Chapter IV: Part 4

Space! space! how narrow, how harsh, and ungallant thou art; not ready to give place, even to Dorothy herself. We must hasten to the end. Dorothy, it appears, unlike some of her sex, does not like playing the Mrs. Bride in a public wedding. “I never yet,” she writes, “saw anyone that did not look simply and out of countenance, nor ever knew a wedding well designed but one, and that was of two persons who had time enough I confess to contrive it, and nobody to please in’t but themselves. He came down into the country where she was upon a visit, and one morning married her. As soon as they came out of the church, they took coach and came for the town, dined at an inn by the way, and at night came into lodgings that were provided for them, where nobody knew them, and where they passed for married people of seven years’ standing. The truth is I could not endure to be Mrs. Bride in a public wedding, to be made the happiest person on earth; do not take it ill, for I would endure it if I could, rather than fail, but in earnest I do not think it were possible for me.”

But her father is now dead. Her brother, Peyton, is to make the treaty for her. Here is the letter, dated for once (Oct. 2, 1654), inviting Temple to come, and she will name the day; at least, Courtenay tells us, that in this interview the preliminaries were settled. “After a long debate with myself how to satisfy you, and remove that rock (as you call it) which in your apprehensions is of no great danger, I am at last resolved to let you see that I value your affection for me at as high a rate as you yourself can set it, and that you cannot have more of tenderness for me and my interests than I shall ever have for yours. The particulars how I intend to make this good, you shall know when I see you, which, since I find them here more irresolute in point of time (though not as to the journey itself) than I hoped they would have been, notwithstanding your quarrel to me, and the apprehensions you would make me believe you have that I do not care to see you—pray come hither, and try whether you shall be welcome or not.”

And now one moment of suspense. A last trial to the lover’s constancy. The bride is taken dangerously ill. So seriously ill that the doctors rejoice when the disease pronounces itself to be small-pox. Alas! who shall now say what are the inmost thoughts of our Dorothy? Does she not now need all her faith in her lover, in herself, ay, and in God, to uphold her in this new affliction. She rises from her bed, her beauty of face destroyed; her fair looks living only on the painter’s canvas, unless we may believe that they were etched in deeply bitten lines on Temple’s heart. But this skin beauty is not the firmest hold she has on Temple’s affections; this was not the beauty that had attracted her lover, and held him enchained in her service for seven years of waiting and suspense; this was not the only light leading him through dark days of doubt, almost of despair, constant, unwavering in his troth to her. Other beauty, not outward, of which I may not write, having seen it but darkly, only through these letters; knowing it indeed to be there, but quite unable to visualise it fully, or to paint it clearly on these pages; other beauty it is, than that of face and form, that made Dorothy to Temple and to all men, in fact, as she was in name—the gift of God.

They are wedded, says Courtenay, at the end of 1654; and thus my task ends. Of Lady Temple there is little to know, and this is not the place to set it down. She lies on the north side of the west aisle at Westminster, with her husband and children.

“Her body sleeps in Capel’s monument,
And her immortal past with angels lives.”

You, reading for yourself, will perhaps gaze upon the darkened tablet, with new interest; and may, perhaps, thank him who has shown you this picture. Yes, thank him, not as author or historian, but as a servant holding a lamp, but ill-trimmed may be, before a glowing picture, careful that what light he holds, may not glisten on its shining surface, and hide the painting from sight; or as a menial, drawing aside with difficulty the heavy, dusty curtain of intervening ages which has veiled from human eyes the beautiful figure of Dorothy Osborne. She herself is the picture, and the painter of it; the historian of her own history. But not even to her are the real thanks due; these must be humbly offered to Him from whom she came to represent

“A holy woman and the perfect wife.”

THE DEBTOR OF TO-DAY.

“He that dies pays all debts.”

_Tempest_ iii., 2.

The debtor is a slave. In the nature of things he always has been and must be a slave. The debtor of to-day is not such a direct slave as his ancestor of remote ages, but he is, in political phrase, a relic of barbarism living under servile conditions. As he has no organisation, and as, in the picturesque analogy of the man in the street, he is a bottom-dog in every sense of the word, no one worries about him. Eleven thousand of him go to gaol every year, and process is issued against three or four hundred thousand, but there is no party capital to be made out of the subject, no one statesman can abuse any other statesman for neglecting the question, and the churches and chapels are so keen about fighting over the technicalities of catechisms that they have no time to worry over the sorrows of the debtor of to-day.

