Chapter V: Part 5

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.’”

But ought it to be cleared away? In the main I think it should. One might lay down the principle that where the debt was not necessarily incurred the State should not assist the creditor to collect it by imprisoning the debtor. For the system is used, in the majority of cases, by a very undesirable class of creditor. I analysed a list of 460 summonses heard by me in one day. There were 284 drapers and general dealers. These include all the instalment and hire system creditors. There were sixty jewellers, thirty-five grocers, twenty-four money-lenders, and ten doctors. Now, with the exception of the doctors, and possibly in a few instances the grocers, it was not in the least desirable, from the point of view of the State, that these debts should be collected at all. Why should taxes be imposed and work done at the public expense to enable a jeweller to persuade a man to buy a watch he does not want? Why should the State collect the jeweller’s money for him by imprisonment for debt? If there had been no imprisonment for debt the jeweller’s business wouldn’t pay, and the workman would have one chance less of mortgaging his wages for the immediate delight of possessing a third-rate piece of jewellery. This would be better for the State and the workman, and for everybody but the jeweller. But why should his interests prevail over those of the rest of the community, and why should we spend money in promoting a business of which most of us disapprove? Everyone must have noticed of late years the enormous growth of firms whose main business seems to be to tempt people of small means to purchase things they do not want, or, at all events, cannot afford. Take up any newspaper or magazine circulating among the lower middle classes, or among working men, and you will find it crowded with advertisements of musical instruments, cycles, furniture on the hire system, packets of cutlery, all of which can be obtained by a small payment down and smaller instalments to follow. Remember, too, that over and above these there exists a huge army of “tally men” and travelling touts, who are pushing on commission, clothing, sewing machines, Family Bibles in expensive series, jewellery, and a host of unnecessaries. What chance has the working-man to keep out of debt? Not one of these transactions has any commercial sanction. Credit is given merely because there is imprisonment for debt. And there is a further aspect of this question which I am surprised has never attracted the attention of temperance reformers. As long as a man can get credit for groceries and clothes there is not the same urgent reason to spend his cash upon these things. But cash is necessary in the public-house, because, by the Tippling Acts, no action can be brought for the price of drink consumed at a public-house. So the obvious result too often follows: the wages are spent at the public-house, and the credit for the week’s groceries and the children’s boots is obtained under the sanction of imprisonment for debt.

Much more might be said in objection to the system of imprisonment for debt, but we have enough before us, I think, to show a strong case for reform. The next question will be: Should that reform be abolition? Although I am personally in favour of the abolition of imprisonment for debt, I am in doubt whether it is desirable at the moment; and I am so eager to see some reform that I would welcome any measure, however meagre, that did something to mitigate the misfortunes of the insolvent poor. I have suggested as a practical measure that no summons should be issued or committal made for a less sum than forty shillings. One must remember that there are a huge number of traders giving reasonable credit to their fellow-traders, who find, when they seek to recover the debt, that the goods in the house or shop are in the wife’s name. This is really a quasi-fraudulent obtaining of credit, and there are many similar cases not within the criminal law where imprisonment for debt seems a natural remedy. Moreover, if one studies the evidence given before the Commissioners on the subject, and if one discusses it, as I have, with men in business, one finds that abolition would meet with great opposition from powerful trade interests, whereas the “forty shilling” proposal is generally regarded as a fair experiment, which would injure no one but traders who deliberately give credit to the poorer working class under the sanction of imprisonment for debt. In my own experience, I have found hardly any cases of judgments summonses taken out for more than two pounds where there was not ample evidence of means, and where the non-payment was not more or less of the nature of a contempt of Court. In the smaller cases the means, though proved to have existed since the judgment, have disappeared, and the debtor is only saved from imprisonment by the leniency of the Court. Total abolition of imprisonment for debt would probably never be carried by consent. It would mean more commissions, inquiries, reports, and the waste of time that these things necessitate. Abolition of imprisonment for debt for sums under forty shillings—a great practical reform for the very poor—would, I believe, be carried by consent. That is why I put it forward. It is utterly illogical but intensely practical; and when one has been face to face with the misery of others for many years, one cares more for business than logic.

Assuming, therefore, that the future of the County Court as a debt-collecting machine is to be a future of decrease, that the legislature are going to save the taxpayer’s money and encourage thrift by refusing to collect undesirable debts, what will be its future as a litigating machine?

