WE are to ask whether it is true that everything a man does is the only thing he could do, at the instant of his doing it.
This is a very important question, because if the answer is yes, all praise and all blame are undeserved.
Let us take some revolting action as a test.
A tramp has murdered a child on the highway, has robbed her of a few coppers, and has thrown her body into a ditch.
"Do you mean to say that tramp could not help doing that? Do you mean to say he is not to blame? Do you mean to say he is not to be punished?"
Yes. I say all those things; and if all those things are not true this book is not worth the paper it is printed on.
Prove it? I have proved it. But I have only instanced venial acts, and now we are confronted with murder. And the horror of murder drives men almost to frenzy, so that they cease to think: they can only feel.
Murder. Yes, a brutal murder. It comes upon us with a sickening shock. But I said in my first chapter that I proposed to defend those whom God and man condemn, and to demand justice for those whom God and man have wronged. I have to plead for the bottom dog: the lowest, the most detested, the worst.
The tramp has committed a murder. Man would loathe him, revile him, hang him: God would cast him into outer darkness.
"Not," cries the pious Christian, "if he repent."
I make a note of the repentance and pass on.
The tramp has committed a murder. It was a cowardly and cruel murder, and the motive was robbery.
But I have proved that all motives and all powers; all knowledge and capacity, all acts and all words, are caused by heredity and environment.
I have proved that a man can only be good or bad as heredity and environment cause him to be good or bad; and I have proved these things because I have to claim that all punishments and rewards, all praise and blame, are undeserved.
And now, let us try this miserable tramp—our brother.
The tramp has murdered a child for her money. What is his defence?
I appear for the prisoner, and claim that he is not responsible for his act.
(Cries of shame! bosh! lynch him!)
I will first of all remind the court of the reasons upon which I base my claim.
(Gentleman in white tie rises and declaims vehemently against the immorality of the defence. Talks excitedly about the flood gates of anarchy, and the bulwarks of society, and is with difficulty persuaded to resume his seat.)
Clerical environment does not make for toleration and sweet reasonableness. I proceed to open my case.
Every quality of body or mind possessed by a child at birth has been handed down to the child by its ancestors.
The child could not select its ancestors; could not select its own qualities of body and mind.
Therefore the child is not to blame for any evil quality of body or mind with which it is born.
Therefore this tramp was not to blame if, at the moment of birth, his nature was prone to violence or to vice.
The prisoner is a criminal. He is either a criminal born, or a criminal made.
If he is a "born criminal" he is a victim of atavism, and ought not to be blamed, but pitied. For it is not a fault, but a misfortune, to be born an atavist.
Had a tiger killed the child, we should have to admit that such is the tiger's nature; as it is the nature of a lark to sing.
But, if the prisoner is an atavist it is his nature to be furious and cruel.
We cannot, however, be sure that a man is a "born criminal" because he commits a murder. So great is the power of environment for evil, as well as for good, that perhaps the most innocent and humane man in this court might, by the influence of an evil environment, have been made capable of an act as horrible.
If the prosecution adopt the course I expect them to adopt, and claim that the unfortunate prisoner "knew better": if they succeed in proving that the prisoner was well-educated, carefully brought up, and never in all his life was once exposed to any evil influence, then I shall claim that such evidence proves the prisoner to be atavist, and entitles him to a verdict of unsound mind.
Because no man whose whole environment had been good, would be capable of murdering a child for a few coppers, unless he were an atavist or insane.
On the other hand, if it should appear, in the course of evidence, that the prisoner was born of criminal and ignorant parents, was brought up in an atmosphere of violence and crime, was sent out, untaught, or evilly taught, and undisciplined, to scramble for a living; if it should be proved that he fell into bad company, that he turned thief, that he was sent to prison and branded as a felon: if it should be proved that he has been hunted by the police, flogged with the "cat" by warders, bullied by counsel, denounced by magistrates and judges; if it should be proved that he has been treated at every turn of his wretched career as a wild beast or a pariah; if it should be proved that he has been allowed to degenerate into an ignorant, a savage, a bestial and a drunken loafer; then, I shall plead that this miserable man has been reduced to his present morose, cruel, and immoral state by evil environment; and I shall ask for a verdict in his favour. (Cries of Monster! Hang him! Lynch him!)