It was not always so. Elisha the Prophet thought it worth while to perform a miracle on one well-known occasion in order to pay the bailiffs out. The creditor, if you remember, had come to the widow’s house “to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.” In those days you took in execution not only the debtor himself, but his wife and family. Elisha was indignant. He orders the widow to borrow her neighbour’s vessels and fills them miraculously with oil. Then he says: “Go, sell the oil and pay thy debt, and live thou and thy children of the rest.” One does not expect miracles from our clergy of to-day, but a consideration of the subject, and the discussion of its social aspects, would be a following out of Elisha’s example. I for one have never yet heard a sermon on imprisonment for debt, but the texts are plentiful, and to any intending preacher I will willingly supply the references.

As in Hebrew times, so in the days of Greece and Rome, you find the slavery of the debtor continue, and what seems to be wanting in the legislator of to-day, an anxiety to relieve his condition. Solon, the Greek law-giver, had sounder notions of the matter than any modern Home Secretary whose views I have come across. It would be interesting to trace the evolution of our poor unfortunate County Court debtor of to-day across the spacious pages of history, through the various degrees of ignominy, slavery, and misery that the debtor has been made to suffer, until we see him what he is to-day—not a very ill-used martyr, perhaps, but the victim of an utterly out-of-date system, the remnant of the cruel laws of the Middle Ages.

To Charles Dickens must be awarded a great portion of the honour that is due to those who abolished the horrible incidents of the imprisonment for debt that existed in his day.

The picture of the old debtor dying in the Fleet after twenty years of captivity must have haunted even the most callous official the Circumlocution Office ever produced. Great reforms followed, but in the usual English way, in scraps and portions by means of compromise and amendment, and by degrees. At last, in 1869, came the start of the present system of imprisonment for debt which abolished a great deal of imprisonment, but left the very poorest still under threat of the gaol if they did not pay their debts. There were many great reformers of that day who saw that the time was even then ripe for total abolition, and that the House of Commons was legislating on too conservative lines.

Jessel, a great lawyer and a sound law-giver, laid down the principle that has always been to me a statement of the true gospel on this question. “In no case,” he says, “should a man suffer penal imprisonment because he failed to pay a certain sum of money on a private contract with which the public had nothing to do.” When we have legislated to that effect we shall get rid of this relic of the barbarous ages that is still with us—imprisonment for debt.

And a word to explain what the system means. It must be remembered that the smaller debts in County Courts are generally ordered to be paid by instalments. Where a debt or instalment is in arrear, and it is proved to the satisfaction of the Court that the person making default either has, or has had since the date of the order or judgment, the means to pay the sum in respect of which he has made default, and has refused or neglected to pay, the Judge may commit him to prison for a period of not more than forty-two days. In practice the wind is very much tempered to the shorn lamb, and a period of twenty-one days is generally the maximum imprisonment ordered. In practice, also, debtors will beg, borrow, and perhaps do worse rather than go to prison, and the result is that the percentage actually imprisoned is small. This, to my mind, has very little bearing on the question whether the system is a wise one in the interests of the State and of the working-man. For it must not be forgotten that the system is in practice a system of collecting debts from the wage-earning class, and the wage-earning class only. It is, of course, incidentally used against small tradesmen and others, but the bulk of those against whom orders are made are working-men. As the late Mr. Commissioner Kerr said in 1873, “The rich man makes a clean sweep of it, and begins again, and the poor man has a miserable debt hanging round his neck all his life.”

For the rich bankrupt is really rather a pampered creature. Here you have the younger son of a duke whose creditors are mostly money-lenders and tradesmen, whose downfall is due to betting, and who has known of his insolvency for a long period, owing £36,631, and his assets are £100. The Official Receiver drops a silent tear of pity over the statement of affairs, and, like the tear of the recording angel, it blots out the record and the younger son goes forth ducally to prey upon a new generation of creditors. Here, again, you have a bankrupt, an ex-Army officer, living on his wife’s income, and betting, and winding up with debts £27,741, and assets £667. These are not fancy cases, they come out of the stern, dull reports of the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy. And as long as such men are allowed to live without fear of imprisonment day by day, we cannot sit down and say with a clear conscience that we have only one law for rich and poor.