I may commend to anyone desirous of studying in further detail the arguments for and against the extension of County Courts, the proceedings of the Norwood Commission on County Courts in 1878. There is no doubt that if the business man had had his way the County Court in urban centres would have long ago been a district Court for all but cases of some peculiar public or legal importance. The great enemy to such an extension has always been the lawyer, and the London lawyer in particular. A very eminent solicitor, giving evidence before the Commission in 1878, had no confidence whatever in County Courts. His evidence was very typical, and shows how carefully one should criticise the evidence of a professional man who is also a very superior person. His view was that “When occasionally a client of mine of position who has been summoned to the County Court comes to me, I am unable to leave him in the lurch, but I never go into the County Court myself.” Asked whether he thought it “undignified,” he replied enigmatically: “It is not a matter of dignity, but a man of position cannot go into the County Court.” It turned out later that it was a physical difficulty, for it was “quite inconsistent with the position of a professional man to stand in the County Court with women bringing cases about washing-tubs, and servants summoning their masters for wages.”

He called them untaught knaves unmannerly
To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse,
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.

Dozens of times, he told the Commission, barristers had declined to go into the County Court, and his clerk had gone to half-a-dozen barristers before he could find one who would demean himself by taking a case in the County Court. County Courts were, in his view, “inherently incapable of conducting important litigation.” The County Court Judges had not, in his opinion, the confidence of the country, because they are not taken from the successful members of the Bar, it is known that their salary is an extremely small one, there is no Bar attending before them, there is no report of their proceedings, and there are difficulties of appeal. One thing I find very delightful in the eminent solicitor’s evidence.

_Question._—Some of the County Court Judges are very competent
men, are they not?

_Answer._—Extremely.

_Question._—You think that there are some who are not equal to
the others?

_Answer._—Yes.

_Question._—Is not the same thing true in regard to the
Superior Courts?

_Answer._—You will not expect me to answer that question, I
think.

Even in the dark ages of 1878 one would have thought he might have risked an affirmative.

One does not quote the eminent solicitor’s opinion merely for the humour that attaches to old-fashioned ideas and prophecies that are brought to light in a new age and found to be absurd. No doubt he was fighting for a substantial thing, in a word—costs, and he was fighting the wreckers that wanted to break up the machinery that made costs, for he naturally disliked to see the smooth, well-oiled machine that worked so well for him replaced by some cheap machinery of one-horse “costs” power. In one thing I confess to his statesmanlike insight. If you want to improve the County Courts, he said, the “only improvement would be to double the salary of the judges at least,” and let the judge reside in his district, “but then you would be establishing superior Courts all over the country.” And the idea of the “country” having similar facilities to London for the trial of actions was too preposterous. It had only to be stated, it was self-condemned, and the matter dropped.

One must not suppose that there were no champions of saner methods in 1878. On the contrary, I think the reformers were the better team of the two, and pressed their opponents hard, although they did not score greatly in the end. What could be more interesting or important than the opinion of Lord Bramwell, who was concerned in several of the Judicature Commissions prior to 1878? His view was that the County Courts should be made constituent branches of the High Court of Justice, and that as a consequence of that, the existing jurisdiction in common law should be unlimited. That is to say every action would commence in the County Court and be tried there unless the defendant chose to remove it to the High Court. It was pointed out that this would practically mean giving to every district, local Courts with full powers, and among other things that it would lead to the “deterioration of the Bar.” Lord Bramwell objected to the phrase, and answered his opponents by saying that the then Attorney-General (Sir John Holker) and Mr. Gully and Mr. Pope and Mr. Higgins, one of her Majesty’s counsel, have belonged to the local Bar, “and I think I may say of my knowledge, that the local Bar of Liverpool is as good as the London Bar.” This is important testimony, inasmuch as any evolution towards district Courts that will injure the assize system is sure to be opposed by those barristers—and there are many in Parliament—who are interested in the assize system, and one argument will be that the client will be deprived of the advantage of London “silk” if his case is tried in the County Court. Lord Bramwell disposes of that argument very shortly. “If there is any disparagement or injury to the Bar for the benefit of the public, the Bar must undergo it; that is all.”

In other words, the Courts of the future must be made convenient to the public as well as convenient to the profession; and where interests clash the public interest must be considered before the professional interest. This looks when written down an obvious platitude, but the history of the efforts to obtain and improve County Courts since 1830 will convince the legal reformer that it is worth re-stating.

