The 1921 Shortcut Misfired ... and how!

In an attempt to help people like me (mean and patient), or others who simply couldn't afford it, someone put forward a means of utilising the 1921 Census data without paying the per-view fee.  If you hover over the image logo of a suspected record, you can obtain the name you entered for the search together with the first names of two others and the total number of people in the household.  By repeating the search for others you expect to be there, it is possible to build up a fair picture of who was in the household ... but, of course, still lacking the details of age, relationship, occupation, etc.

Last year, this was fine and gave me all I really needed for a score or so of families I was working on,  Since upgrading my Findmypast account when I renewed my subscription last month, I've been working through those results and adding the previously hidden data.  One result has underlined to me the ultimate folly of relying too heavily on this sneaky technique.  I feel it my shameful duty to tell you the whole story here.

Jobes is a fairly uncommon surname, found principally in County Durham and the area around Newcastle-on-Tyne.  I had discovered the family of Mark Jobes, born in 1859, and Sarah, née Bruce some 6 or 7 years his junior.  They were married in the June quarter of 1886 and I had followed them through the censuses of 1891 and 1901 as their family grew: George (whose birth was registered as Joshua in 1887) was followed by Sarah Jane in 1889, Mary Hannah (1892), Mark (1893), Jane Isabel (1896), Ethel (1898) and Edith Mary in 1901.  All was going well although, in a typical coal miner's terrace home in Annfield Plain, things were probably getting quite tucked up space-wise ... especially when twins Jonathan and Robert arrived in 1904.

Mark died in 1906 at the age of 47 and into this crowded house came a younger miner looking for board and lodging.  Thomas Palmer, born in 1882 on the outskirts of Durham, lost no time in making himself at home.  

In the census entry for 1911, he was listed next after Sarah Jobes, although described as a boarder, before all the children.  Although only 28, his age was shown as 32, while Sarah was shown as 39, when she was actually 45.  (Mary Hannah had left home but was lodging nearby in another large household, where she was described as married, although retaining the name Jobes.)  Sarah said that she had been married 24 years and had borne 9 children all of whom were still alive.  Since she was a widow, she wasn't required to provide this information; the nine children were correctly recorded, and she was indeed married 24 years before the census, although taken with her supposed age of 39 that would imply marriage at 15!

The family also boasted a granddaughter, Ada, born in the June quarter of 1907 and correctly entered as 3 years old.  As can be seen here, the sons were listed first after Sarah and Thomas, and then all the daughters.  It would appear that Sarah's thoughts as she entered the name of her eldest daughter were on her granddaughter, because the age 20 for Sarah Jane was superimposed on the 3 for Ada, suggesting, perhaps, that Sarah Jane rather than her absent sister Mary Hannah, by then aged 19, was Ada's mother.

So we come to 1921.  I adopted the strategem outlined above and found the names Edith Mary (my prime concern), Thomas, Jennie Isabella, Robert, Jonathan and Ada out of a total of 7 individuals.   Given that I had already found the death of Sarah in the March quarter of 1918 (with a recorded age of 48 ... closer to her real age of 52 than had been the case in 1911), These were close enough for me to construct the family as Thomas Palmer, 42 and the remainder all unmarried Jobes at varying ages based on the 1911 census.  So far as I was concerned the seventh person could have been either a lodger or a younger child fathered by Thomas on either Jane (now calling herself Jennie) or the now-missing Sarah Jane. 

Now I'm in a position to review, with the support of  civil registration, the true story as revealed by the 1921 Census.  Firstly (another thing not revealed in advance of subscribing), the precise address.  Apart from a change of name from Edward Street to Edward Terrace, it was the same house as their home in 1911.  Another assumption I'd got right was that Jane had married Thomas Palmer.  This was perhaps under a degree of duress; it took place in the June quarter of 1914 when she was just 18, and he was 31, but purporting to be some years older than that.  More significantly, she was on the brink of delivering his child, who was named Edith Mary, after her aunt, the original cause of my interest in the family.  This was in fact the Edith Mary I had unknowingly found - ages are another element not revealed without payment.  Two years later came another daughter, Ethel May, who lived only a few weeks and died later in 1916.