The chief evil of the present system of imprisonment for debt is the undesirable class of trade and traders that it encourages: the money-lenders, the credit drapers, the “Scotchmen,” the travelling jewellers, the furniture hirers, and all those firms who tout their goods round the streets for sale by small weekly instalments, relying on imprisonment for debt to enable them to plant their goods out on the weaklings. The law as it stands assists the knave at the expense of the fool. I was discussing with a rather slow-minded working-man and his wife why he had purchased a showy and unsatisfactory sideboard wholly beyond his means. It had been seized and sold for rent, and he had this burden of a few pounds debt to clear off as best he might.

“Why buy it?” I asked.

“My wife would have it,” he replied.

“Why did she want it?” I asked.

“She didn’t want it, but yon man (the shopman) seemed to _instil_ the sideboard into her.”

The shopman was a clever salesman, no doubt, but does anyone suppose he would have _instilled_ a sideboard into the workman’s wife if it had not been for imprisonment for debt. To a working-man on small weekly wages no credit can be given in any commercial sense. His only asset is character, and there are many retail traders who never come near the County Court at all, because they make it a rule only to give credit after inquiry.

Constantly one finds goods taken by women, and immediately pawned, the proceeds being spent on drink. How can a workman prevent this? He probably never hears of the matter until a judgment summons is served on him. I asked such a man the other day if his wife had had the goods, mentioning the date when they were said to be delivered.

“I don’t doubt she had the goods. Indeed, she must have got some goods that day,” he admitted.

I asked why.

“Because that day she got locked up for being drunk and disorderly, and I never knew until now where she got the money.”

This is by no means an isolated case. I have been several times applied to by quite respectable men whose wives had run up debts with as many as twelve to nineteen different drapers for relief under the power permitting of small bankruptcies. One man told me he was putting a nail in the wall, and on moving a picture he found some County Court summonses. I asked him what he did.

“I upbraided my wife,” he replied, in a rather melancholy tone, “and she ran away, and I have never seen her since.”

A creditor corroborated the fact, and it was clear that debt had destroyed that household. The man had no idea that there were any debts owing, they had been hidden from him, but he thought it right to arrange honestly enough to pay them all off. Many a man removes, or has his house sold over his head, or his wife leaves him through misunderstanding arising out of credit recklessly given for useless articles, and the law as it stands encourages this kind of thing.

Nor can it be said that the wife is always to blame. The husband finds that his wife can obtain credit at any grocer’s for the week’s food, and the necessity of carrying home his wages to the chancellor of his domestic exchequer is less apparent. The temptation to spend wages on drink or gambling is distinctly encouraged in the debtor of to-day by a system that makes credit so readily obtainable by the unthrifty and unfit.

There was a story illustrating this aspect of the matter told me by a member of a relief committee during the late war. The committee were paying women half wages whilst the men were at the front. The wife of a working-man refused a sovereign saying, “That ain’t half my man’s wages.”

It was explained that he earned forty shillings.

The honest woman shook her head. “Nay, he didn’t,” she said. “Nowt o’ sort. He never earned more than twenty-five. Twenty-three he give me, and two shillings spending money.”

After some time and examination of the books, the good lady was convinced that she was entitled to a sovereign, and she went away aghast at her husband’s deceit, and murmured, “Eh, but if yon Boers don’t kill him, wait till I get him back!”

One reason why imprisonment should be abolished in relation, at all events, to amounts under forty shillings is the dangerous and slippery paths of evidence along which a Judge has to walk in dealing with small cases. Some witnesses have not the remotest idea of their duties and responsibilities. On one occasion a low-class Jewish workman was sufficiently impressed with his responsibilities to make the following demand after he was sworn.

“My lort, I cannot be a vitness in this case.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you know anything about it?”

“Oh, yes, I know all about it, but I don’t vant to speak.”

After a good deal of trouble I obtained from him the reason of his reticence.

“You see,” he said, “Moses (the plaintiff) is mine brother-in-law, and little Isaac (the defendant) he is mine vife’s nephew, and if I speak about this case, vy, I must give vun of them avay.”

I condoled with him about his family difficulties, and tried to persuade him that his duty was to speak the truth, but my only recollection of his evidence is that it was of no service to anyone, and that he certainly succeeded in giving himself away.