Some years ago I made some elaborate calculations from the Blue Books, the results of which were rather surprising even to myself. I investigated the figures of ten typical urban Circuits in the centres of industry and of ten typical rural Circuits in agricultural districts. I found that in the former Circuits in ten years there had been a large increase in business. Nearly £40,000 a year more was paid to the Treasury in fees, and more than £150,000 was the increase in monies collected for suitors. In the same ten years similar figures for the rural districts showed a marked decrease. When one compared the turnover of the ten urban Circuits as against the turnover of the ten rural Circuits, it was as ten to one. I wondered what a Harrod or a Lipton or a Whiteley would have done with these Courts if he had found in auditing their accounts over many years that ten of them were non-increasing in a business sense, and that the other ten were increasing; if he found that he drew £150,000 as an income from one set and £40,000 from the other set. Would he not consider whether there was not a class of business being done by the urban circuits worthy of special consideration and encouragement?

For what did these figures show? They showed on the one hand a stagnant and non-increasing business, and on the other a business increasing by leaps and bounds. What business man would hesitate to extend ten branch concerns capable of so great an improvement in turnover in the course of a few years? I am frankly an enemy to making the suitor pay for his law. I believe, as Lord Brougham did, in free law; but if the system is to continue, why should a suitor in Birmingham pay more for his law than is necessary in order that a suitor in Ambleside may pay less for his law than it costs?

The Courts are, no doubt, not paying concerns, but how far some Circuits are run at a profit it is impossible for anyone outside the Treasury to ascertain. There is no doubt, however, that the loss in small Courts is very great, and whether they are of any great value to a district in these days of postal facilities and cheap railway transit I have grave doubts. I have always thought that the Post Office might work a great deal of the pure debt-collecting business in connection with the County Court, if it were thought desirable. It would, to my mind, be a natural co-ordination of two public offices, and might adapt itself very well to the needs of rural districts. If a country debtor could pay his debt to the nearest post office, and get an official receipt there, many small Courts and offices would become wholly unnecessary, and with a post office cash on delivery system one excuse for giving credit would be removed.

Why one little town has a Court and another has none it is as impossible to say, as why one little pig went to market and the other little pig stayed at home. These ancient myths are part of our history, and any effort to dislodge them is rightly made difficult. But whilst the Courts of London and the Midlands and the North are overcrowded, there are actually ten Courts issuing less than 100 plaints each—their average is 57!—and thirty-two Courts with less than 200. Alston, in Cumberland, is the holder of the record. This Court issued twenty-seven plaints and four actions were heard. It heard two judgment summonses, and made a commitment order in one. And the Court collected sixteen pounds in fees. To cope with this annual business the Judge sat once and the Registrar three times. It will take a long time to persuade these small communities that it is necessary they should give up conditions such as these to which they have become accustomed. I think it would be more readily done if the districts that had no real use for a County Court or an Assize Court were only allowed to retain them on payment of what they cost to the community.

The endeavour to bring justice to the poor man’s door is more praiseworthy than practical. I remember explaining to a collier’s wife that her husband must attend with her, and adjourned the case to a Monday for that purpose. Monday is often kept by colliers as a saint’s day. “Eh!” she replied. “It will be very onconvanient. My maister winna like coming on a Monday. Besides, it’s my weshing-day.”

I expressed my regret, but said it must be.

“Well, it’s very onconvanient our coming here. Couldn’t yo call?”

The idea of calling personally on the litigants—especially in these days of motor-cars, when every registrar is probably an expert chauffeur—is a very attractive one, and not much more absurd that the present system of sending Judges to Courts that have no real use for them.

But from my point of view, the difficulties of dealing with the smaller Courts, if they exist, should not hinder the development of the larger Circuits. It is clear that the problems of providing adequate Civil Courts for Central Wales and Norfolk is not the same as the problem of providing similar tribunals for Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. I have shown that there are a large number of districts where the Courts are increasing yearly in usefulness and in public favour, and there is, I think, a strong case that from a business point of view Circuits that are dealing with large amounts of work should be specially considered.