It is said the prisoner is an inhuman monster. He has been made a monster by a monstrous heredity; or he has been made a monster by a monstrous environment.
No man of sound heredity ever becomes a monster save by the action of an evil environment.
Say the prisoner is an atavist; a man bred back to the beasts. Then he is entitled to be judged by the standard we apply to beasts.
Some of you will remember Poe's story of the murder in the Rue Morgue, in which a terrible murder is done by an ape. In such a case our horror and our anger would probably cause us to shoot the ape. But that would be the uprising within us of our own atavistic and brutish passions; it would not be the result of our promptings of our human reason. Reason might prompt us to kill the ape as a precaution against a repetition of violence. But anger and hate are not reasonable, not human: all anger and all hate are bestial—like the hate and the anger of the tramp. But if the prisoner is not an atavist, or brute-man, if he has been reduced to his present moral state of environment, ask for some measure of compensation from the society; unjust laws, and dishonest social conditions, and immoral neglect are responsible for the fact that a brother man has been allowed, or rather compelled, by society, to grow up an ignorant and desperate savage.
Be that as it may, the prisoner is a creature of heredity and environment; and, as he is bad, the heredity, or the environment, or both, must be bad. And I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour.
Will any man on the jury say me nay? The prisoner has defied the law, he has injured society, has outraged morality. Have law and morality not injured him? Has society not injured him?
He has committed a terrible crime, for which it is claimed that he should be punished. Who shall be punished for the crimes of the law and of society against him?
There is much proper and natural sympathy expressed by the prosecution with the parents of the murdered child. Is there no sympathy with this unhappy victim of atavism, or of society? This prisoner has been bred as a beast, or treated as a savage, until he has become a savage and a beast.
Here stands a human being, poisoned, battered, and degraded beyond all human semblance. Here stands a brother man, whose soul has been murdered by inches, has been murdered by the society that now hales him here to be denounced, and execrated, and hanged.
Do I speak truth, or falsehood? Is logic true? Are facts true? That which society has here planted it has here to reap. Not all the law, the piety, and education in the wide, wide earth can make this ruined and degraded prisoner the man he might have been. Not all the repentance we can feel, not any compensation we can offer can buy him back the soul we have destroyed. It is too late.
Gentlemen of the jury, is it nothing to you? You are accessories to the fact. I appeal to your justice, to your pity—
(A voice: How much pity had he for the child?)
None. There is no pity in his soul. Either his forefathers put none there, or society has destroyed it.
(Cries of monstrous! immoral! preposterous! shame!)
I hear cries of monstrous and immoral. But I do not hear any voice say "false." Is there a man in court can impeach my reasoning, or disprove my facts? Is there a man in court can deny one statement I have made? Is there a man in court can break one link of the steel chain of logic I have riveted upon our metaphysicians, our moralists, our kings, our judges, and our gods?
You say my defence is unreasonable and immoral. You dread the effects of justice and of reason upon society. You talk of crime and cruelty, of law and order. You want the prisoner punished. You ask for justice: but you want revenge. Give me a fair hearing, and I will speak of these things to you.
When you cry out that to deny responsibility is immoral you are thinking, at the back of your heads, that men can only be kept within the law by fear; that wrong-doing can only be repressed by punishment.
It is the old and cruel conventions of society that hold you fast to the error that blame and punishment are righteous and salutary. It is ignorance of human nature that betrays you into the belief that men can be made honest and benevolent by cruelty and terror.
Punishment has never been just, has never been effectual. Punishment has always failed of its purpose: the greater its severity, the more abject its failure.
Men cannot be made good and gentle by means of violence and wrong. The real tamers and purifiers of human hearts are love and charity and reason.
You seem to think it is a noble thing to be angry with a criminal, and to be angry with me for defending him. But it is always ignoble to be angry.
Some of you deny this blood-stained murderer for your brother; but directly your features are distorted by passion, directly your fury overcomes your reason, directly you begin to shriek for his blood, your close relationship to him appears.
Reason, patience, self-control, these are lacking in the savage criminal: I look around for them in vain amongst the crowd in this court.
I said that I would take note of what our Christian friend said about repentance. I will speak to that question now. There are few who so often forget the tenets of their own religion as the clergy. I have found it so.
The clergy are always amongst the first to raise the cry of immorality when one speaks against punishment as unjust, or useless.
