the Christian duty of unselfishness which we none of us practise. And in this, as in all things, let us strive to teach by example rather than by word. And if we are to teach by the Christian rule, then how great, how noble, how enduring is to be the work of the schoolmaster in continuing the greatness of our nation. And the man or woman we shall choose shall not be a pedant, whose long ears are decorated by degrees, but an honest, simple person of any creed whatsoever, who will humbly and reverently teach the children of his or her school the few simple facts of life, and add to that something of its arts and its crafts and so much or little of its learning as can be a service and not a hindrance to the child’s career.

COOKERY BOOK TALK.

_Arviragus._ How angel-like he sings!

_Guiderius._ But his neat cookery! he cut our roots in characters,
And sauc’d our broths as Juno had been sick
And he her dieter.

_Cymbeline_ iv. 2.

In this passage Shakespeare exalts cookery above songs that are merely angel-like, and anyone who has dined at a modern restaurant with “music off” as part of the stage directions will agree with Guiderius that it is impertinent to consider the merit of song at moments that should be given to the praise of cookery. Incidentally, too, the passage has a value for the cuisinologist of an antiquarian turn of mind by pointing out that the decoration of dishes with alphabetical carrots and turnips, “roots cut in characters,” was a commonplace of the Shakespearean table.

And if in a detached passage from a dramatic writer we can find so much culinary thought, how much more remains to be sought after in those masterpieces of kitchen literature given to the world by the great artist cooks of bygone centuries.

It has always been a matter of considerable surprise to me that so few people really read their Cookery Book with any diligence and attention. There is no subject of conversation so popular as Cookery Book. It blends together all persons in a common chorus of talk irrespective of rank, age, sex, religion and education. The dullest eye lights up and a ripple crosses the most stagnant mind when the dying embers of formal conversation are called into brilliant flames by a few pages from the Cookery Book. Every one lays claim to take a hand at Cookery Book talk, no one is too bashful or ignorant in his own seeming, and yet how few really bring to the discussion a sound literary knowledge of even Mrs. Beeton and Francatelli, and how many prate of cookery to whom Mrs. Glasse and John Farley are unknown names. No one will talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses without at least a slight knowledge of Charles Lamb’s delightful nursery tales and the study of an article on the theory of music in “Snippy Bits.” But if Cookery Book is mentioned—and in ordinary society the subject is generally reached in the first ten minutes after the introduction—the humblest and most ignorant is found laying down the law with the misplaced confidence of a county magistrate. And yet with Cookery Book as with lower forms of learning one can never tell whence illumination may spring. True indeed is it that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings strength is ordained.

I remember a beautiful and remarkable instance of this which occurred but recently. I was privileged to dine at the family table of a great artist and there were present besides myself several others of sound learning and religious education from whom might be expected stimulating and rational conversation. We began I remember with the Pre-Raphaelites and ox-tail soup. Albert Durer started with the fish but “failed to stay the course,” as a sporting friend of my host remarked. He it was who brought the conversation round to the haven and heaven of all conversation—Cookery Book. He told a story of a haggis which drew from my host—an ardent Scotsman—a learned and literary defence of the haggis, which in common with the thistle, the bagpipes and Burns poetry it is a matter of patriotism for a Scotsman to uphold in the company of aliens. There was no doubt that my friend broke down in cross-examination as to the actual contents of the haggis, but as to the necessity of drinking raw whisky at short intervals during its consumption he was eloquent and convincing. When he had finished—or maybe before—I began to describe the inward beauties of a well-grilled mutton chop, and to detail an interesting discussion I had had the week before with a Dean of the Church of England on the respective merits of Sam’s Chop House in Manchester and the South Kensington Museum Grill Room. Listening is I fear a lost art for my entertaining reminiscences were broken into by a babel of tongues. Every one named his or her particular and favourite dish which was discussed rejected, laughed at and dismissed by the rest of the company. So loud was the clash of tongues that you might have imagined you were taking part in a solemn council at Pandemonium, when suddenly the shower of Cookery Book talk dried up and there was a pause, a lull—a silence. At that moment the youngest son of the house whose little curly head—like one of those heads of Sir Joshua’s angels—rested on his hands as he listened to the earnest converse of his grave elders—this child threw down before us a pearl of simple wisdom—“Surely you have forgotten bread sauce and chicken!” And so we had. The artist also remembered that we had left out sucking pig. The conversation started with renewed force. The whole question of onions in bread sauce was exhaustively debated and a happy evening was spent in congenial and intellectual conversation.