In a family dispute the greatest care must be taken to accept nothing as true that can possibly be prompted by hatred or malice. To do justice to the Jews they do not, as a rule, bring family disputes into court. A cynical registrar once told me that a Jew would swear anything for his brother, and a Christian anything against his brother. Without endorsing this epigrammatic exaggeration, I must sorrowfully admit that a downright North Country fight between blood relations over club money or the cost of a funeral tea or the furniture of a deceased parent is one of the saddest exhibitions of uncharitableness that I know.

The recklessness with which good ladies of unblemished character will commit what technical-minded lawyers might be inclined to consider perjury, and on occasion even stoop to something like forgery, would surprise anyone who was not conversant with it. In ordinary matters these good people are honest citizens enough, but in a family dispute honour requires that no iniquity must be left undone in order to gain the day. I remember in my early days a fat old dame of cheerful countenance suing her son-in-law, a young workman, for £2 17s. 9d. The odd shillings and pence were admitted, but the £2, which figured through two or three greasy books as “ballanse of account,” could not be traced to any particular source.

The old lady swore it was a grocery account. The young man denied it with emphasis, and said it was spite. Sarah, the old lady’s elder daughter, remembered some of the items of it, and with a great relish swore to them in detail. The young wife, who had been keeping a very lively baby quiet, and trying in between whiles to give evidence from the body of the court, at last got into the witness-box. Flinging the baby into her husband’s arms, and kissing the book with a smack, she shot out the following testimony at her mother and myself: “Look ’ere, mother, you know reet enow what that there balance is; it ain’t no balance at all—it’s my ’at and the wedding-dress, and the shoes to match, and the pair o’ greys what druv us to church, which I paid for when I was in service for three years, putting by ’arf-a-crown a month, which mother kep’ for me, and well she knows it, which it’s Sarah’s spite as ain’t got married yet.”

What was the real truth may be doubtful, but I was clear the “ballanse of account” was not groceries, and struck it out; yet, had the mother succeeded, she would have pursued her son-in-law to prison in an endeavour to collect the money.

For my part I think it is bad business for the community that homes should be broken up in order that a creditor may collect a trumpery debt that should never have been incurred, and it is because I believe it is the interest of the State to keep together the home of the working-man, and to deliver him from temptation, that I hope to see imprisonment for debt diminished, if not abolished altogether. An intelligent landlord wishing to preserve game kills off birds of prey and puts down poachers. An intelligent State, if it wishes to preserve the home of the working-man and his wife and children, should make it illegal for him to mortgage his future earnings, and to place his liberty in jeopardy in order to possess for the moment some shoddy piece of jewellery or drapery for which he has no real use.

THE FOLK-LORE OF THE COUNTY COURT.

“To those athirst the whole world seems
A spring of water in their dreams.”

_From the Arabic._

Being snowed up in a library, well stocked with modern scientific folk-lore, I began a serious study of the subject. I started with enthusiasm. I saw myself propounding a new theory for every variant text, and pictured myself triumphantly riding through the otherworld on the Ossianic cycle. After a few days of it, however, I found that, wonderful as the science was, it was not made for me. I ran into a thick German fog, I got mixed up with _sagzug_ and _märchen_, I failed to appreciate the true differences between those holy men, Zimmer and Rohde, and I wandered aimlessly among parallels and analogues of varying age and _provenance_. When I emerged from the German fog I found myself staggering about a bleak Irish moor in company with a fellow named Cormac—or was it Finn? We were studying the _Dinnshenchas_, or playing with an _Agallamh_ or looking for a _Leprechaun_. It was worse than political economy, or logic, or the lost tribes. The fiscal problem is merriment compared to folk-lore. I finished my holiday with Trollope and have put folk-lore on my index _expurgatorius_.

One thing, however, haunts me still. I seem to have escaped from the learned confusions of this dismal science with a belief that the world is certainly not progressing. They took a lot of trouble at school to persuade me that the world kept going round. Since I have dipped into folk-lore I find this to be only part of the truth. The fact seems to be that the world does nothing else but go round and round and round, reiterating its old ideas in a very tiresome way indeed. The things we do and gossip and preach about to-day are much the same as the things they worried over in the ages of caves and mammoths and flint implements. I feel sorry that I cannot explore folk-lore further, for there are evidently great possibilities in it. But folk-lore is like collecting stamps, or keeping gold-fish or guinea-pigs. It is a “fancy,” and if you don’t fancy it you cannot be of the “fancy.” The slang of the science is too difficult for most of us, and if you cannot master the technical terms of a game, how can you hope to play it? Even football would be dull if you had no elementary conception of “off-side,” and it is easier to get “off-side” at folk-lore than it is at football. Then these scientists are so solemn. Euclid has his pictures and occasionally admits that things are absurd; but the smiles of folk-lore are in the otherworld, and even their ghosts do not appear to the latter-day student.

