Then, this morning, I remembered that I started it, that I was twisting the words of the law to suit my purposes, while the lawyers in question were twisting the words to suit the purposes, the intention of the Crown in formulating this law. And I cannot deny that my purpose was to subvert that intention, that intention to deny the people psychic pleasure.
With the distinction between the letter and the intent of the law having occupied big brains for a long time. My recollection is that the Continentals, being Roman in these matters (as largely in others), allow a preamble to a law which sets down the intent, while we Anglos only allow the letter.
So suppose that we are in the days before there were land registers or computers and that I need to raise some money to pay for a war to make some more glory for our already glorious army and navy. Perhaps the capture of the Rock of Gibraltar would suit the purpose.
Now I am a fair sort of chap and want to make my people pay up according to their ability to pay – unlike the arrangements which pertained in pre-revolutionary France or Russia. So I light upon the scheme of making householders pay according to the number of windows in their houses and write a short law to this effect. A good scheme because the number of windows in a house reflects the wealth of the owner in a straightforward way, can be determined by ocular inspection from the outside, cannot quickly be changed and is obvious to all right thinking people.
But then I find that the householders, despite being decent people who do not beat their dogs, their children or their wives and who attend Divine Service on Sunday, are keen to minimise their contribution to glory.
Some of them simply brick up most of their windows and reduce their liability that way. The catch being that it rather spoils the appearance of the outside of the house and makes it rather dark inside the house – this being before the days of the electric light. So most of them go in for more elaborate subterfuges.
Some swap the glass in their windows for parchment. Some replace their large rectangular windows with small round portholes. Some fix cunning shutters to the outside of their windows, so cunning that, when the shutters are shut, the windows are no longer there to the casual glance. Some arrange things so that they can take the glass out of the windows when the tax assessor is in the area. While some go the whole hog and build houses with no external windows at all, but with plenty of windows opening onto an interior light well – which they might go so far as to roof over (with glass). And they all go on to fight their assessment for tax.
Such fighting is, of course, a matter for the trained specialist, a lawyer if you will. And so we are off. The Inns of Court never looked back.
Conservatives will read this story and will observe that you will never change human nature – and that socialists are talking twaddle or worse. To which I reply that you might not be able to change nature, but you can change the way that people behave. It used to be socially acceptable to boast in bars about your ability to drive when drunk or to drive at irresponsible speeds on public roads, but that is changing. Perhaps, one day, it will not be socially acceptable to minimise your tax liability – and what will be acceptable will be to pay according to your means, without troubling lawyers to work out exactly what that was.
PS: these days, of course, there are more interesting possibilities. Taking a leaf out of the people who did the interior design for cold war bunkers, I could have no windows, but screens on the inside of walls onto which I projected a view of something outside – a view which might or might not bear some relation to what actually was outside.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/psychic-pleasures-forbidden.html.
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