But how seldom it is that you find yourself among persons capable of discussing with knowledge any of the nicer problems of the kitchen. At my own table the other day a graduate of Cambridge actually asked my wife whether she put maraschino or curaçoa in the Hock cup. Yet in educational affairs this man passes for a rational and highly cultivated man. Colossal ignorance of this type is but too common. I have stayed—but never for more than one week-end—with families of the highest respectability to whom tarragon vinegar is unknown, and I once entertained a Judge of the High Court who did not know the difference between Nepaul and Cayenne pepper,—yet in his daily life he must have been called upon to decide differences of graver importance.

I wish I had the pen and the inspiration of one of the early prophets to rouse my countrymen to urge upon Education Committees, schools and universities their duty in dealing with this national ignorance. But one may at least make a practical suggestion. Why should not “What to do with the Cold Mutton” be read as a first reader in our elementary schools? It touches on no points of doctrine and teaches truths that both Anglican and Nonconformist could discuss pleasantly at a common board.

Once the young mind has tasted of the delight of the literary side of cookery a demand would spring up for the re-publication of many earnest, eloquent and scientific Cookery books of olden time. The eighteenth century was a golden age in the literature of cookery, and the works of Charlotte Mason, Sarah Harrison’s “Housekeeper’s Pocket Book,” and Elizabeth Marshall’s “Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery,”—these are books that should be in every polite library. For myself I prefer what may be called the Archæology of Cookery and the study of “The Proper New Book of Cookery, 1546,” or Partridge’s “Treasury of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets, 1580?” will have a charm for all who like to pierce the veil that hides the old world from us. We have moved on since then it is true, but for my part I like to learn how to “pot a Swan” or “make an Olio Pye,” though such learning is no longer practical.

To those who have not access to the original editions of the classics, let me commend that charming volume of the Book Lovers’ Library, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt’s “Old Cookery Books.” Problems are there touched upon that when we have a serious business Government untrammelled by party ties will be solved by Royal Commissions dealing with the various aspects of cookery which, as an old writer says, is “The Key of Living.” It was Tobias Venner, as long ago as 1620, who endeavoured to dissuade the poor from eating partridges, because they were calculated to promote asthma. Many Poor Law Commissions have sat since then, but the truth of Venner’s theory has never yet been subjected to modern scientific criticism, and every year from September to February the poor continue to remain under the shadow of asthma. The Government give us volumes of historical records, but I search in vain among them for the way to make Mrs. Leed’s Cheesecakes and “The Lord Conway, His Lordship’s receipt for the making of Amber Pudding.” Thus are we trifled with by our rulers, few of whom I think could tell us without research why the porpoise and the peacock no longer grace the tables of Royal persons.

But see how Nature supplements the mistakes of mankind. True it is that Governments do nothing for our greatest art, sadly true it is that the great masterpieces of culinary writing remain on the shelves, and disgracefully true it is that among the idle rich of our universities there is not one Professor of Cookery—though there be many ignorant critics of the Art at high tables. And yet, round every board, simple or noble, with the steam that rises from the cooked meats comes the heartfelt praise of mankind rejoicing to lift up the voice in that Cookery Book talk, which is the oral tradition that carries on the religion of the “Key of Living.”

Indeed, there is only one human being who does not talk about Cookery, and that is the high Priestess herself—the Cook. This I have on the evidence of a policeman.