I should never have troubled further about folk-lore had not I met one of its greatest professors. To him I unburdened myself and told my trouble. “Folk-lore books,” he explained, “are not made to read. They are written to amuse the writer. You write about folk-lore—then you will begin to enjoy it.” I remembered that Lord Foppington held similar views when he said: “To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one’s self with the forced product of another man’s brain. Now, I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.” An idea held in common by a peer and a professor must be precious indeed.

I modestly murmured that I knew nothing about folk-lore. To which the Professor encouragingly remarked that I should “approach the subject with an open mind.” “There is one royal road to success,” he said, as we parted, “have a theory of your own, and whatever happens, stick to it.”

Now curiously enough, I had a theory about folk-lore. It was the simple common idea that comes to many children even in their earliest school-days. The schoolmasters were all wrong. The professors of folk-lore were teaching it upside down. Instead of beginning with ancient legends and working back towards to-day, they should begin with to-day and march forward into the past. I wired to the Professor about it—reply prepaid. His answer was encouraging. “Theory probably Celtic origin; stick.”

As my business is to preside over a County Court, I went down to my work full of my theory and determined at all costs to stick to it. I know that to the pathologist a County Court is merely a gathering-place for microbes, and a centre point of infection; that the reformer sees in it only a cumbrous institution for deciding unnecessary disputes, whilst the facile reporter comes there to wash from its social dirt a few ounces of golden humour for his latest headline. These are but surface views. I went there like the poet, “whose seed-field is Time,” to find folk-lore, and I was overwhelmed.

No sooner did I enter the Court, as I had done many and many a hundred times, than the High Bailiff, rising in his place, called out, as he, too, had done many a hundred times, “Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! All persons having business in the Manchester County Court draw near and give attention.” At once I knew that the place I was in belonged to the old days of fairies and knights, and ladies and giants, and heroes and dragons. The “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” struck my certain ear and told me I was in the presence of folk-lore. The creeping voice of the old world came stealing across the ages, calling upon me “Oyez!” “Hear!” and if you can “Understand!” It seemed to bring its message with a sly chuckle as if to say, “There you are, my modern, up-to-date, twentieth century judicial person, beginning your day’s work with the same old cry that has called men together to listen to official wisdom for centuries of time.”

My friend the High Bailiff has not, I am sure, the least notion that he is, from a folk-lore point of view, a man of parallels and analogues, or that the “fancy” would undoubtedly classify him along with that most beautiful of human fritillaries, the Herald. For indeed, in everything but glory of costume, he is one of those delightful figures of the middle ages who carried challenges and messages of peace and war, and set out the lists in jousts and tournaments, and witnessed combats and wagers of battle—which my friend sits and watches to-day—and recorded the names of those who did valiantly, and remembered the dead when the fight was over—which to-day he leaves to the reporters. Here in this dingy court in a Manchester back street students of folk lore may see a real Herald calling out “Oyez! Oyez!” announcing that the lists are open, and that anyone may come prancing into Court and throw down his glove—with the post-heroic gloss of a treasury hearing fee upon it—and that if the challenge be taken up, the fight may proceed according to the custom of County Courts.

I would inaugurate a movement to apparel the High Bailiff in scarlet and gold lace, and I would have him ride into Court on a white palfrey, sounding a trumpet, but that I fear it would lead to jealousy among Registrars. Besides, some envious German Professor will, I know, point out that as a crier my High Bailiff is more akin to the _Praeco_ of a Roman auction, and that the village town crier is his poor relation. The answer to this is that his auctioneering tendencies really belong to his bailiff cycle, as the “fancy” would say. And as a bailiff we could, did time permit, trace him in dry-as-dust glossaries and abridgments, through a line of sheriffs of counties, and stewards of manors, and in various forms of governors and superintendents, until we lose sight of him as a kind of tutor to the sons of emperors in the twilight of the gods.