I do not think there will be any great difficulty in dealing with the great urban centres when the legislature makes up its mind to make the County Courts district Courts working directly in touch with the High Courts. No doubt it will mean the providing of money for further and better equipment, but it has certainly to come about, and there are signs that it is being faced. The problem of the rural Courts is more difficult, but I think the grouping of several Courts under one resident permanent registrar with extended powers and allowing him to gather together in one place a day’s work for the Judge who is to travel his Circuit with a business regard for the actual wants of litigants from time to time is a statement of the general lines upon which reforms can be carried out. The rural Courts will always be costly to the community, out of all proportion to the services rendered, but they are necessary and the expense must be borne; the urban Courts, on the other hand, might be made to pay their way, and might be of far greater service to the business communities around them than they already are.

It is difficult, of course, to write upon such a subject without personal bias, and it has been my lot to take an official position for the sake of its comparative leisure, and to find that leisure taken away by successive Acts of Parliament without compensation for disturbance. Still, experience of legal reform leads me to believe that I cannot be writing this with any personal motive, for I cannot hope to be presiding in any County Court in the latter part of the twentieth century, when, according to recorded precedent, such reforms as I propose will be about due.

Why, then, do I commend the future of the County Court to the attention of the legal reformer? Because I see in the County Court, and in that Court only, a growing and popular tribunal favoured by the business men of the country. Because in that Court there is a crying abuse calling aloud for reform, namely, imprisonment for debt, which abuse, when abolished or mitigated, will release Judges from odious duties, and give them time for more honourable services. Because in great urban centres there has long been a demand for continued sittings, which the High Court has been unable to comply with, but which the County Court already satisfies to some extent, and with reasonable equipment could supply in full measure. The record of the County Courts in the last fifty years is a very remarkable one. In the face of keen professional opposition, Parliament has given them year by year more important and onerous duties. These have been carried out in the main to the satisfaction of the business man in the business centres. It is because the urban County Courts are live business concerns, carrying on their business to the satisfaction of their customers, that I believe in the future of the County Court.

THE PREVALENCE OF PODSNAP.

“The question about everything was would it bring about a blush
into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of
the young person was that according to Mr. Podsnap she seemed
always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at
all.”

—_Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend._

There seems an alarming recrudescence of Podsnappery at the present moment. Perhaps in a measure it is a protest against things that are wrong. If some novel-writers exceed the limits of reasonable plain speech, and some dramatists seek publicly to exhibit the results of moral leprosy, they challenge the latent Podsnap, that is a valuable asset in our national character, to flourish its right arm and say, “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” With every proper contempt for Podsnap, there are some excesses about which he is right when he sweeps them away with the verdict, “Not English!” But having tasted too much success by reason of the excesses of his enemies, he is beginning not only to reform our morals, but has started upon our manners.

A “Town Vicar,” writing a letter to a Church paper, recently lifted up his voice in the following complaint: “It is not long ago that I heard a Dean declare that ‘we were not going to take it lying down,’ and more than one Bishop has in preaching lately had recourse to ‘the bottom dog.’ But these are mere details in the alarming spread of vulgarity where culture and right feeling used to be.”

What would Charles Kingsley have said or His Honour Judge Hughes to a parson who shrank from a simile drawn from the noble art of self-defence? Seeing, too, that the phrase has attained esoteric political value in respect of its use by the leader of Birmingham state-craft, the Podsnap in our good Vicar takes too much upon itself when it declares that the sporting Dean who used it was wanting in “culture and right feeling.”

The reference by more than one Bishop to the “bottom dog” is less easy to defend. The “Town Vicar” no doubt regards a Bishop as so far removed from the everyday affairs of the world that the phrase should never have polluted his ears, far less his lips, and that if he has indeed heard of the existence of “bottom dogs,” and he desires to express himself about them, he should allude to them on the platform as the “submerged tenth,” and in the pulpit as “our poorer brethren.”

To many of us it will come as a pleasant surprise to know that there is more than one Bishop whose courage is stronger than his culture. Not that one desires to see in Bishops or in anyone else a tendency towards the patronage of meaningless slang or dull expletive. I remember a story of the seventies that used to be told with equal inaccuracy of Canon Farrar and Bishop Fraser. The Bishop—let us say—travelling in a third-class carriage with some workmen, took occasion to reprove one on his constant and meaningless use of the adjective “bloody.”

The workman took the reproof in good part, and by way of excuse said: “You see, Mister, I can’t help it. I’m a plain man, and I call a spade a spade.”

