I confess that I felt rather unhappy when I got home, and thought more
closely over the trial that I had just witnessed. For the time I was
carried away by the opinion of those among whom I was. They had no
misgivings about what they were doing. There did not seem to be a
person in the whole court who had the smallest doubt but that all was
exactly as it should be. This universal unsuspecting confidence was
imparted by sympathy to myself, in spite of all my training in opinions
so widely different. So it is with most of us: that which we observe to
be taken as a matter of course by those around us, we take as a matter
of course ourselves. And after all, it is our duty to do this, save
upon grave occasion.
But when I was alone, and began to think the trial over, it certainly
did strike me as betraying a strange and untenable position. Had the
judge said that he acknowledged the probable truth, namely, that the
prisoner was born of unhealthy parents, or had been starved in infancy,
or had met with some accidents which had developed consumption; and had
he then gone on to say that though he knew all this, and bitterly
regretted that the protection of society obliged him to inflict
additional pain on one who had suffered so much already, yet that there
was no help for it, I could have understood the position, however
mistaken I might have thought it. The judge was fully persuaded that
the infliction of pain upon the weak and sickly was the only means of
preventing weakness and sickliness from spreading, and that ten times
the suffering now inflicted upon the accused was eventually warded off
from others by the present apparent severity. I could therefore
perfectly understand his inflicting whatever pain he might consider
necessary in order to prevent so bad an example from spreading further
and lowering the Erewhonian standard; but it seemed almost childish to
tell the prisoner that he could have been in good health, if he had
been more fortunate in his constitution, and been exposed to less
hardships when he was a boy.
I write with great diffidence, but it seems to me that there is no
unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding them
for their sheer good luck: it is the normal condition of human life
that this should be done, and no right-minded person will complain of
being subjected to the common treatment. There is no alternative open
to us. It is idle to say that men are not responsible for their
misfortunes. What is responsibility? Surely to be responsible means to
be liable to have to give an answer should it be demanded, and all
things which live are responsible for their lives and actions should
society see fit to question them through the mouth of its authorised
agent.
What is the offence of a lamb that we should rear it, and tend it, and
lull it into security, for the express purpose of killing it? Its
offence is the misfortune of being something which society wants to
eat, and which cannot defend itself. This is ample. Who shall limit the
right of society except society itself? And what consideration for the
individual is tolerable unless society be the gainer thereby? Wherefore
should a man be so richly rewarded for having been son to a
millionaire, were it not clearly provable that the common welfare is
thus better furthered? We cannot seriously detract from a man’s merit
in having been the son of a rich father without imperilling our own
tenure of things which we do not wish to jeopardise; if this were
otherwise we should not let him keep his money for a single hour; we
would have it ourselves at once. For property is robbery, but then, we
are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it
essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to
organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the
bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to
him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.
But to return. Even in England a man on board a ship with yellow fever
is held responsible for his mischance, no matter what his being kept in
quarantine may cost him. He may catch the fever and die; we cannot help
it; he must take his chance as other people do; but surely it would be
desperate unkindness to add contumely to our self-protection, unless,
indeed, we believe that contumely is one of our best means of
self-protection. Again, take the case of maniacs. We say that they are
irresponsible for their actions, but we take good care, or ought to
take good care, that they shall answer to us for their insanity, and we
imprison them in what we call an asylum (that modern sanctuary!) if we
do not like their answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility.
What we ought to say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less
satisfactory answer from a lunatic than from one who is not mad,
because lunacy is less infectious than crime.
We kill a serpent if we go in danger by it, simply for being such and
such a serpent in such and such a place; but we never say that the
serpent has only itself to blame for not having been a harmless
creature. Its crime is that of being the thing which it is: but this is
a capital offence, and we are right in killing it out of the way,
unless we think it more danger to do so than to let it escape;
nevertheless we pity the creature, even though we kill it.
But in the case of him whose trial I have described above, it was
impossible that any one in the court should not have known that it was
but by an accident of birth and circumstances that he was not himself
also in a consumption; and yet none thought that it disgraced them to
hear the judge give vent to the most cruel truisms about him. The judge
himself was a kind and thoughtful person. He was a man of magnificent
and benign presence. He was evidently of an iron constitution, and his
face wore an expression of the maturest wisdom and experience; yet for
all this, old and learned as he was, he could not see things which one
would have thought would have been apparent even to a child. He could
not emancipate himself from, nay, it did not even occur to him to feel,
the bondage of the ideas in which he had been born and bred.
So was it also with the jury and bystanders; and—most wonderful of
all—so was it even with the prisoner. Throughout he seemed fully
impressed with the notion that he was being dealt with justly: he saw
nothing wanton in his being told by the judge that he was to be
punished, not so much as a necessary protection to society (although
this was not entirely lost sight of), as because he had not been better
born and bred than he was. But this led me to hope that he suffered
less than he would have done if he had seen the matter in the same
light that I did. And, after all, justice is relative.
I may here mention that only a few years before my arrival in the
country, the treatment of all convicted invalids had been much more
barbarous than now, for no physical remedy was provided, and prisoners
were put to the severest labour in all sorts of weather, so that most
of them soon succumbed to the extreme hardships which they suffered;
this was supposed to be beneficial in some ways, inasmuch as it put the
country to less expense for the maintenance of its criminal class; but
the growth of luxury had induced a relaxation of the old severity, and
a sensitive age would no longer tolerate what appeared to be an excess
of rigour, even towards the most guilty; moreover, it was found that
juries were less willing to convict, and justice was often cheated
because there was no alternative between virtually condemning a man to
death and letting him go free; it was also held that the country paid
in recommittals for its over-severity; for those who had been
imprisoned even for trifling ailments were often permanently disabled
by their imprisonment; and when a man had been once convicted, it was
probable that he would seldom afterwards be off the hands of the
country.
