Ginx's Baby [28]
The uproar outside increased. Why did not the President of the Poor-Law Board interfere? At last he did interfere: that is, instead of visiting the scene himself, and satisfying his own eyes as to the truth of what his ears had heard, a process that would have taken a couple of hours, he appointed a gentleman to hold an inquiry. The Guardians became furious. The reports of their proceedings read like the vagaries of a lunatic asylum or the deliberations of the American Senate. They discharged Snigger for breach of orders, substituting a relative of Mr. Stink. They put a lock on the door, and passed food to the Baby by a stick. A committee was appointed to see him fed, and they forwarded a memorial to the Poor-Law Board, stating that "he daily had more food than he could possibly eat, and was in admirable condition." They refused to allow any doctor but one employed by themselves to see him. They procured from him a certificate that the noble busybody and his physician had made a mistake, and that all the functions of life in the infant appeared to be in perfect order. Then came the gentleman, and the inquiry, and his report, and a letter from the Poor-Law Board, and further discussions and more letters, until the bewildered public gnashed its teeth at the Minister, the Guardians, and the law, and wished them all at Land's End or beyond it. V.-An Ungodly Jungle. The case of the Guardians of St. Bartimeus against the Guardians of St. Simon Magus was at length reached. The argument lasted for two days. There is a grim work, the short title whereof is "Burns's Justice," in five fat volumes, from which the legal Dryasdust turns aghast. In one of these portentous books, title "Poor," pp. 1200, the inquisitive may find a code unrivalled by the most malignant ingenuity of former or contemporary nations: a code wherein, by gradual accretion, has been framed a system of relief to poverty and distress so impolitic, so unprincipled, that none but the driest, mustiest, most petrified parish official could be expected to lift up his voice to defend it; so complicated that no man under heaven knows its length or breadth or height or depth; yet it stands to this hour a monument of English stolidity--a marvel of lazy or ignorant statesmanship. Imagine, if you please, a Lord Chief Justice and three Puisnes, all keen, practical men, alive to public policy and the common weal, eager to extricate the truth and do the right, plunging into this "ungodly jungle," thwarted at every turn, in search of justice for Ginx's Baby. With all his patient industry and lightning quickness of apprehension, the Chief Justice found it hard to reconcile past and present, or evolve from the vast confusion anything consistent with his moral instincts. --Clear the board, gentlemen. True regenerative legislation will begin by drawing away the rubbish. Reform means more than repair. Mend, patch, take down a little here, prop up some tottering nuisance there, fill in gaping chinks with patent legislative cement, coat old facades with bright paint, hide decay beneath a gloze of novelty, titivate, decorate, furbish--and after all your house is not a new one, but a whited sepulchre shaking to decay. Repair? There is a Repair party, intermediating between Tories and Reformers--Radicals or Rooters let us call these latter if you like--who cling to "vested interests" and all other sorts of antique nuisances, yet say they are willing to improve them. REFORM, which means, Pull down with bold statesman's hand, and with like hand REBUILD, is no darling of your political Repairer. Call the party and the men by their right names: and give me for utility in legislation or administrative action an Old Tory and Obstructive party rather than this middling, meddling, muddling Repairer-- "Eager to change yet fearful to destroy." Just now all Social Reformation, in its noblest aims and attempts, is fettered by the Repair party. What is termed Sanitary Reform is enfeebled, and the vigor withdrawn from it, by this party. "Vested rights," "the