“That is just what you don’t do,” retorted the Bishop quickly. “You call it ‘a bloody shovel.’” At which they all laughed in a friendly spirit, and the offender promised amendment.

Relating this anecdote at a dinner, a well-known pillar of the Church, noted for his pompous demeanour and the ignorant pleasure he took in the use of long words, expressed his horror that such language could be used in any form of society. “For myself,” he said, “I cannot believe it possible that, however I had been brought up, such words could pass my lips.” “I am sure of it,” replied the Bishop, “in whatever society you found yourself you would always refer to a spade as an agricultural implement for the trituration of soil.”

And, indeed, in this story lies the test of the matter. A spade is to be called a spade. And whilst even Podsnap is right in putting his veto on the mediæval adjective dear to the sons of toil, we are not going to be bullied by him into periphrastic descriptions of facts that are better stated in plain, simple, and even vulgar language.

The “Spectator” voiced a very general feeling among the Podsnap family in writing of Mr. Lloyd-George’s reference to the hereditary principle and his simile that a peer became a legislator by being “the first of the litter.” The word ‘litter’ quoted without its context may seem a little harsh, but the point of the allusion was that, although we chose our legislators in that way we did not choose our spaniels by this curious and, as he argued, obsolete method. The “Spectator” found this to be mere vulgarity. I have a great affection for the “Spectator,” having been brought up from earliest childhood to reverence her teachings. I say “her” because I always visualise the “Spectator” as some being like Charles Lamb’s aunt, who was “a dear and good one ... a stedfast friendly being, and a fine old Christian ... whose only secular employment was the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a china basin of fair water.” Much as I honour the “Spectator,” I cannot but think the prevailing Podsnap is warping her better judgment.

But there is an excuse for the “Spectator” that cannot be offered for the average man of the world who claims to be righteously offended at the vulgarity of Mr. Lloyd-George’s similes.

I met a friend upon the golf links who used language upon the last green, where he failed to hole out in three, that no Bishop could have sanctioned, even although he fully appreciated that my friend was for the moment a “bottom dog.” On the way to the Club-house he vented his wrath upon the offending Chancellor of the Exchequer for the language he used on the platform. I pleaded in mitigation that just as my friend had been endeavouring to hole out a lively “Helsby” on a tricky green, so the Chancellor was endeavouring to put the House of Lords in a hole, a process in which that rubber-cored institution refused to assist him. To express your feelings and beliefs at a moment like that required that some latitude should be allowed to you in the choice of simile and language.

But so far had the microbe of Podsnap entered into my friend’s understanding that he treated my poor pleasantry as an added insult and complained bitterly that such vituperation, as he called it, was “not English, and never used to be done.” Curiously enough, I had in my mind a passage in a political speech that created even greater pleasure and displeasure to Reds and Blues more than a quarter of a century ago. It was that famous passage in which Mr. Chamberlain scorned Lord Salisbury as constituting “himself the spokesman of a class—of the class to which he himself belongs—‘who toil not neither do they spin,’ whose fortunes, as in his case, have originated in grants made long ago, for such services as courtiers render kings, and have since grown and increased while their owners slept by the levy of an unearned share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country of which they form a part.” There was not so much whining over a few hard words in those days, and Lord Salisbury himself could hit out with his “black man” allusion and the famous Hottentot simile, and, lost, as the ‘Town Vicar’ would think, to culture and right feeling, could talk of “having put our money on the wrong horse.”

Memory may be misleading after a gap of twenty-five years, and the wisest of us is apt to grow “_difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti_,” yet I cannot but think that there are signs in the air that our old friend Podsnap is having it too much his own way. He is a good fellow in the main, and some of the ideas he worked for are sound. His belief in the young person had its touching and beautiful side as it had its ridiculous side. The young person, however, has grown up since his day, and has her own movements which are but lightly clad with Podsnappery of any kind. And for grown-ups dealing with the everyday affairs of the world we must, in the old English way, stick to our fighting instincts, and give and take hearty blows in good part, and win pleasantly and lose ungrudgingly, as most of our fighters, fair play to them, still do. And we must not be afraid of the Town Vicar’s “mere vulgarity.” For, after all, our language is a vulgar tongue, and we are proud that our Bible is printed in it, and our speeches have to be made in it. As a vulgar tongue vulgarly used it brought forth the triumphs of Elizabethan literature, and was the medium of such varied writers as Fielding, Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. And when it is the duty of wisdom to cry without and utter her voice in the street, she must do it without fear of Podsnap and in the vulgar tongue.

