Law -- England; Poor -- England; Poor laws -- England; Working class -- England
The home to me is the great asset of the nation. I do not want to see the
home superseded by State barracks or common hostels or district boarding
schools. On the contrary, I think individual homes are good for the
development of citizens. For this reason I would protect the home from
ruin by an extravagant husband or an extravagant wife in the interests of
the children, who are the next generation of citizens, and whose welfare
is, therefore, a debenture of the State.
Nobody would think of distraining on a pheasant's nest, or breaking up the
home of a couple of partridges, or imprisoning the birds at breeding time
in separate coops and cutting down their food merely because one of the
birds had run up a bill for too many mangel wurzels or the other had run
into debt for some fine feathers beyond her means.
Pheasants and partridges are too valuable to be so treated. Their nests
are protected from any distress or execution by poachers, and their bodies
are protected from arrest by watchful gamekeepers under strict laws. I
want to insure under my reformed laws that the human nest should be
protected in the same way, and that judges should not only be allowed, but
ordered, to take care that the home is not devastated by human misfortune
or even by improvidence. We want Game Laws for the poor. In future our
legislators must treat them as game birds--as indeed most of them are--and
not as vermin to be devoured, they and their children, by the owls and
kites of the underworld in which they live.
And the second clause of my Magna Charta would be of almost simpler
dimensions than the first. It would run: "Let it be enacted that the
County Courts have jurisdiction in Divorce." This would at once place rich
and poor on an equality that is not yet even aimed at. I should not
complicate this matter with the overdue reforms proposed by the Divorce
Commission, much as I should like to see those enacted. They are matters
of general interest that have waited for so many years that there is not
much hardship in holding them back further, but the institution of a new
tribunal of divorce is of vital and immediate importance to the poor. The
Act would be a practically unopposed act of one clause. It would only
touch one vested interest, the London lawyers of the Divorce Court, and it
would greatly please their brethren throughout the country.
All details of costs and machinery could be left to rule committees, as is
the common practice in other and more important matters that have come to
the County Courts, such as Admiralty and equity jurisdiction, and a
hundred other really difficult and complicated matters.
And then would follow a lot of simple but important reforms that really
only need the stroke of the official pen that is never made until the man
in the street rises in his wrath and knocks the official funny-bone on the
official desk and wakens him up to the fact that it is officially time to
do some official act.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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