Yet the clergy preach the doctrine of repentance. It is only a few weeks since the English papers printed a letter from a murderer under sentence of death, in which he spoke of meeting his relatives "at the feet of Jesus."
In a week from the date of his letter he expected to be in heaven. In a month from the time when he murdered his wife, he expected to be with Jesus, and to live in happiness and glory for ever.
That is what the prison chaplain had taught him. It is what the clergy do teach. They talk of the folly and the immorality of abolishing prison and gallows; and then they offer the perpetrators of the most inhuman and terrible crimes a certainty of everlasting bliss in a sinless heaven.
If it is immoral and absurd to say that all criminals are sinned against as well as sinning; if it is immoral and absurd to say that we ought not to hang a man, nor to flog, nor to imprison him, what kind of morality and wisdom lie in offering all criminals an eternity of happiness and glory?
The clergy are that which their environment has made them. What kind of reasoning can we expect from men who have been taught that it is wicked to think?
Before you are angry with me for defending the prisoner be sure that you are not confounding the ideas of the criminal and the crime. I hate the crime as much as any man here; but I do not hate the criminal. I am not defending evil; I am defending the evil-doer.
Before you plume yourselves too much upon your superior morality and greater love of justice, allow me to remind you that I am asking that the world shall be moral, and not only this man: I am demanding justice for all men, and not for a few. But you—you think you have acted righteously and honourably when you have hanged a murderer; but you have not a thought for the inhuman social conditions that make men criminals. This prisoner is but a type: a type of the legion victims of a selfish and cowardly society. Every day, in every city, in every country, innocent children are being poisoned and perverted by millions. Which of you has spoken a word or lifted a hand to prevent this wholesale wrong? What man of you all, who are so fierce against crime, so loud in praise of morality, has ever tried in act or speech to combat the crime and the immorality which society perpetuates: with your knowledge and consent? You who are so anxious to punish crime, what are you doing to prevent it?
When I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour you assume that I would set him free, assuring him that he is an injured man and that fate compelled him to the act of murder.
Do you think, then, that I would release a tiger amongst the crowd in a circus, or that I would allow a homicidal maniac to go at large in the streets of a city?
It would be folly to give to this brutalised and ignorant tramp a message which hardly a man in this court is sufficiently educated and refined to understand; it would be folly to set at liberty a besotted savage: it would be unsafe.
But I say to you that the prisoner is a victim of heredity and environment, that he has been debased and wronged by society, and that to punish him is unjust.
(A woman's voice: "The monster! Kill him.")
Madam, there is not a woman here can be sure that any child she bears may not be driven by society to stand some day in the dock.
But still. You are not satisfied. Some of you, at any rate, still frown and set your teeth hard. Logic or no logic, he has murdered a baby.
There stands my clerical friend, with knitted brows, and fire in his eyes. But that his calling checks his fierce old Saxon heredity this parson would echo the stern speech of Carlyle to the criminal: "Scoundrel! Know that we for ever hate thee!"
Ah! I thought so. The cloud begins to clear from the face of my clerical friend: the crowd look hopeful. Grim old Thomas appeals to you. The prisoner is a scoundrel, and you do hate him. Nothing I have said, so far, has shaken that feeling. He is a scoundrel, and you hate him. What is more, you cannot forgive me for not hating him. You cannot believe that I am a natural man. I ought to hate him. Well, my friends, how do we feel about a shark? I think you will find that men hate a shark. And I think you will find that they hate him more bitterly than they hate a tiger. And I think you will find that they believe they hate the shark because he is cruel. But that seems to me a mistake. The shark is not so cruel as a cat; it is not so cruel as a shrike; it is nothing like so cruel as a European lady. For though the shark will devour any animals it can reach, it does not deliberately torture them. Now the cat tortures the mouse, the shrike impales flies or beetles upon a thorn, and leaves them to die, and the European lady eats lobster, which has, to her knowledge, been boiled, alive.
But the shark kills human beings. So do tigers, so do lions, and so do men.
But the shark is horrible. Yes; now we are getting nearer the real root of our hatred. The shark is horrible. And so is the murderer.
But there is a difference between horror and hate. The murderer is horrible to me, far more horrible than the shark, just as a mad man is more horrible than a mad dog; just as a human corpse is more awful than the carcase of a deer.
