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.
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