Let the High Bailiff call on the first case, and say with Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York:

This is the day appointed for the combat,
And ready are the appellant and defendant,
The armourer and his man to enter the lists;
So please your Highness to behold the fight.

It seems a real pity that we no longer follow the rubric of the Second Part of Henry VI., and that we cannot see Horner enter with his neighbours “bearing his staff with a sand-bag fastened to it,” on the other side, “Peter with a drum and a sand-bag.” Horner and Peter to-day would make a much better fight of it, thumping each other with sand-bags, than they do “barging” at each other with tongues, and they would be better friends afterwards. With a small charge for admission, too, and two houses a night, the County Courts might be self-supporting.

But we have not got very far away from the wager of battle after all. The hired champion is still with us from the house of the old Knights Templars, but he breaks his wit against his adversary instead of a lance. In another hundred years or so our methods of settling disputes may seem as laughable and melodramatic to our more reasonable great grandchildren as our grandfathers’ romantic methods seem to us. They may think that fees paid to eminent counsel, dressed in antique shapes, to exhibit their powers before packed galleries, according to the ancient and musty rules of a game that is wholly out of date, is an absurd way of endeavouring to reconcile human differences. The whole thing must before long, one would think, tumble into the dustbin of history and become folk-lore. But the legendary charm of the absurdity will always remain. Sir Edward Clarke or Mr. Rufus Isaacs, appearing for an injured ballet-girl in a breach of promise case against a faithless and wicked peer, is only a new setting of the story of Perseus and Andromeda, with the golden addition of a special fee. Perhaps there is even a parallel for the special fee in the old myth, for may it not be said that in a sense Perseus was moved to leave his usual circuit, and appear against the dragon by the tempting special fee of Andromeda herself? Could such a glorious figure be marked on the brief of to-day, what eloquence we should listen to.

The longer one stays in a County Court, the more does the atmosphere seem charged with folk-lore. Sagas seem to float in the air with the soot of our smoky chimneys, and wraiths of old customs swim in the draughty currents of cold that whistle under our doors. No sooner does a witness step into the box than one perceives that he too is an eternal type, and our methods of dealing with him as everlasting as the forms of the waves. The Greeks with all their noble ideals were a practical people, and the exactitude of their terminology is beyond praise; with a true instinct they described their witness as μάρτυς, a martyr. For, in the Golden Age, and equally I take it, in the Bronze, Stone, and Flint Chip period, the only way to stimulate your witness to truth was by blood or fire. These rough, kind-hearted, jovial, out-of-door fellows had not considered the superior and more subtle torture of cross-examination. The rack and the stake were good enough for them. Yet I feel sorry for the Greeks. How an Athenian mob would have enjoyed the intellectual entertainment of Mr. Hawkins, Q.C., administering one of those searching cross-examinations so lovingly described in Lord Brampton’s “Book of Martyrs.” Many others I have heard greatly skilled in this truly gentle art, but no one who played the game with such sporting strictness or approached his task with such loving joy. To see a witness in his hands made one feel almost jealous of the victim. To say this is only to say that to be a great advocate you must also be a great sportsman. How many moderns could handle a witness after the manner of Master Izaak Walton dealing with his frog? “I say, put your hook, I mean the arming-wire, through his mouth and out at his gills, and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your hook; or tie the frog’s leg above the upper joint to the armed wire; and, in so doing, use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly that he may live the longer.” Alas! Lord Brampton’s arming-wire is laid on the shelf, and the pike in his pool mourns for Master Izaak—but what sportsmen they were. Really, when I think of the sorrows of the human frog in the witness-box, I begin to think the hour is coming to start a Witness Preservation Society with a paid secretary and a London office. It would be a charity—and there is a lot of money in charity nowadays.

Some day I will write a book the size of a Wensleydale cheese on the folk-lore of evidence. It should be written in German, but unfortunately I am such a bigoted Imperialist that I have patriotically avoided the study of the tongue. It should perhaps be published in several cheeses, and the biggest cheese should be all about the Oath. It was the flood of folk-lore on this subject that overwhelmed me when I first began to consider the matter.

