And there were men and women who wanted to abolish it all. It was too much for Dr. Johnson. "Tyburn itself not safe from the fury of innovation!" Fancy that! What a terrible outlook! The law deserting the poor and giving them no more cheap excursions to Tyburn--well might the good Doctor shake his dear old head and prophesy woe. And when Dr. Johnson upheld the English treatment of the poor in 1770, we may suppose he knew as much about it as a literary professor of to-day knows about what is going on in the workhouse, or the police court, or the County Court of our own time. 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. If a history of the law and the poor were to be written, it would be a story of the lower classes emerging out of slavery into serfdom, out of serfdom into freedom of a limited character, and every age finding new abuses to remedy and trying in some small way to rid the law of some of those traits of barbarism which linger in its old-world features. To each new generation the terrors of the past iniquity of the law are mere nightmares. We can scarcely believe that what we read is true any more than our grandchildren will be able to understand how we were able to tolerate some of the everyday legal incidents of our daily courts. Less than a hundred years ago at Salford Quarter Sessions there were over two hundred prisoners, all poor and mostly very young, and the law thought nothing of transporting them for life or fourteen years as a punishment for small thefts. And horrible as all this cruelty was, yet I make little doubt that the judges of the time, with very few exceptions, administered the law as humanely as they do to-day. Sir Thomas Starkie, the learned Chairman of the Salford Epiphany Quarter Sessions in 1824, no doubt felt very grieved when he sentenced Martha Myers, aged sixteen, and Mary Mason, twenty-four, to seven years' transportation. I expect he thought he was "giving them another chance." Perhaps he was. We do not know. They may have become the mothers of big-limbed colonial aristocrats instead of peopling the Hundred of Salford with another generation of feeble-minded criminals.