These evils had long been apparent and recognised; yet people were too
indolent, and too indifferent to suffering not their own, to bestir
themselves about putting an end to them, until at last a benevolent
reformer devoted his whole life to effecting the necessary changes. He
divided all illnesses into three classes—those affecting the head, the
trunk, and the lower limbs—and obtained an enactment that all diseases
of the head, whether internal or external, should be treated with
laudanum, those of the body with castor-oil, and those of the lower
limbs with an embrocation of strong sulphuric acid and water.
It may be said that the classification was not sufficiently careful,
and that the remedies were ill chosen; but it is a hard thing to
initiate any reform, and it was necessary to familiarise the public
mind with the principle, by inserting the thin end of the wedge first:
it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that among so practical a
people there should still be some room for improvement. The mass of the
nation are well pleased with existing arrangements, and believe that
their treatment of criminals leaves little or nothing to be desired;
but there is an energetic minority who hold what are considered to be
extreme opinions, and who are not at all disposed to rest contented
until the principle lately admitted has been carried further.
I was at some pains to discover the opinions of these men, and their
reasons for entertaining them. They are held in great odium by the
generality of the public, and are considered as subverters of all
morality whatever. The malcontents, on the other hand, assert that
illness is the inevitable result of certain antecedent causes, which,
in the great majority of cases, were beyond the control of the
individual, and that therefore a man is only guilty for being in a
consumption in the same way as rotten fruit is guilty for having gone
rotten. True, the fruit must be thrown on one side as unfit for man’s
use, and the man in a consumption must be put in prison for the
protection of his fellow-citizens; but these radicals would not punish
him further than by loss of liberty and a strict surveillance. So long
as he was prevented from injuring society, they would allow him to make
himself useful by supplying whatever of society’s wants he could
supply. If he succeeded in thus earning money, they would have him made
as comfortable in prison as possible, and would in no way interfere
with his liberty more than was necessary to prevent him from escaping,
or from becoming more severely indisposed within the prison walls; but
they would deduct from his earnings the expenses of his board, lodging,
surveillance, and half those of his conviction. If he was too ill to do
anything for his support in prison, they would allow him nothing but
bread and water, and very little of that.
They say that society is foolish in refusing to allow itself to be
benefited by a man merely because he has done it harm hitherto, and
that objection to the labour of the diseased classes is only protection
in another form. It is an attempt to raise the natural price of a
commodity by saying that such and such persons, who are able and
willing to produce it, shall not do so, whereby every one has to pay
more for it.
Besides, so long as a man has not been actually killed he is our
fellow-creature, though perhaps a very unpleasant one. It is in a great
degree the doing of others that he is what he is, or in other words,
the society which now condemns him is partly answerable concerning him.
They say that there is no fear of any increase of disease under these
circumstances; for the loss of liberty, the surveillance, the
considerable and compulsory deduction from the prisoner’s earnings, the
very sparing use of stimulants (of which they would allow but little to
any, and none to those who did not earn them), the enforced celibacy,
and above all, the loss of reputation among friends, are in their
opinion as ample safeguards to society against a general neglect of
health as those now resorted to. A man, therefore, (so they say) should
carry his profession or trade into prison with him if possible; if not,
he must earn his living by the nearest thing to it that he can; but if
he be a gentleman born and bred to no profession, he must pick oakum,
or write art criticisms for a newspaper.
These people say further, that the greater part of the illness which
exists in their country is brought about by the insane manner in which
it is treated.
They believe that illness is in many cases just as curable as the moral
diseases which they see daily cured around them, but that a great
reform is impossible till men learn to take a juster view of what
physical obliquity proceeds from. Men will hide their illnesses as long
as they are scouted on its becoming known that they are ill; it is the
scouting, not the physic, which produces the concealment; and if a man
felt that the news of his being in ill-health would be received by his
neighbours as a deplorable fact, but one as much the result of
necessary antecedent causes as though he had broken into a jeweller’s
shop and stolen a valuable diamond necklace—as a fact which might just
as easily have happened to themselves, only that they had the luck to
be better born or reared; and if they also felt that they would not be
made more uncomfortable in the prison than the protection of society
against infection and the proper treatment of their own disease
actually demanded, men would give themselves up to the police as
readily on perceiving that they had taken small-pox, as they go now to
the straightener when they feel that they are on the point of forging a
will, or running away with somebody else’s wife.
But the main argument on which they rely is that of economy: for they
know that they will sooner gain their end by appealing to men’s
pockets, in which they have generally something of their own, than to
their heads, which contain for the most part little but borrowed or
stolen property; and also, they believe it to be the readiest test and
the one which has most to show for itself. If a course of conduct can
be shown to cost a country less, and this by no dishonourable saving
and with no indirectly increased expenditure in other ways, they hold
that it requires a good deal to upset the arguments in favour of its
being adopted, and whether rightly or wrongly I cannot pretend to say,
they think that the more medicinal and humane treatment of the diseased
of which they are the advocates would in the long run be much cheaper
to the country: but I did not gather that these reformers were opposed
to meeting some of the more violent forms of illness with the
cat-of-nine-tails, or with death; for they saw no so effectual way of
checking them; they would therefore both flog and hang, but they would
do so pitifully.
I have perhaps dwelt too long upon opinions which can have no possible
bearing upon our own, but I have not said the tenth part of what these
would-be reformers urged upon me. I feel, however, that I have
sufficiently trespassed upon the attention of the reader.