When Thomas Palmer died towards the end of 1920, at the (now corrected) age of 37, we might imagine a sigh of relief pervading the house.  Within weeks - certainly within that same December quarter - Jane had re-branded herself Jennie Isabella and had married Thomas Bailey, a hewer at East Pontop colliery, who was just five months her senior.  The 1921 Census therefore shows Thomas and Jennie Bailey as head and wife, supported by Edith Mary Palmer, stepdaughter, aged 7, entered with the description 'Father dead'.  Next are listed Robert and Jonathan, the 17-year-old twins, both described as 'miner (driver)' at South Derwent colliery.  Ada was described as niece and her condition is stated 'NK', where the choices were 'both (parents) alive', both dead', 'father dead' or 'mother dead'. 

The seventh person of the household was the Edith Mary Jobes of my original search.  Now aged 20, she was listed as a visitor.  She had left the family home, perhaps glad to get away, and was engaged as a waiting maid at 'Stray Lea', 20 Victoria Avenue, Harrogate (now known as Osborne House).  She later moved to Farnham, Surrey where, in 1928, she married Arthur Herbert Farley, a nephew of my cousin's husband's grandmother.

Readers may be curious about Thomas and Jennie.  Apart from Jane's first-born Edith Mary Palmer,  they had four children of their own: Gwendoline (born 1923), Jessie (1925), Minnie (1928) and Norman George (1931).  By 1939, Jennie had reverted to plain Jane I, Thomas was still a hewer, Jessie, Minnie and Norman were still at home, and they lived with Thomas's widowed father at 100 Lily Gardens, Dipton, which was the part of Stanley where Jane had been born.

Were These the Consequences of a Hard Bargain?

I suspect there are many researchers who have adopted the same, almost 'casual' attitude to their family history digging as mine.  I find that the son or daughter of a family has married, I track down their children and follow them through census after census, and so on, working forwards and outwards.  Then finally - almost as an afterthought - I'll work backwards from those spouses, tracing each of them back to birth.  If anything catches my interest along the way then I'll broaden the present track before again following that general pattern.

Last April and June, I posted in two parts the story of a family tragedy that began as a newspaper obituary following a dual death in a Suffolk village.  You can read about it here (part one) and here (part two).  In the autumn, I combined those two posts into an article for the local family history magazine. Eventually the trail circled round and I received an e-mail that drew my attention back to that tragic family.  As a result, earlier this week, I found myself working backwards along the life records of someone who was a daughter-in-law of the couple who died.

Working forwards, I had come to a stop at the 1939 Register, which added a date of birth to the ages on the intermediate censuses.  Married in 1895, she was born in 1875 so, typically, there were only two earlier census entries to find between the couple's marriage and this woman's birth.  And there she was, Anna Barker, in service at the age of 15 in 1891, one down, one to go.  Anna Barker aged 5 in 1881 proved impossible, however.  I found one, but her place of birth didn't match, and the appropriate birth registration - there was one - didn't match with the date on the 1939 Register.  Usually if there's a discrepancy there, it's the correct birthday and the wrong year, for one reason or another.  And anyway I'd already found a birth registration for the Anna I was looking for ... and that one matched both for place of birth, Occold, and a September registration for a 10th June birth, which wasn't out of the ordinary: Anna Barker, mother's maiden name Davey.

After I'd found James and Anna's first three children, and the registrations  of their birth, I'd noted a peculiarity, and this note was brought to mind now, as I puzzled why a 5-year-old girl should be missing from the census.  Her first two children (and, I later discovered, her fifth, too) had been registered with mother's maiden name - so often the key to an identity puzzle - 'Lambert'.  Why so, when her name was Barker.

Just on the off-chance, I tried looking for an Anna Lambert, born 1875. Bingo, there she was with her family in Occold as one might expect, along with five brothers, three born in Occold like her and the eldest two in neighbouring Wickham Skeith like their mother.  The father of the family was the key identifier: he was born in Aylsham, Norfolk.  Like a hound on a strong scent, I followed this family back to source.  The names of the children came and went but there were enough overlaps, together with parents Thomas born Aylsham and Eliza born Wickham Skeith, to be sure I had the right family.  As I worked back through 1871, 1861 and 1851 I realised I had the answer about those children being registered Lambert instead of the expected Barker  Sometimes they appeared as one, sometimes the other.  In 1851, I believe I might have the explanation.  At least my imagination has concocted a story that might or might not fit the evidence I had unearthed.

