Something In This
Weather-Beaten Board To Be Very Proud Of, Is It Not?
Something human and
comforting and assuring to the mind that we have made so much progress.
The pagan Roman
Empire reached from the wall of Severus in the north of
England to Athens of the philosophers; it included our islands, France,
Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey in Europe and Asia,
Egypt - the whole world of those days. No one could escape from it,
because it enclosed all; you could not take refuge in Spain on account of
the absence of an extradition treaty; no forger, no thief, no political
offender could get out of it. A crushing power this, quite unknown in our
modern world, with all our engines, steamers, and telegraphs. A man may
hide himself somewhere now, but from the power of old Rome there was no
running away. And all this, too, was under the thumb of one irresponsible
will, in an age when human life was of no value, and there was no State
institution preaching gentleness in every village. Yet even then there
was no such law as this, and in this respect we are more brutal than was
the case nineteen centuries ago. This weather-beaten board may also serve
to remind us that in this Jubilee year the hateful workhouse still
endures; that people are imprisoned for debt under the mockery of
contempt of court; that a man's household goods, down to the bed on which
he sleeps, and the tools warm from his hand, may be sold. In the West End
of London a poor woman, an ironer, being in debt, her six children's
clothes were seized. What a triumph for the Jubilee year! Instead of
building a Church House to add another thousand tons to the enormous
weight of ecclesiastical bricks and mortar that cumbers the land, would
it not be more human to signalise the time by the abolition of these
cruel laws, and by the introduction of some system to gradually
emancipate the poor from the workhouse, which is now their master?
In the gathering dusk of the afternoon I saw a mouse rush to a wall - a
thick stone wall, - run up it a few inches, and disappear in a chink under
some grey lichen. The poor little biter, as the gipsies call the mouse,
had a stronghold wherein to shelter himself, and close by there was a
corn-rick from which he drew free supplies of food. A few minutes
afterwards I was interested in the movements of a pair of wrens that were
playing round the great trunk of an elm, flying from one to another of
the little twigs standing out from the rough bark. First one said
something in wren language, and then the other answered; they were
husband and wife, and after a long consultation they flew to the
corn-rick and crept into a warm hole under the thatch. So both these, the
least of animals and the least of birds, have a resource, and man is the
only creature that punishes his fellow for daring to lie down and sleep.
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