174 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



no coin in your pocket you are still more diabolically 

 wicked — you are a vagrom man, and the cold cell is 

 your proper place. This is the Jubilee year, too, of the 

 mildest and best reign of the Christian era. 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 extradi- 

 tion treaty ; no forger, no thief, no political offender 

 could get out of it. A crushing power this, quite un- 

 known 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 work- 

 house 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 