The 1851 census recorded the whole family, living 'by the Knowl' in Wickham Skeith.  William Davey, his wife Susan, aged 50 and 51, four sons, aged 15, 12, 10 and 3, a daughter aged 5 and added at the end was Thomas Lambert, 21, son-in-law, Eliza, 19, daughter and Jacob, 1 month old, grandson.  There were two interesting points there.  The only one of those with an occupation was Thomas, an agricultural labourer.  Ordinarily, one might suppose that William and at least two of the sons would also be working.  No one was indicated to be unable to work, and none of the younger ones was listed as 'scholar'.  Then I looked into the Lambert trio.  

I found a marriage for Thomas Barker and Eliza Davey  in the March quarter of 1851, and in the same quarter a birth record is Jacob Barker, with mother's maiden name Davy.  The family appeared with the name Barker in the census of 1861, as Lambert in 1871 and 1881, and then again as Barker in 1891.  They had up to 17 children altogether, for 15 of whom I found birth records ... all as Barker and all with variations of Davey as mother's maiden name.  No registration was found for the other two, but the birth years are close enough for the names to become confused across the various censuses.

So, why the dual identity?  This is my theory.  William Davey was not a violent man, but he was a man of great internal strength.  When he discovered that this man Lambert had, to use the comedian's euphemism, 'been a bit previous with his daughter', he was livid, but realistic.  He made a hard bargain with Lambert and attached a severe penalty to it.  Lambert would marry Eliza (which he did, about the same time as she gave birth to his son), so his grandson would not carry the stigma of being illegitimate.  William Davey would provide him with a home, but in return Lambert would be expected to work hard enough to keep the family.  Naturally, Thomas Lambert didn't like this arrangement, but he didn't like whatever penalty went with default.  So he devised an alternative identity.  Why else was he married as Barker, and all his children registered as Barker?  He and Eliza left her dominant father, and made their own way in the world, occasionally lapsing to the old name when the censuses came around.

Little wonder, then, that almost half a century later, When Anna's first children needed to be registered, that she should be confused and uncertain which guise to adopt.

On a Seaside Holiday in 1921 ...

We were warned that a summer census would make some people more difficult to find.  I found the man I was looking for quite easily, but also stumbled on the unexpected aftermath of another story besides.

I had been working for much of last year on the family of my cousin's husband's grandmother, who was one of 18 children.  Her younger brother was married in the September quarter of 1917, and when I found him and his wife by 'trial and error' in Great Yarmouth in the 1921 Census, I decided that they had quite likely taken a summer holiday.  He was a farmer, so a June holiday would be quite likely - a fact that I knew from personal experience.  My father was a farm worker and holidays in my school holidays were always ruled out because of the harvest.

I had decided that, when my Findmypast subscription was due for renewal after Christmas, I would upgrade it to included unlimited access to the 1921 Census and, at odd moments recently, I've been looking up the people I thought I'd found already, to get a proper reference make sure I had found the right person and glean whatever else I could from the entry.  In this case, I certainly got more than I'd bargained for!

I found the couple I was looking for - yes, Stephen and Daisy Kerridge (lines 4 & 5) were the farmer and his wife.  I was a bit puzzled that all five immediately visible occupants were visitors, but then I clicked on the 'show more' button and revealed the host family.  Why put themselves last? a gesture of importance to their guests, perhaps,  who knows?  Even as I revealed this bricklayer and his family, my mind was registering the name of the first person on the list: Sarah Boggis.

Notwithstanding that a girl named Sarah who was at school at the same time as me later became a Mrs Boggis, it wasn't until I looked further down the list and found Archibald J Francis that I realised that Sarah Boggis was the ultimate married name of my great-great-aunt.  So here was an intermediate snapshot in a story that began way back in the 19th century.

Archie Francis was, sadly, a figure of fun in the family as I grew up.  In those days little boys didn't question what their elders shared 'over their heads'; we either learned by listening quietly or, as in this case, only as a result of unearthing the family history as a retired adult.

His father, James Francis was born in March 1835 and, at the age of 21, married my 3 x great-aunt, Mary Ann Sturgeon.  By 1871 he was an 'engine driver', and ten years later was more clearly described as a 'threshing engine proprietor', which remained his occupation for the rest of his life.  In 1902, after almost 46 years of childless marriage, Mary Ann died.  Two years or so later, James married his niece, Sarah, who promptly presented him with a son ... Archie.  I think my mother and her family were mildly amused by the fact that this distant relative had suddenly become a father at the age of 70 ... or maybe it tickled them that, at the age of 25, Archie went on to marry his cousin (the daughter of Sarah's elder sister), who was some four-and-a-half years his senior!