The criminal makes me shudder, he makes my flesh creep; my whole nature recoils from him. But I do not hate him, and I do not blame him.
Which of us does not admire and honour an innocent, graceful, and charming girl? To all of us, men and women, her presence is more delightful than a garden of sweet flowers.
Think of some such amiable and gentle creature. Then imagine that we meet her ten years hence, and find her a drunken harlot, wallowing in the gutter. Think of her then so hideous, filthy, and obscene; think of her debased, indecent, treacherous; think of her incapable of honesty, of gratitude, of truth; think of her sullied and broken and so vile that she would betray her only friend for a glass of gin: think of her well, and ask yourselves how should we feel towards her.
Some of us would blame her: some of us would pity her: some of us would try to befriend her: but hardly one of us could endure her touch, her speech, her gaze. She has become a horror in the light of the day.
My clerical friend and I would stand before her sick and sorry and ashamed. We should be alike dismayed and shocked: we should be alike touched and repelled. But there in that tragic moment would appear the likeness and the difference between us. He would not understand.
The unfortunate woman has been rendered physically and morally loathsome to us. So has this murderer. But that should cause us to pity, and not to hate them; it should inspire us not to destroy them; but to destroy the evil conditions that have brought them, and millions as unfortunate as they, to this terrible and shameful pass. The bitterest wrong of all is the fact that these fellow-creatures of ours have been degraded below the reach of our help and our affection.
Looking into my own heart, and recalling my experience of men and women, I must own that there is not one in a thousand of us who might not have become a shame and a horror to our fellows had our environment been as cruel and as hard as the environment of these from whom we shrink appalled.
And when I read of a murder, when I see some human wreck, so repulsive and unsightly that my soul is sick within me, and my flesh shudders away from the contact, I crush the anger out of my heart, and remember what I am and might have been, and that this man, this woman, now so dreadful or so vile, is a victim of a state of society which most of us believe in and uphold.
I cannot hate these miserables, but I cannot love them. I could not sleep in a dirty bed, nor eat a rotten peach, nor listen to a piano out of tune, nor drink after a leper or a slut, nor make a friend of a sweater, nor shake the hand of an assassin, nor sit at table with a filthy sot.
But to drive our fellow-creatures into disgrace and crime beyond redemption, and then to hate them or to hang them; is that just?
To loathe and punish the victims of society, and never lift a hand against the wrongs that are their ruin, is that reasonable?
I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour; but I cannot ask that he be set at liberty. We could not liberate a smallpox patient nor a lunatic.
Although the prisoner ought not to be punished, it is imperative that he be restrained.
Being what he is: being what society has made him, he is not fit to be at large.
We must defend ourselves against him. We must protect our children from him, even although we have failed to protect other children against society.
I ask the jury for a verdict in the prisoner's favour. I leave the prisoner to their justice and to their reason. That is my case.
DOES it do a man any good to hang him? Does it do us any good to hang him? Is any human being in the wide world edified or bettered when a man is hanged? Is it any use hanging men?
That it is unjust to hang a man we have seen. But is it any use?
There is a certain school of moralists who are angered and alarmed by the mere suggestion that men should cease to blame and punish each other. They protest that virtue would die out and morality become a mockery if we ceased to scold, and whip, and execute each other. They seem to believe that injustice and ferocity are the best exemplars of justice and human kindness.
Dr. Aked, minister of Pembroke Chapel, Liverpool, declaiming against what he called "this preposterous notion of moral irresponsibility," declared that "it is the doctrine of every coward, of every cur, of every thief who ever pilfered from his master's till, of every seducer and traitor the world has seen." I whisper the name of Torquemada, and pass on.
Dr. Aked, supposing, for the sake of illustration, that he who has been a bad man, said:
If, in the mercy of God, the day comes when I see myself as I am, when there is no more shuffling, when to myself Myself is compelled, even to the teeth and forehead of my faults, to give in evidence—if such a day comes, no juggling with words, no nonsense about not knowing any better or being driven by education upon organisation, by environment acting on heredity, will serve to conceal from my soul the hideous view of its own guilt.
And yet Dr. Aked is a minister of the Christian religion, and a professed follower of Christ, who said of his murderers, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."
I might imitate Dr. Aked, and denounce the idea that punishment makes men virtuous and docile as the idea of every tyrant, of every religious persecutor, of every wife-beater, of every martinet, of every bully and brute the world has ever seen. But I prefer to look calmly and sensibly at the evidence.
