174 FIELD ANN) 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 centurics 
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. 