James died in 1916 and, still only in her early 40s, Sarah was married the following year to John Boggis.  (I think it was a descendant of John's brother who married the Sarah I mentioned above.)  My grandfather's aunt Sarah had clearly held on to the business that her late husband had built up over the decades, hence her rather unusual occupation on the census form, 'threshing engine proprietress'.  The same logic would prevail regarding the choice of June for a holiday, and why not take her unemployed son with her?  The business could clearly look after itself for a week.

As indeed it did; in 1939, Archie was recorded as a threshing contractor and, two households further on, was John Boggis, a threshing engine owner.  Whether one owned what the other used is anyone's guess, but it's likely they were in business together.

Crocodile and Blue Wave Experience

Yesterday afternoon's lovely sunshine brought to mind an incident - well, a whole series of 'incidents', if I'm honest - nearly 65 years ago that I thought worthy of bringing to a broader public.  It goes to show how different were life, the townscape and social norms then compared to now.

After lunch on a sunny Friday, three or four dozen eight- or nine-year-olds were formed into an excited crocodile and walked forth, two by two, across the school playground.  At the gate in the corner, they made a 180-degree turn to the right, into the footpath that ran alongside the outside of the playground.  Once out of sight of the school building, and a bit further along, they turned into a gateway on the opposite side of the path.  This led them into a public meadow, with a square patch in the middle roped off to protect the town's cricket pitches.

The children kept well away from the square and made for a cluster of wartime Nissen huts and sheds, passing as they did so a fence on their right-hand-side beyond which some of the elder boys used to have their gardening lessons.  They made their way along a well-trodden path between the buildings and through another gateway, turning right into an open area through which ran a broad, straight path, wide enough to be a road.  In point of fact, it wasn't many years afterward that this would indeed be its fate, as it became the main thoroughfare of a completely new housing estate.

At the end of this broad pathway, as they walked towards the bright sun, they came to a wrought-iron gate, beyond which was the main road out of the town.  Often this gate would be set open, and the leading children knew that they had to stop here and wait for all the others to catch them up.  When all were assembled, the trek continued, along the pavement, keeping carefully away from the kerb.  Eventually their destination was sighted on the opposite side of the road and, closely watched and monitored by those in charge, they crossed the road and entered the grounds of the Blue Wave Swimming Pool.

This ritual occupied Friday afternoons all through the summer term, supervised by two of the senior teachers: one male and one female, sometimes accompanied by the school secretary.  Here, the male teacher taught the children the basic swimming strokes, demonstrating vertically on the poolside the motions to be copied horizontally in the water.  Somehow this geometric transition didn't confuse the children and in the course of the term many succeeded, first of all in overcoming their fear of the water itself, and then finding the confidence to launch forth supported by the water and actually achieve forward movement, first over 10 yards, then over increasing distances up to 220 yards!  Each stage of progress was rewarded by a certificate.

Depending on our pre-existing circumstances, the skill of swimming wasn't all that was learned.  Boys who had no sisters discovered the sight of female legs to an extent hitherto unknown ... and this before they were aware of the erotic nature of such an experience.  There were others, who had thus far lived under the close control of doting mothers who did far more than they taught, so far as their children's development was concerned; they had to be shown the technique of drying themselves once out of the water.  I suspect that, in the case of the girls, there was a far smaller innovative degree of subsidiary discovery, they likely having had a more comprehensive domestic growing up already.

For my part, it was a skill once learned that kept me occupied and to a great extent out of mischief for several summers, and the overall experience led to a degree of self-confidence that - although I may not have realised it at the time - has equipped me for the whole of my adult life.

Thass loike I saay ... teark loife as 't come

Some things happen one day and are gone from memory the next.  Others stay for decades, as bright and fresh (or so I believe!) as the day they happened.  One that came to mind the other day dates back to my first year of married life, and a dining-room incident while on holiday; another that I recalled the same day stems from my pre-school days, when my mother took me into the shop where, not five years previously, she would have been working in the days before her marriage.  A third recollection comes to mind even as I ponder narrating two incidents of the week just past.  

I'm something of a natural mimic.  When I was driving for a living, I had to be careful when delivering in another part of the country, not to lapse into the local accent.  Quite apart from the likelihood of 'not getting it quite right', there was always the possibility that someone would be offended if they thought I was taking the mickey at the way they talked.  One day I'd been given a job to the Newcastle area and by the time I'd gone the five miles to collect it, I was already muttering to myself 'in Geordie'!