A DAY OF MY LIFE IN THE COUNTY COURT.

“We take no note of time
But from its loss.”

_Young’s Night Thoughts._

It is a difficult task to describe to others the everyday affairs of one’s own life. The difficulty seems to me to arise in discovering what it is that is new and strange to a person who finds himself for the first time in a place where the writer has spent the best part of the last twenty years. The events in a County Court are to me so familiar that it is hard to appreciate the interest shown in our daily routine by some casual onlooker whom curiosity, or a subpœna, has brought within our walls. Still, in so far as the County Court is a poor man’s Court, it is a good thing that the outside world should take an interest in its proceedings, for much goes on there that has an immediate bearing on the social welfare of the working classes, and a morning in the Manchester County Court would throw a strong light on the ways and means of the poor and the fiscal problems by which they are surrounded.

An urban County Court is a wholly different thing from the same institution in a country town. Here in Manchester we have to deal with a large number of bankruptcy cases, proceedings under special Acts of Parliament, cases remitted from the High Court, and litigation similar in character to, but smaller in importance than the ordinary civil list of an Assize Court. Cases such as these are contested in much the same way as they are in the High Court, counsel and solicitors appear—the latter having a right of audience in the County Court—and all things are done in legal decency and order. The litigants very seldom desire a jury, having perhaps the idea that a common judge is as a good tribunal as a common jury, whereas a special judge wants a common jury to find out the everyday facts of his case for him. I could never see why juries are divided into two classes, special and common, and judges are not. It is a fruitful idea for the legal reformer to follow out.

The practice in Manchester is to have special days for the bigger class of cases, and to try to give clear days for the smaller matters where most of the parties appear in person. The former are printed in red on the Court Calendar, and the latter in black, and locally the days are known as red-letter days and black-letter days. On a black-letter day counsel and solicitors indeed often appear—for it is a practical impossibility to sort out the cases into two exact classes—but the professions know that on a black-letter day they have no precedence, and very cheerfully acquiesce in the arrangement, since it is obvious that to the community at large it is at least as important that a working woman should be home in time to give her children their dinner as that a solicitor should return to his office or a barrister lunch at his club.

Let me try, then, to bring home to your mind what happens on a black-letter day.

We are early risers in Manchester, and the Court sits at ten. I used to get down to my Court about twenty minutes earlier, as on a black-letter day there are sure to be several letters from debtors who are unable to be at Court, and these are always addressed to me personally. Having disposed of the correspondence there is generally an “application in chambers” consisting of one or more widows whose compensation under the Workman’s Compensation Act remains in Court to be dealt with for their benefit. I am rather proud of the interest and industry the chief clerks of my Court have shown in the affairs of these poor women and children, and the general “liberty to apply” is largely made use of that I may discuss with the widows or the guardians of orphans plans for the maintenance and education of the children, and the best way to make the most of their money.

You would expect to find the Court buildings geographically in the centre of Manchester, but they are placed almost on the boundary. Turning out of Deansgate down Quay Street, which, as its name implies, leads towards the river Irwell, you come across a street with an historic name, Byrom Street. The name recalls to us the worthy Manchester doctor and the days when even Manchester was on the fringe of a world of romance, and John Byrom made his clever epigram:

God bless the King, I mean the faith’s defender,
God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who the King,
God bless us all—that’s quite another thing.

It is a far cry from Jacobites to judgment debtors, but it is a pleasant thought to know that one lives in an historic neighbourhood, even if the building you work in is not exactly fitted for the modern purpose for which it is used.