That mighty moral ruler, King Henry VIII., during his reign did, according to the author of Elizabethan England, hang up seventy-two thousand thieves, rogues, and vagabonds.
Now, Sir Thomas More, who was one of the finest men England ever bred, and was Lord High Chancellor under Henry VIII., has put it upon record, in his great and noble work, Utopia, that these severe punishments were not only unjust, but ineffectual.
I will quote from Sir Thomas:
One day when I was dining with him (Cardinal Archbishop Morton) there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said: were then hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places.
Upon this, I, who took the boldness to speak freely before the Cardinal, said there was no reason to wonder at the matter, since this way of punishing thieves was neither just in itself, nor good for the public; for as the severity was too great, so the remedy was not effectual; simple theft not being so great a crime that it ought to cost a man his life; and no punishment, how severe soever, being able to restrain those from robbing, who can find out no other way of livelihood; and in this, said I, not only you in England, but a great part of the world, imitate some ill masters that are readier to chastise their scholars than to teach them. There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing, and dying for it.... If you do not find a remedy to these evils, it is a vain thing to boast of your severity of punishing theft; which, though it may have the appearance of justice, yet in itself is neither just nor convenient; for if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves, and then punish them?
In confirmation of the statement of Henry the Eighth's Lord Chancellor, we have the evidence of Harrison, that after these 72,000 executions of Henry, there were more thieves than ever in the next reign.
Harrison, who wrote in the reign of Elizabeth, says of the "rogues and vagabonds": "the punishment that is ordained for this kind of people is very sharp, and yet it cannot restrain them from their gadding."
In that day any one convicted, "on the testimony of two honest and credible witnesses," of being a "rogue," "he is then immediately adjudged to be grievously whipped, and burned through the gristle of the right ear, with a hot iron of the compass of an inch about." Amongst the "rogues" were included actors, jugglers, fencers, minstrels, and tinkers!
Harrison toasts that our laws against felons were more humane than those of the Continent. Let us consider the leniency of Elizabeth's day. A woman who poisoned her husband was burnt alive. Other poisoners were boiled alive, or scalded to death in "seething water or lead." Heretics and witches were burnt alive. Murderers were hanged alive in chains. Harrison adds: "We have use neither of the wheel nor of the bar as in other countries; but when wilful manslaughter is perpetrated, besides hanging, the offender hath his right hand commonly stricken off, before or near the place where the act was done, after which he is led forth to the place of execution and there put to death according to the law."
For treason men were "hanged, drawn, and quartered."
For felony, which was anything from highway robbery to theft of a piece of bread, men, women, and children were hanged. There were over 250 offences for which the penalty was death.
For "speaking sedition against a magistrate" the offender had both his ears cut off.
If a prisoner refused to plead he was pressed to death under heavy weights.
Harrison says that "there is not one year" in which three or four hundred "rogues" are not "eaten up by the gallows." And then he goes on to remark that so many are the idle rogues, that "except some better order be taken, or the laws already made be better executed, such as dwell in uplandish towns and little villages shall live but in small safety or rest."
A hundred years ago there were over two hundred offences for which the punishment was death. Boys and girls were hanged for theft. Mr. Collinson, in Facts about Floggings, says that in 1816 there were at one time over fifty prisoners in England waiting to be hanged, and that one of them was a child of tender years. Mr. Collinson says:
The inefficiency and brutality of all this torture and bloodshed became obvious to the people, through the propaganda of a few daring and enlightened reformers, and it was swept away.
But let us come nearer home. About a dozen years ago the late Mr. Hopwood, K.C., Recorder of Liverpool, was good enough to give me his opinions on the subject of harsh and lenient punishment. Mr. Hopwood said:
I was first convinced of the uselessness of harsh sentences by attendance at two courts of sessions about thirty-five years ago. The two courts were those of Manchester and Salford—towns very similar as to population and conditions of life. In Salford the sentences were uniformly lenient. In Manchester they were uniformly severe. People said Manchester would be purged of crime; that all the criminals would flock to Salford. It was not so. The state of things continued for some years, and caused no increase of crime in the one, nor decrease of crime in the other town. Hence it becomes evident that a great deal of useless punishment was inflicted in Manchester. I was a young barrister at the time, and I took the lesson to heart.