I can't help wondering whether this ability bears some relationship to my delight in languages.  In my days at the local grammar school, I recall getting 98% for French in my first form examination.  In these days of possibly greater wisdom, I find myself being more careful about accents, and I only lapse into the broad tones of my youth on the Norfolk-Suffolk border when I'm among people with whom I'm completely at ease.

Two incidents this week have brought these things to mind.  On Sunday morning after the coffee and chatter that followed our Meeting for Worship, I said something to one of the elders as I was leaving in just that broad accent that I've described ... and realised what an indication that was of how 'at home' I feel in their company.

For the last few months I've been going most Thursdays to a community coffee morning in the town.  This week, instead of a simple quiz to tax our minds, we were asked to help wrap children's presents for Santa Claus to distribute when he comes along next month.  I had been cutting paper off a large roll to fit the books that others were wrapping. When the last of the paper sprang free from the tube within, I turned to the lady sitting next to me and, without thinking, imitated the accent I've been surrounded by for the last year and more as I commented. "Ah've coom to t'end o' t'roll; Ah'm goin' 'oom."

That was an example of the other aspect of my experiences.  I clearly had no fears about offending her ... although, in point of fact, she's only been here a few years herself, after moving up from Bristol, so it wasn't her accent I was imitating.  Instead, she was quite amused and possibly a bit surprised, since I'm usually quite quiet and restrained.

It all goes to show how well I've settled into a new pattern of life.  One aspect of this new shape to things is retiring to the lounge in the evening, and so I'm no longer tempted to carry on working at my desk until bedtime, as would often have been the case before I moved out of the flat.  Instead, I use my old laptop to watch a selection of You-Tube videos.  Two in particular, I find extremely relaxing.  

One is The Mindful Narrowboat, presented by a lady cruising the canal system with her dog.  She has an eye for nature and is also quite artistic, for each vlog ends with an 'over-the-shoulder' shot of her entry in a beautiful notebook, in which a poetic summary of the foregoing scenes accompanies coloured sketches of birds, animals or plants that she has noticed along the way. It's rather in the style of 'The Diary of an Edwardian Lady'.

The second video is called Linguoer Mechanic, this one featuring a young oriental lady.  The posts follow a common pattern, with no narrative at all.  She collects a rusty or corroded piece of machinery, dismantles it and cleans each part, before painting and rebuilding the whole, and finally demonstrating it working once more as it did when new.  I'm amazed how she knows what bit goes where!

I Want Apple Crumble!

I make no bones about it, and readily confess that apple crumble is by far my favourite dessert dish.  As a virtually self-taught and very limited cook, it's one that I can manage quite well, with the help of a proprietary brand of crumble mix, an ever-present item in my store cupboard.

Switch on your imagination for a moment, dear reader.  Imagine that, instead of blazing this desire abroad in a blog, I had announced my wishes to a loving and supportive wife.  Imagine further that her response was "But we haven't any apples, darling."  Imagine even further my rejoinder: "That's all right, dear, we've got lots of eggs."  Depending on factors outwith this hypothetical narrative, the outcome would be anything within the range from sympathetic laughter, to "don't be silly!", to grounds for divorce.

This weekend the second-class citizens of this country, who happen to live in Northern Ireland, have been told that they will soon be filing into the polling stations to elect a new Assembly.  Why?  Basically it's because the existing Assembly has been unable to appoint a Speaker and therefore is unable to operate the democratic institution to which its members have been elected.

The Northern Ireland Secretary in Westminster has looked in the store cupboard of legislation, found the shelf where there are instructions for what to do when an Assembly has been unable to govern and - apparently without looking any further - has said 'Ah yes, well you've had six months to try, you'll have to have another election.' Solution provided, problem solved, next business please.  

Only it isn't ... and it won't be.  

The reason the present Assembly has been unable to operate is not that it couldn't come to a decision, but that one party has stubbornly - but possibly with good cause - refused to take part in any discussion towards that decision.  There's little indication that the outcome of a new election will be very different from the present Assembly, and when it's all done and dusted, the new Assembly will face the same problem as the old.  Does the population have to wait another six months with no one to take important and increasingly urgent decisions in the government of the country ... only to face another unproductive - and very expensive - election?