In our County Court we administered two oaths.[1] The Scotch oath, with uplifted hand, and the English oath, with its undesirable ceremony of kissing the Book. The Scotch form is incomparably the older, and though some maintain that the hand of the witness is lifted to show he has no weapon about him, there seems no doubt that the sounder view is that both Judge and witness are really each lifting his hand in appeal to the Deity. In this way did the Greeks lift their hands at the altars of their gods when they made sacrifice. In similar fashion was the oath to Wodin administered in the Orkneys by two persons joining their hands through the hole in the ring-stone of Stennis. So also Aaron “lifted up his hand toward the people.” And it is no stretch of imagination to suppose the lifting of the hands to the sun to have been one of the most natural and solemn attitudes of early man. In the Scotch form of oath we seem to have a ceremony that has been with us from the earliest dawn of humanity. I have seen this oath administered in a Scotch Court, and it certainly still retains many of the solemn incidents of a religious ceremony, and compares very favourably from a serious dramatic point of view with the English oath as administered here. The fact that the Judge administers the oath himself, standing with hand uplifted, is impressive, at all events to those to whom it is not made stale by custom. To me it seems a very appropriate ceremony in an old-world system of law such as prevails in Scotland, where there are numerous judges and not too much work to do. In a busy English urban County Court, it would render the life of a Judge uninsurable.

Our English oath is a much younger branch of the family. I have made my own theory of its incidents, and remembering my professor’s advice, I propose to stick to it. It is a quite modern idea that the oath should be taken on the New Testament. Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, writing to John Paston in 1460, says that the late Sir John Falstafe in his place at Suffolk, “by his othe made on his primer then granted and promitted me to have his manner of Gunton.” Even as late as 1681, Coke’s “Institutes” print a form of oath with the Roman Catholic adjuration, “So help you God and all Saints.” An Irish woman in Salford County Court quite recently objected to kiss the Book, and desired to kiss a crucifix. But the “kissing” idea is very modern. In 1681 it seems clear that kissing the Book was not a necessary official act. All that was necessary was to place the hand upon the Bible. “It is called a corporall oath,” writes Coke, “because he toucheth with his hand some part of the Holy Scripture.”

The efficacy of the “touch” runs through all the old legends, and we have an amusing survival of it to-day when a punctilious Crier insists upon a nervous lady struggling out of her glove before he will hand her the Book, and again, in the peremptory order constantly given by a clerk when handing the Book to a witness, “Right hand, if you please.” For these demands there is as far as I know no legal sanction, and I take them to be echoes of the social system of these islands that prevailed some time prior to the building of Stonehenge.

Touching a sacred object seems a world-wide method of oath-taking. The Somali—who are not yesterday’s children—have a special sacred stone, and observe a very beautiful ceremony. One party says, “God is before us, and this stone is from Amr Bur,” naming a fabulous and sacred mountain. The other party receiving the stone says, “I shall not lie in this agreement, and therefore take this stone from you.” Let us hope that what follows is more satisfactory than are my everyday experiences.

The exact origin of kissing the Book in English Courts, though modern, is obscure. It is not, I should say, a matter of legal obligation, but seems to be merely a custom dating from the middle or end of the eighteenth century. If a witness claims to follow the law according to Coke, and to take his “corporall oath” by touching the Book, who shall refuse him his right? The “kissing” act seems akin indeed to what the “fancy” call, somewhat unpleasantly, a saliva custom, which in modern western life exists in very few forms, though many of the lower classes still “spit” on a coin for luck. The subject is a very large one, but the fundamental idea of all customs relating to saliva seems to have been a desire for union with divinity, and if the Book were always kissed in our Courts with that aspiration, the custom might well be retained.

Unfortunately, the practical value of an oath depends in almost exact ratio upon the depth of superstition of the person to whom it is administered. The moral man will speak truth for practical moral reasons. The immoral man will lie for practical immoral reasons. The latter in the old days was hindered by the oath from lying, because he firmly believed in the practical evil effects of breaking the oath. The perjurer of old was certainly “looking for trouble.” This is not a phrase of the “fancy,” but it exactly describes the oath-breaker’s position. Some of the few minor _sequelæ_ of perjury were such domestic troubles as a curse which ran on to the seventh generation, or the perjurer’s death from lingering disease in twelve months, or that he would be turned into stone, or that the earth might swallow him up and that after death he would wander round as a vampire. These simple beliefs, which were no doubt part of the cave-dwellers’ early religious education, must have done a great deal to render the evidence of early man more trustworthy and accurate than that of his degenerate younger brother.

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

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

CONCERNING DAUGHTERS.

“As is the mother so is the daughter.”

_Ezekiel_ xvi., 44.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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