At the corner of Byrom Street and Quay Street is the Manchester County Court. It is an old brick building with some new brick additions. Some architect, we may suppose, designed it, therefore let it pass for a house. It was built, as far as I can make out, in the early part of last century, when the brick box with holes in it was the standard form of the better class domestic dwelling house. Still it is an historic building. In 1836 it was No. 21 Quay Street, the residence of Richard Cobden, calico printer, whose next door neighbour was a Miss Eleanora Byrom. Cobden sold it to Mr. Faulkner for the purposes of the Owens College, so it was the first home of the present Victoria University. It is now a County Court. _Facilis descensus._ It still contains several very fine mahogany doors that give it the air of a house that has seen better days.

You will see groups of women making their way down to the Court, many with a baby in one arm and a door key slung on the finger. The wife is the solicitor and the advocate of the working class household, and very cleverly she does her work as a rule. The group of substantial-looking men chatting in the street are debt-collecting agents and travelling drapers discussing the state of trade. These are the Plaintiffs and their representatives, the women are the Defendants. Here and there you will see a well-dressed lady, probably summoned to the Court by a servant or a dressmaker. There will always be a few miscellaneous cases, but the trivial round and common task of the day is collecting the debts of small tradesmen from the working class.

I have no doubt that a County Court Judge gets an exaggerated view of the evils of the indiscriminate credit given to the poor. They seem to paddle all their lives ankle-deep in debt, and never get a chance of walking the clean parapet of solvency. But that is because one sees only the seamy side of the debt-collecting world, and knows nothing of the folk who pay without process. At the same time, that indiscriminate credit-giving as practised in Manchester is an evil, no one, I think, can doubt, and it seems strange that social reformers pay so little attention to the matter.

The whole thing turns, of course, upon imprisonment for debt. Without imprisonment for debt there would be little credit given, except to persons of good character, and good character would be an asset. As it is, however, our first business in the morning will be to hear a hundred judgment summonses in which creditors are seeking to imprison their debtors. There are some ten thousand judgment summonses in Manchester and Salford in a year, but they have to be personally served, and not nearly that number come for trial. We start with a hundred this morning, of which say sixty are served. It is well to sit punctually, and we will start on the stroke of ten.

A debt collector enters the Plaintiff’s box, and, refreshing his memory from a note book, tells you what the Defendant’s position is, where he works, and what he earns. The minute book before you tells you the amount of his debt, that he has been ordered to pay 2s. a month, and has not paid anything for six months. His wife now enters into all the troubles of her household, and makes the worst of them. One tries to sift the true from the false, the result being that one is generally convinced that the Defendant has had means to pay the 2s. a month, or whatever the amount may be, since the date when the order was made. The law demands that the debtor should be imprisoned for not having paid, but no one wants him to go to prison, so an order is made of seven or fourteen days, and it is suspended, and is not to issue if he pays the arrears and fees, say in three monthly instalments. The wife is satisfied that the evil day is put off and goes away home, and the creditor generally gets his money. He may have to issue a warrant, but the Defendant generally manages to pay by hook or by crook, rather than go to Knutsford Gaol, where the debtors are imprisoned, and as a matter of fact only a few actually go to gaol. Of course, the money is often borrowed or paid by friends, which is another evil of the system. The matter is more difficult when, as often happens, the Defendants do not appear. It is extraordinary how few people can read and understand a comparatively simple legal notice or summons. Mistakes are constantly made. A collier once brought me an official schedule of his creditors, in which in the column for “description,” where he should have entered “grocer,” “butcher,” etc., he had filled in the best literary description he could achieve of his different creditors, and one figured as “little lame man with sandy whiskers.” There are of course many illiterates, and they have to call in the assistance of a “scholard.” An amusing old gentleman came before me once, who was very much perturbed to know if, to use his own phrase, he was “entaitled to pay this ’ere debt.” The incident occurred at a time when the citizens of Manchester were being polled to vote on a “culvert scheme” of drainage, which excited much popular interest.

“I don’t deny owing the debt,” he said, “and I’ll pay reet enow, what your Honour thinks reet, if I’m entaitled to pay.”

I suggested that if he owed the money he was clearly “entitled” to pay.

“Well,” he continued, “I thowt as I should ’ave a summons first.”