The underlying problem, as Sir Geoffrey Donaldson (DUP leader) succinctly stated on BBC R4's Today programme yesterday, is that, so long as the present arrangements for trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK result in a tariff being charged on goods crossing the Irish Sea, the people of Northern Ireland will remain at a financial disadvantage compared to their fellows in Great Britain or, as he put it, 'be second-class citizens' of a supposedly United Kingdom.  Whether or not he and his party are right to hold his countrymen hostage in this way and deprive them of normal government for months on end is, to some extent, a separate question.

The Secretary of State has to remove his blinkers and realise that eggs won't make an apple crumble.  If he - or his colleagues in the Westminster government - don't address the fundamental difficulty (no apples), no progress will be made, however many eggs (or elections) he provides, in the production of apple crumble (stable and effective government).

I wrote here recently about the basic impossibility of squaring the circle of Northern Ireland, Brexit and the resulting need for a border somewhere.  I don't propose to repeat that here.  What I will say is that to me - and I expect to thousands of others - the solution is blindingly obvious, and one that would resolve other difficulties at the same time.  The UK must seek to re-join the Single Market and Customs Union, the severance from which, as part of Brexit, caused the need for a border in the first place.

The Elephant in the Room!

Well, it's happened.  Many have been foreseeing it for some while.  This patchwork quilt has come apart at the seams - I can't with any realism add 'at last' - and it is seen for what it was ... a pretence, a sham, something thrown together to give someone the transitory pleasure of holding the top job, a job for which she was never fit.  Now she has resigned and we are subjected yet again to see the members of a once respectable political party thrashing around like rats in a sack as they try to find yet another leader who will, incidentally, be saddled with the responsibility of running the government of the country.

What's behind it all?  Some would say it's a combination of world events: the Covid-19 pandemic; the war in Ukraine and its resulting effect on energy prices; a global decline in economic growth.  Some go further, and are persuaded to admit a degree of incompetence in leadership.  A few risk being labelled as 'Remoaners' or 'Remainers', as they suggest that the effects of these international matters have been made worse for this country by the self-inflicted difficulties and isolation resulting from Brexit.  Although that was some years ago now, these effects have become visible at last in the form of increased (and apparently unforeseen) levels of bureaucracy and paperwork that have frustrated - and in many cases totally annihilated - international trade and have, at the same time, generated political frustration in Northern Ireland that is yet to be resolved.

Is that all?  No.  The roots of the present fiasco stretch back much further than that.  If you have 6 minutes to spare, listen to this interview with trade union leader Mick Lynch.  He specifically refers to situations created decades ago in many industries, not just his own.  

Many background aspects of British life were distorted and made more difficult to operate by the introduction of a raft of private companies to manage them.  Naturally, private companies have shareholders, and shareholders expect dividends.  And where do these dividends come from?  In part, I expect, from the efficiencies that were introduced by commercial managers as they competed with each other for business.  But in far greater measure, I suggest, they come from increased prices to those using the services, whether it be transport, energy or clean water and sewerage facilities.  And of course there's another component to commercial management - bonuses: bonuses that can be fairly easily won, and are, in effect, a virtually guaranteed addition to an already generous salary.  These, too, have to be met by either increased productivity or turnover (which is another term for increased prices, when the consumption of those services is relatively stable).

But what is really behind all this trauma?

My Bible readings this week have been in the book of Jeremiah.  There are many parallels with the present political situation.  The nation is under threat.  An invading army is just beyond the borders and people's leaders are turning in fear to their spiritual mentors for help.  They are told in no uncertain terms that this is a peril they have brought upon themselves.  They have not fulfilled the responsibilities of leadership.  This is what they should be doing: "Administer justice every morning; rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed." (Jer. 21:12); "Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place." (Jer. 22:3)

You can read these two chapters in full here.  They illustrate the penalties of selfish rule and oppression in many guises.  These penalties can be readily understood in terms familiar to us, living two millennia and more later.  The underlying truths are still valid today.  Both as a nation and in the way our governments have led us down the decades, although efforts have been made to improve the lives of individuals, we have moved away from the basics of how man should treat his fellow man.  Instead of being the servant of the people, the state has become their oppressor.  Instead of welcoming the foreigner in need - as was the case eighty-odd years ago - we have shut our doors, closed our boundaries and barricaded ourselves with punitive legislation - poorly administered - against any acts of international human generosity.  

I fear we will all pay the price for the neglect exercised by those we elect.