Mr. Hopwood only claimed a negative result. He said: "I do not say I have reduced crime, but only that I have reduced punishment without increasing crime. For instance, I claim that during my six years at this court I have saved three thousand years of imprisonment."
When I remarked "that saved a great waste of money," he answered that it was "a great saving of humanity." He claimed that life and property were at least as secure under a clement judge as under a cruel one, and that his system saved much suffering and shame, not only to the prisoners, but also to those dependent upon them. He said that very often his treatment had a good effect upon the prisoners: "Do you know, often they are ashamed to come back."
Mr. Hopwood told me that at first he met with strong opposition, but that his example had such an effect that the local magistrates had come "to give six or ten months' imprisonment in cases where formerly the offenders would have got seven years." Asked whether his leniency had caused criminals to flock to Liverpool, Mr. Hopwood answered, "Not at all"; and his denial was backed by the statement of the Chief Constable that "crime was decreasing to an appreciable extent."
Mr. Hopwood told me he would like to release one-third of those men then in prison, and, he added, "another third ought never to have gone there." Asked what that meant, he said that one-third of the prisoners were innocent. My own observation, in the police-courts afterwards, convinced me that he was quite right. Finally, after showing me that the boasted cure of garrotting by "the cat" was a fiction, "there never was a garrotter flogged," Mr. Hopwood asked me to go and see some of our prisons, remarking, gravely:
The prison system is cruel and vile. The prisoners are starved, tortured, and degraded. The system should be altered at once. It is inhumanly severe upon the guilty, and, in my opinion, a good third of those in our gaols are not guilty.
Dr. James Devon, medical officer at Glasgow Prison, told the Royal Philosophical Society in that city, in 1904, that "with milder methods of repression we have not more, but less, crime: and certainly much less brutality."
Dr. Hamilton D. Wey, of Elmira Reformatory, 'Elmira, N. Y., says:
"The time will come when every punitive institution in the world will be destroyed, and be replaced by hospitals, schools, workshops, and reformatories."
Dr. Lydston, professor of criminal anthropology, writes as follows:
"Try to reform your man, try to purify and elevate his soul, and if he does not come to time, lock him up or hang him." This has been the war-cry of the average reformer through all the ages. "Make a healthy man of your criminal, or prospective criminal, give him a sound, well-developed brain to think with, and rich, clean blood to feed it upon, and an opportunity to earn an honest living—then preach to him if you like." This is the fundamental principle of the scientific criminologist. Which is the more rational?
Havelock Ellis says in his work on "the criminal," "Flogging is objectionable, because it is ineffectual, and because it brutalises and degrades those on whom it is inflicted, those who inflict it, and those who come within the radius of its influence."
The Recorder of Liverpool told me that millions were wasted upon prisons which ought to be spent upon detection. "Make detection swift and certain," said he, "and crime will cease. No one will steal if he is sure he will be caught every time."
This is proved by the Revenue service. Penalties did not stop smuggling; but it has now become almost impossible to run a cargo: the coast is so closely guarded.
Dr. Lydston, in The Diseases of Society, says:
The prospective criminal once born, what does society do to prevent his becoming a criminal? Practically nothing.... What is the remedy at present in vogue? Society punishes the vicious child after a criminal act has been committed, and sends the diseased one to the hospital to be supported by the public, after he has become helpless. Even in this, the twentieth century, the child who has committed his first offence is in most communities thrown by the authorities into contact with older and more hardened criminals—to have his criminal education completed. The same fate is meted out to the adult "first offender." We have millions for sectarian universities, millions for foreign missions, but few dollars for the redemption of children of vicious propensities or corrupting opportunities, who are the product of our own vicious social system. Every penal institution, every expensive process of criminal law, is a monument to the stupidity and wastefulness of society—and expenditure of money and energy to cure a disease that might be largely prevented, and more logically treated where not prevented.
Lombroso, the great Italian criminologist, said, in 1901:
There are few who understand that there is anything else for us to do, to protect ourselves from crime, except to inflict punishments that are often only new crimes, and that are almost always the source of new crimes.
From the day of Sir Thomas More to the present hour, it has been claimed by wise and experienced men that punishment is not only unjust, but worse than useless. And the statistics of crime have always supported the claim.