AN ELIZABETHAN RECORDER.

“I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And that they could no-how have been better than they were.”

—_Walt Whitman._

Many years ago, when I happened upon a few extracts from the letters of Mistress Dorothy Osborne, I wondered how they had escaped the grasp of the historian learned in the domestic annals of the Commonwealth. And in the same way it has always surprised me that the correspondence of William Fleetwood, Recorder of London from 1571 to 1591, should have been left hidden in the scarce but charming collection of Elizabethan Letters edited by that excellent antiquary and man of letters, Thomas Wright.

Some day, perhaps, popular interest may demand a Life and Letters of Fleetwood; but, meanwhile, a mosaic of the man and his work, pieced together from his own written words, may interest latter-day readers. His career was similar to that of many another minor Elizabethan official, and the records show him to have been an honest, active Protestant magistrate, full of zeal for his religion, honour for his Queen, and integrity in his office. In his letters we have a twenty years experience of an Elizabethan Quarter Sessions which we may use as a base to measure our progress in law and humanity during the last four hundred years.

And first a word or two of the man himself that his message may be the more clearly understood. The Recorder was a descendant of the ancient Lancashire Family of the Fleetwoods of Hesketh, in which village Baines, Lancashire’s historian, thinks our Recorder was born, and the probable date of his birth seems to be 1535. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of Robert Fleetwood, third son of William Fleetwood of Hesketh, who married Ellen Standish, daughter of another old Lancashire family. Their second son, Thomas, came to Buckinghamshire, and was known as Thomas Fleetwood of the Vache in Chalfont St. Giles. He was Master of the Mint, and Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. The Recorder must have been recognised by the family, and no doubt visited his uncle Thomas, for he himself married a lady of a well known Buckinghamshire family, Mariana, daughter of John Bailey of Kingsey. He was educated at Oxford, and was of Brazenose College, but he took no degree, and came to London to study law at the Middle Temple, where at the age of twenty-eight we find him appointed Reader. In Mary’s reign he was member for Lancaster, and afterwards sat in the House for Marlborough and the City of London. The Earl of Leicester was his patron, and it is said to be through his influence that in 1571, at the early age of thirty-six, he became Recorder of the City of London.

This office he held for twenty years, when he retired on a pension of £100 a year, and becoming Queen’s Serjeant the following year, did not live to enjoy the further honour, for he died at his home in Noble Street, Aldersgate, in February, 1593, and was buried at Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, where he seems to have had considerable estates.

Altogether he stands before us as a type of successful professional lawyer coming from the ranks of the county families into the larger world of London, bringing with him a certain amount of Lancashire grit and humour, and a strong sense of duty to the Government and the public. Nor does he seem to have been in any way a hide-bound, dry-as-dust, technical minded official, but there is evidence that he had a wide sympathy with many social movements of the time. He was an eager Protestant, but I cannot find that he was fanatical in his dislike of the Roman Catholics, whom it was his duty to prosecute. Anthony Wood describes him as “a learned man and a good antiquary, but of a marvellous merry and pleasant conceit”; and it is said he contributed much to the last of the old editions of Holinshed. Strype, the annalist, speaks of him in reference to a speech in the House of Commons as “a wise man,” and he seems to have combined wisdom and humour with a stern sense of official duty. That he was not a mere creature of Leicester’s and the Court is shown in his examinations of one Bloss, who had uttered terrible scandals concerning Elizabeth and her favourite, but Fleetwood reports upon his conscience as a lawyer, that it is “a clear case of no treason.” A weak man would have been tempted to strain the law against the prisoner, who was an undeserving and dangerous person. There is a pleasant incident, too, of his writing to Secretary Walsingham about some young orphans whose Catholic mother had committed suicide, begging him to acquaint Peter Osborn, the Lord Treasurer and the Master of the Wards, with the details of the unfortunate case, in order that their monies may be kept for them. “Such was the care,” writes Strype, “of this good Recorder, of the Children of the City.”