“But you must have had a summons,” I said, “or how did you get here?”

“’E towd me case wor on,” he said, pointing to the Plaintiff, “so I coom.”

I looked up matters and discovered that service of the summons was duly reported, and informed the Defendant, who seemed much relieved.

“You see,” he said, “I’m no scholard, and we got a paaper left at our ’ouse, and I took it up to Bill Thomas in our street, a mon as con read, an’ ’e looks at it, an’ says as ’ow may be it’s a coolvert paaper. ‘I’m not certain,’ ’e says, ‘but I think it’s a coolvert paaper.’ So I asks him what to do wi’ it, and he says, ‘Put a cross on it, and put it in a pillar box,’ and that wor done. But if you say it wor a summons, Bill must a bin wrong.”

One can gather something from this poor fellow’s difficulties of the trouble that a summons of any kind must cause in a domestic household, and one can only hope for the day when England will follow the example of other civilised countries and at least do away with the judgment summons and imprisonment for debt.

The hundred judgment summonses will have taken us until about eleven o’clock, and meanwhile in an adjoining Court the Registrar has been dealing with a list of about four hundred cases. The bulk of these are undefended, and the Registrar enters up judgment and makes orders against the Defendant to pay the debt by instalments at so much a month. A small percentage—say from five to ten per cent. of the cases—are sent across to the Judge’s Court for trial, and small knots of folk come into Court to take the seats vacated by the judgment debtors and wait for the trials to come on.

The trial of a County Court action on a black-letter day, where Plaintiff and Defendant appear in person, where neither understands law, evidence, or procedure, and where the main object of each party is to overwhelm his opponent by a reckless fire of irrelevant statements, is not easy to conduct with suavity and dignity. The chief object of a County Court Judge, as it seems to me—I speak from many years’ experience—should be to suffer fools gladly without betraying any suspicion that he considers himself wise. Ninety-nine per cent. of the cases are like recurring decimals. They have happened, and will happen again and again. The same defence is raised under the same circumstances. To the shallow-witted Defendant it is an inspiration of mendacity, to the Judge it is a commonplace and expected deceit. All prisoners in a Police Court who are found with stolen goods upon them tell you that they have bought them from a man whose name they do not know. There is no copyright in such a defence, and it sounds satisfactory to each succeeding publisher of it. No doubt it is disappointing to find that the judge and jury have heard it before and are not disposed to believe it. In the same way in the County Court there are certain lines of defence that I feel sure students of folk-lore could tell us were put forward beneath the oak trees when the Druids sat in County Courts in prehistoric times. The serious difficulty lies in continuing to believe that a Defendant may arise who actually has a defence, and in discovering and rescuing a specimen of a properly defended action from a crowded museum of antique mendacities. Counter-claims, for instance, which of course are only filed in the bigger cases, are very largely imaginative. The betting against a valid counter-claim must be at least ten to one. It is, of course, in finding the one that there is scope for ingenuity. It is the necessity for constant alertness that makes the work interesting.

The women are the best advocates. Here, for instance, is a case in point.

A woman Plaintiff with a shawl over her head comes into the box, and an elderly collier, the Defendant, is opposite to her. The action is brought for nine shillings. I ask her to state her case.

“I lent yon mon’s missus my mon’s Sunday trousers to pay ’is rent, an’ I want ’em back.”

That seems to me, as a matter of pleading, as crisp and sound as can be. If the trousers had been worth five hundred pounds, a barrister would have printed several pages of statement of claim over them, but could not have stated his case better. My sympathies are with the lady. I know well the kindness of the poor to each other, and, won by the businesslike statement of the case, I turn round to the Defendant and ask him why the trousers are not returned and what his defence may be.

He smiles and shakes his head. He is a rough, stupid fellow, and something amuses him. I ask him to stop chuckling and tell me his defence.

“There’s nowt in it all,” is his answer.