There was more crime in the fifteenth century, when penalties were so severe, than there is to-day. There were worse crimes. There was more brutality.
The abolition of cruel punishments has diminished crime. The abolition of flogging in the army and navy has not injured either service. The improvement in school discipline has not lowered the moral standard of boys and girls.
But, it may be urged, the decrease in crime, and the improvement in morals are not due only to the increased leniency of punishments. They are due also to the spread of education, and to the improved conditions of life.
Exactly. That is my case. Decrease of punishment, and increase of education, have diminished crime and improved morals.
Punish less, and teach more; blame less, and encourage more; hate less, and love more; and you will get not a lowering, but a raising of the moral standard; not an increase in crime, but a decrease. And the improvement will be due to alteration for the better of—environment.
Chance has placed me very often in positions of authority. I have been in charge of rough and reckless men: soldiers, militiamen, navvies, workers of all sorts. I have never found it necessary to be harsh, nor to threaten, nor to drive. I have always found that to respect men as men, to treat them fairly and quietly, and to show a little kindness now and again, has sufficed to get the best out of them.
I have gone into the midst of a crowd of Irish soldiers, all drunk, and all fighting in true Donnybrook fashion, and have got order without a hard word, without making a single prisoner. Directly they recognised me they calmed down. Had I been a sergeant disliked by them they would have thrown me downstairs.
I have found the wildest and the lowest amenable to reason and to kindness. One of the greatest ruffians in the regiment once spoke rudely to me in camp, and even threatened me. I was then a lance-corporal, and a mere boy. I sat down and talked to the bruiser quietly for a few minutes, and from that day he would have done anything for me.
There was a blackguard in my company who once threatened to murder me. A few months later he was taken ill in the night and I attended to him, and probably saved his life. He never forgot it. It was but a small kindness, and he was what is generally called a scoundrel, but he showed his gratitude to me all the rest of the time I was in the army.
As a child I was brought up under strict discipline. I felt that it was a wrong method. I have "spoilt" my children; and they are better than I ever was.
Parents beat their children for their own errors. If a father cannot gain the respect and obedience of his children, it is because he is foolish, or violent, or ignorant. Children, soldiers, and animals are alike in one respect: they know and respect strength and reason. The quiet manager, officer, sergeant, parent, who knows his own mind, who keeps his temper, who is not afraid, can always get discipline and order. If I thought any one under my control or care was afraid of me, I should feel ashamed. If a master rules only by fear of punishment he is not fit to rule at all. When those over whom we happen to be placed in authority feel that we deserve their respect, we get it If you want to know whether a man is fit for command, put him with men who are not bound to obey him. Put him with his equals, where he has no power to punish nor to harm. Thus you will find the real leader of men: the man who leads with his brains.
I knew a young lieutenant once, a boy of twenty. He met a boy private in town, and saw that he had been drinking. Had he made a prisoner of the boy, the private would have got punished for drunkenness, and would have got drunk again. But the young officer sent for the boy the next day and said, "If I were you, Thomas, I wouldn't drink. It is a poor game, and your people would not like it" That boy was cured.
That same officer, if the men were unsteady on parade, would stand quite still and look at them. He had clear blue eyes, and his look was not stern, it was calm and confident. It brought the whole company to attention without a word. The officer was a man, and the men knew it, and they knew it because he knew it The boss who begins to bully is not sure of himself. Children, soldiers, workers, and animals know by instinct when the boss is not sure of himself.
Those who put so much trust in blame and punishment do not understand human nature. I said in a previous chapter that a man could not believe a thing unless his reason told him that it was true. I now say that a man cannot help believing a thing when his reason tells him it is true. The secret of reform is to make men understand.
The terrors of capital punishment, the terrors of the "cat," even the terrors of hell-fire fail to awe the criminal. That is because the criminal is stupid or ignorant, and lacks imagination. He hears of hell, and of death. But he cannot imagine either. He seldom thinks. He seldom looks beyond the end of his nose.
Discipline is not preserved in the army by the dread of the "cat," nor of the cells. It is kept by the fact that the wildest and most reckless man knows that he must obey, that the whole physical and moral force of the army is united to insist upon obedience.
If he disobey an order he will be punished. He does not care a snap of his fingers for the punishment. But he knows that after he has done his punishment drill the order will be repeated, and that he will be obliged to obey. He knows that the sentiment of the army is against him until he does obey.
