Sir Edward Abbott Parry

“ When an Attorney-General in 1869 brings in a Bill to abolish imprisonment for debt and deliberately tells us that he retains one class of imprisonment for debt, it is inconceivable why people to-day should strive to make out that the system we are working is not imprisonment for debt, but something else. Unless it be that the advocates of imprisonment for debt know in their heads that it is an evil, out-of-date system, and they have an instinct that it smells more sweetly under some other name. ”

“ In a word, the reign of love and unselfishness will have commenced.
We may not even see my beautiful world from afar, but this need not dismay us, for we know it is there, and we know that every effort we make to serve the cause of the poor helps to clear the path through the desert along which the coming armies of victory will march in triumph. The cause of the poor has always been the greatest cause in the world, and the generation that has at length understood it, and fought for it and won it, will find itself standing at the open gates of the promised land. ”

“ As I grope my way back along the main road of the history of the law into the dark ages I seem to find the milestones of reform set at longer and longer intervals. This puts me in good heart for the happy youths whose lot it will be to set their faces towards the morning breezes of the future. Their milestones will come at shorter intervals every day, until the burden of the law drops from the shoulders of the poor at the wicket gate.
There is no greater folly than to sing the praises of the good old days. Anyhow, the law had no good old days for the poor. ”

“ A century and a half has worked wonderful reforms for us in the world of police and police courts, but one cannot honestly say that nothing remains to be done. Direct bribery is no doubt abolished, justice is fearlessly administered, but there are still traditional methods of imposing fines and imprisonment which cause the poor to think that carriage folk go more easily along the turnpikes of the law than those humble ones who travel perforce on foot. ”

“ From 1869 until to-day over three hundred thousand English citizens have been actually imprisoned who have not been guilty of any crime whatsoever. They have been imprisoned mainly for poverty or, if you will, for improvidence—that blessed word that so insidiously describes in the poor that failure in economic asceticism, that lack of cold self-denial of luxury and extravagance, that absence of patient thrift and simplicity of life—characteristic features which are never wanting in the beautiful lives of those social classes above them that the poor must learn to look up to and to imitate. ”

“ The foreign bird whose plumes adorn the matinee hats of our dearly beloveds, the street cur who might find a sphere of utility in the scientist’s laboratory, the ancient cabhorse who crosses the Channel to promote an entente cordiale by nourishing the foreigners—all these have friends, eloquent and vigorous for the lives and liberties of their especial pets; but the poor man who goes to gaol because he cannot pay the tally-man has few friends.
There is no getting away from the fact that political influences are against the abolition of imprisonment for debt. ”

“ Chamberlain had foreseen, lawyers and litigation could in no way assist its working.
It cannot be gainsaid that the legal history of the Workmen’s Compensation Act is not a thing for lawyers to boast about. No one has a greater respect for the Court of Appeal—and, indeed, for all my spiritual, legal, and worldly pastors and masters—than I have. Humility towards those who are called to any honour amongst us is my foible. ”

“ I do not see why a working man and his wife should not have their tea in a lounge in their public house. I cannot understand why, if two friends after a day in the workshop want to have a friendly chat, they cannot find an institution where one can have his cup of tea and a muffin, and the other his glass of ale and a sandwich, and both sit at one table in a spacious room with comfortable surroundings, and if they do not heartily dislike it a gramophone to play tunes to them. ”

“ Nevertheless, the evil overshadows the good, for it is the institution itself—the workhouse—that is as radically unwholesome and unfit to-day as it was in 1834.
The evils of promiscuity cannot be exaggerated. In the larger workhouses male and female inmates dine together, work together in kitchens and laundries and in the open yards and corridors, with results that are obvious. In a fortuitous assembly of such people the lowest common denominator of morality is easily adopted as the standard. What a terrible place is a General Mixed Workhouse to which to send children or young people. ”

“ But whilst I would abolish imprisonment and should like to see the English workman paying his way like his German brother, whilst I am eager to see the poorer classes freed from the misery that debt and extravagance brings upon them to-day, yet no one, I hope, recognises more clearly than I do the sacred duty of a debtor to pay an honest debt. Every penny that he can save after his first duties of maintenance of wife and family should be devoted towards the repayment of debts. ”

“ I should be in favour of more stringent measures being taken against the fraudulent debtor, for one meets him every day, well-to-do and smiling, with a bill of sale on his furniture and everything in his wife’s name. But he is the curled darling of the law. He makes use of the law to protect himself and his frauds, and the Debtors Act, which was intended to abolish imprisonment for debt, has no terrors for him, whilst under its provisions hundreds of weekly wage earners are imprisoned. ”