I point out that this is vague and unsatisfactory, and that the words do not embody any defence to an action of detinue known to the law.

He is not disturbed. The lady gazes at him triumphantly. He is a slow man, and casually mentions “The ’ole street knows about them trousers.”

I point out to him that I have never lived in the street, and know nothing about it. He seems to disbelieve this and says with a chuckle, “Everyone knows about them trousers.”

I press him to tell me the story, but he can scarcely believe that I do not know all about it. At length he satisfies my curiosity.

“Why yon woman an’ my missus drank them trousers.”

The woman vociferates, desires to be struck dead and continues to live, but bit by bit the story is got at. Two ladies pawn the husband’s trousers, and quench an afternoon’s thirst with the proceeds. The owner of the Sunday trousers is told by his wife a story of destitution and want of rent, and the generous loan of garments. Every one in the street but the husband enjoys the joke. The indignant husband, believing in his wife, sues for the trousers and sends his wife to Court. The street comes down to see the fun, and when I decide for the Defendant there is an uprising of men, women, and babies, and the parties and their friends disappear while we call the next case. These are the little matters where it is easy to make a blunder, and where patience and attention and a knowledge of the ways and customs of the “’ole street” are worth much legal learning.

One must learn to sympathise with domestic frailties. I was rebuking a man, the other day, for backing up his wife in what was not only an absurd story, but one in which I could see he had no belief.

“You should really be more careful,” I said, “and I tell you candidly I don’t believe a word of your wife’s story.”

“You may do as yer like,” he said, mournfully, “but I’ve got to.”

The sigh of envy at the comparative freedom of my position as compared with his own was full of pathos.

A case of a workman who was being sued for lodging money gave me a new insight into the point of view of the clever but dissipated workman. His late landlady was suing for arrears run up when, as she said, he was “out of work.”

The phrase made him very angry.

“Look ’ere,” he said, “can that wumman kiss the book agen? She’s swearin’ false. I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my life. Never.”

“Tummas,” says the old lady, in a soothingly irritating voice. “Think, Tummas.”

“Never been out o’ wark i’ my life,” he shouts.

“Oh, Tummas,” says the old lady, more in sorrow than in anger. “You remember Queen’s funeral. You were on the spree a whole fortneet.”

“Oh, ay!” says Thomas unabashed; “but you said out o’ wark. If you’re sayin’ on the spree I’m with yer, but I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my life.”

It was a sad distinction for a clever working man to make, but a true one and to him an important one, and I rather fancy the nice old lady knew well what she was doing in her choice of phrase and hoped to score off Thomas by irritating him into an unseemly exhibition by the use of it.

A class of case that becomes very familiar arises out of the sale of a small business. A fried-fish shop is regarded by an enterprising widow who does not possess one as a mine of untold gold. She purchases one at a price above its value, fails from want of knowledge to conduct it successfully, and then brings an action for fraudulent misrepresentation against the seller. Of course, there are cases of fraud and misrepresentation; but, as a rule, there is nothing more than the natural optimistic statements of a seller followed by incompetence of the purchaser and the disgust of old customers. In a case of this sort, in which up to a point it was difficult to know where the truth lay, owing to the vague nature of the evidence, a graphic butcher gave a convincing account of the reason of the failure of the new management. He had come down to the Court in the interests of justice, leaving the abattoir—or as he called it “habbitoyre”—on his busiest morning.

“Yer see,” he said, “I knew the old shop well. I was in the ’abit of takin’ in a crowd of my pals on Saturday neet. So when the old Missus gave it up, I promised to give it a try wi’ the new Missus. Well, I went in twice, an’ there wor no sort o’ choice at all. There worn’t no penny fish, what there wor, wor ’a-penny fish, and bad at that, an’ the chips wor putty.”

It was obvious that the Plaintiff had started on a career for which Nature did not intend her, and that the cause of the failure of the business was not the fraud of the Defendant, but the culinary incompetence of the Plaintiff.