I have seen an officer get a battalion into a mess on parade, and then lose his temper and bully the men.. And I have seen another officer on the same day drill the men and get them to work like a machine. The first officer did not know how to give the orders. The second knew his business, was sure that he did know it, and so let the men feel that he knew it.
It is with parents as with those two officers. The one who knows his duty, and does it properly, never has any occasion to lose his temper.
It is time Solomon's rod followed the witches' broom. It is time the "cat," and the chain, and the cell, and the convict's dress, and the oakum and the skilly, and the gallows followed the rack and the thumbscrew and the faggot and the wheel. It is time the leaders of the people were taught to lead. It is time the educated and the uneducated were given some real education. It is time that tyranny, cruelty, self-righteousness, superstition, and the bad old conventions of an ignorant past, gave place to reason, to science, to manhood.
"But," the penal moralist will demand, "if you propose to abolish blame and punishment, what do you propose to put in their place?"
And I answer, "Justice, knowledge, and reason—in fact, an improved environment."
The cause of most of our social and moral troubles is ignorance.
By ignorance I do not mean illiteracy only: there are many classical scholars who are really ignorant men. No: I mean ignorance of human nature and of the essentials to a happy and wholesome human life. It is this kind of ignorance which divides the people into two classes: rich and poor—masters and slaves. It is this kind of ignorance which causes men to sacrifice health, happiness, and virtue for the sake of vanity, and idleness, and wealth. It is the kind of ignorance which keeps twelve millions of people in a rich and fertile country always on the verge of destitution. It is this kind of ignorance which saddles mankind with the cost of armies, and fleets, and prisons, and police. It is this kind of ignorance which breeds millions of criminals, and educates them in crime. It is this kind of ignorance which splits a great nation into castes, and sects, and makes the realisation of the glorious ideal of human brotherhood impossible. It is this kind of ignorance which drives professing Christians to neglect the teachings of Christ. It is this kind of ignorance which makes possible the millionaire, the aristocrat, the sweater, the tramp, the thief, the degenerate, and the slave. It is this kind of ignorance which keeps the children hungry, drives the men to drunkenness, and the women to shame. It is this kind of ignorance which is answerable for all evil environments from which hate, and greed, and poverty, and immorality spring, like weeds from a rank and neglected soil.
We cannot get rid of this most deadly form of ignorance by means of blame and punishment. There is only one way to drive out ignorance, and that is by spreading knowledge.
What knowledge? Knowledge of human nature and of the essentials to a happy and wholesome life.
It is bad for men to be rich and idle; it is bad for men to be ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-taught, unhonoured, and unloved.
Whilst life is a sordid scramble, in which the prizes are pernicious wealth, and luxury, and idleness, and in which the blanks are hunger, ignorance, vice, unhappiness, the prison, and the gallows; immorality and crime must flourish as pestilence flourishes in a filthy, pent, and insanitary city. It is sad to see the custodians of the public morality bewailing the wickedness of men, and fostering the evil surroundings from which evil springs. It is as foolish as to bewail the presence of malarial fever, to punish the victims for spreading the disease, and at the same time to refuse to drain the marsh from which the malaria comes, because it is the property of a grand duke, who wishes to shoot wildfowl there.
What do I propose should be done. Why that, my friends, is another story. What I propose at present to do is to prove that crime and immorality are caused: to show what the causes are; and to point out that the recognised remedies are ineffectual.
While we have an idle rich, and a hungry and ignorant poor, we cannot get rid of vice and crime. To punish the criminals we have made, is unjust and useless; to pray for deliverance from plague: we must look to the drains—we must improve the environment.
No man should be idle. No man should be rich. No man should be ignorant, no man destitute. Every man should have a chance to earn the essentials to a wholesome, happy, temperate, and useful life. Every child should be nourished, and taught, and trained.
Crime, vice, disease, poverty, idleness: all these are preventable evils.
But we cannot drain our marshes, because, little as we heed the misery of the people, the ignorance and hunger of the children, the despair of the men and the degradation of the women, we are marvellously tender of Grand Ducal sport.
It is Mammon we worship, not God; it is property we prize, not life; it is vanity we love, and not our fellow-creatures. We are an ignorant, atavistic people; and our priests are wondrous moral.