“ Given private ownership of land and the right of a landlord to distrain for rent in arrear, and seize and sell his tenant’s goods to pay himself, it does not seem that the law or the way in which it is administered is better or worse for rich or poor. The law of distress is, as its name implies, a harsh and cruel remedy and the shadow of it hangs nearer and darker over the cottage porch than over the doors of the eligible mansion, but it is there in both places. ”

“ It is all very well to smile at the simplicity of the fool, and admire the cunning of the knave, but let us remember that the poor fool has in each generation to discover for himself that this is a world in which skimmed milk is constantly masquerading as cream, and that faith in the honesty of human nature in business affairs is in the poor man the first step on the road to ruin. ”

“ The belief that the world is the best possible of worlds has its value in making for the stability of things, but mere ignorance of the facts of life, coupled with that strange form of piety which accepts whatever system was good enough for a past age as the only possible system for this, renders the pace of social reform as imperceptible to the human mind as the movements of glaciers. ”

“ The idea that a more reasonable system of divorce will lead to a wholesale system of divorces is an absurd folly, a bogey used by ignorant but honest clericals to frighten good people who rather enjoy being scared to death. The fat boys of sociology love to make their victims’ flesh creep, and when they speak of divorce reform constantly suggest that human nature tends to immorality in matrimonial affairs. As a matter of fact human beings naturally prefer marriage and married life where it is at all a successful institution to divorce and divorced life. ”

“ For centuries the King’s Bench judges have worked off their natural irrelevancy in charging the grand juries at assize towns to the great benefit of themselves and the local papers. This national safeguard, this barrier between judicial irrelevancy and the public at large, should not be removed in a careless spirit. Our forefathers knew a thing or two. The grand jury is really a sound instrument of constitutional mechanics. It is the safety valve for the blowing off of judicial steam.
Lawyers and judges are certainly held in higher esteem to-day than they were in the past. ”

“ Judges, registrars, solicitors, bailiffs, debt collectors, the piling up of costs and fees on to the original debt, the dragging off to gaol of an occasional debtor pour encourager les autres, the breaking up of some poor home, the blackmailing of friends and relations very little better off than the poor debtor himself, the squeezing of the pittance out of the bellies of the little children to keep the father out of prison—what a picture to leave on the canvas of our own generation for our grandchildren to scoff at. ”

“ That is to say, according as he and his ancestors have rested their feet cramped in pinched shoes under the mahogany of the wealthy or tramped barefoot along the highway in the freedom of poverty, so will a judge’s principles of natural justice favour the rich or the poor.
We cannot get away from the fact that our judges make a great deal of law. The idea that a law is somewhere in existence and that the judges merely adopt it will not, I think, hold good for a moment. ”

“ The fool will always be outwitted by the discreet ones of the world, who justify their ways by reminding us that we are only bound to obey the letter of the law, and that there is no duty cast upon us to interpret and respect its spirit.
And simple charitable folk will say that after all things may really be quite honest and straightforward, and it is only the stingy creditor who sees fraud and the ungenerous judicial mind that finds in the constant repetitions of a series of happenings an intention in the parties to whom the events occur to wrong their neighbours. ”

“ And the working man thinks to himself of the twenty or thirty pounds that he owes, and how pleasant it would be if an accountant would add it up and a judge tell him that he need not worry any more about it; but when he begins to inquire further into the subject he finds that bankruptcy is one of the good things of this world that he cannot afford.
Bankruptcy, successful bankruptcy, is not so easy of achievement as you might think. It is not everyone who knows how to become a bankrupt. ”

“ In America grave popular discontent has arisen over the law-making propensities of judges and their bold refusal to carry out the intentions of the Legislature. We have no such widespread feeling in this country, nor are we likely to have, but, all the same, if we were to recognise the law-making power of our judges and openly discuss it and endeavour to define and limit it, there would be less fear in the future of a rupture between the people and the judges when futurist laws of far-reaching social reform come to be administered by the Courts. ”

“ I admit that I have the craving strongly myself—not to sit upon Commissions, for I am a working man and the amusement is one for Bishops, Law Lords, philanthropists and the leisured classes—but I buy the reports when they come out and sometimes read them—or some of them—or some part of them—and marvel at the patience and energy and research that have gone to the making of them, and sigh over the pity of it and the heart-breaking inutility of the whole business. ”