There was one exciting incident in his life when in 1576 he was cast into the Fleet Prison. Lord Burghley seems to have suggested a raid upon the Charterhouse, where unlawful Mass was being celebrated. The Recorder carries out his instructions, and writes a vivid account of his proceedings. Unfortunately, Lady Geraldi, the wife of the Portuguese Ambassador, was present, and her husband carries his complaint of her treatment to Court, with the result that Elizabeth—after the manner of all rulers of all times—promptly disavows her agent, and by way of a pleasant apology to Portugal, throws Fleetwood into gaol. The Recorder, who probably thoroughly understands that he is only in the Fleet, “without prejudice” and for purely Pickwickian state purposes, writes to Lord Burghley: “I do beseech you thank Mr. Warden of the Fleet for his most friendly and courteous using of me, for surely I thank God for it. I am quiet and lack nothing that he or his bedfellow are able to do for me.” And after a short experience of gaol he sums up the situation much as Mr. Stead did after a similar experience: “This is a place wherein a man may quietly be acquainted with God.”

It is in passages like these in the man’s own letters that his figure becomes dimly discernible to us across the ages of time, and when our eyes grow accustomed to the sight, we see before us the form of an Englishman not unlike many we have known in our own time. The more one studies the unaffected domestic documents of any period written without afterthought of publication, the more convinced one is that social progress moves like the tide and the rocks and the trees; its growth is nearly imperceptible, and four hundred years in the development of mankind is but a small moment of time.

The correspondence of William Fleetwood with Lord Burghley commences in 1575, when my Lord Burghley was at Buckestones—what a charming spelling of the prosaic Buxton—for his health. In those days an English Premier got rid of his gout in his own country, and knew not Homburg. The knowing ones in the political circles of London whispered with emphasis that the Prime Minister was “practising with the Queen of Scots,” then in custody at Sheffield, but the historical evidence points to mere gout.

Our Recorder, being Leicester’s creature, and being also a man of the world and looking for promotion as his deserts, writes careful reports to my Lord Burghley, telling him of London that from a police point of view “the state of the city is well and all quiet.” The Star Chamber had received the city fathers, and my Lord Keeper with the Chancellor of the Duchy, the Master of the Rolls and others had met the Recorder, and Master Nicholas the Lord Mayor, and divers Aldermen who had reported to them of city affairs. And as is the way of official men, they reported all to be well.

“And as,” writes the Recorder, “my Lord Keeper’s order is to call for the book of misbehaviours of masterless men, rogues, fencers, and such like, we had nothing to present for London, for Mr. Justice Southcot and I had taken fine of six strumpets such as haunt the hedge and which had lately been punished at the Assizes at Croydon, and two or three other lewd fellows, their companions, whom we despatched away into their countries. As for Westminster, the Duchy (the Savoy), St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John’s Street and Islington, (they) were never so well and quiet for neither rogue nor masterless man dare once to look into those parts.” Could Scotland Yard make a better report than that to-day? No doubt Fleetwood believed with the optimism of a modern Home Office official that he and his fellows had purged London of crime.

Crime being well in hand, these good men set out with feverish energy to put down the source of crime, and like the social reformer of to-day, thinking that pimples were the origin of disease rather than mere evidence of a disordered system, commenced a crusade on the alehouse.

One is apt to think of the Star Chamber as merely a Court for the oppression of English freedom and the abolition of Magna Charta, but in Elizabeth’s day it was busying itself with much the same problems that are troubling Parliament and the magistrates to-day. It is very modern reading to learn that my Lord Keeper and the residue of the Council at the Star Chamber have set down in writing certain orders for the reforming of certain matters, and that the very first of these is “for the suppressing of the over great number of alehouses, the which thing upon Wednesday last my Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Hayward and myself for the liberties of Southwark, and Mr. Justice Southcot and myself for Lambeth town, Lambeth Marsh, the Mint, the Bank, Parr’s Garden, the Overground, Newington, Bermondsey Street and Kentish Street, sitting altogether, we have put down, I am certain, above two hundred alehouses and yet have left a sufficient number, yea, and more, I fear than my Lord Keeper will well like of at his next coming.”

All this was done on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday there was an influential dinner party at Mr. Campion, the brewer’s—one wonders if he owned tied houses in those days and whether their licenses were spared—and “at after dinner, Mr. Deane and I went to Westminster, and there in the Court we had before us all the officers of the Duchy and of Westminster, and there we have put down nearly an hundred alehouses. As for St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John Street, and Islington, Mr. Randall and I mean this Saturday at afternoon to see the reformation, in like manner Mr. Lieutenant and Mr. Fisher deal for the East part. I am sure they will use great diligence in this matter.”