CHAPTER VII

THE MORAL PROGRESS OF THE RACE AS SHOWN BY HISTORY

The necessity of the constant assimilation of savage tribes, of the

peopling of thinly inhabited areas, renders social evolution as a whole

exceedingly slow. Nor can there be, even in isolated peoples, any sudden

leap from savagery to civilization; in other words the term

"civilization" is not of absolute but of comparative, progressive,

import. Nor can we suppose the social evolution to have been only

outward; we cannot suppose that our cave-dwelling, man-eating, rude

ancestors, if they could have been suddenly transported, in infancy

even, into the midst of modern civilization by means of a Carlylean

wishing-cap, or by some method of projection in time similar to that by

which men promise to "knock each other into the middle of next week,"

would have been able to equal modern men in mental and moral attainment.

We may gain some idea of the gentle manners and moral character of our

early progenitors from the customs of savage peoples of the present day;

although a very large number of these stand upon a higher plane than did

the ancient savages known to geology. I insert a few extracts from

Lubbock:--

"Mr. Galbraith, who lived for many years, as Indian agent, among the

Sioux (North America), thus describes them: 'They are bigoted,

barbarous, and exceedingly superstitious. They regard most of the vices

as virtues. Theft, arson, rape, and murder, are among them regarded as

the means of distinction; and the young Indian from childhood is taught

to regard killing as the highest of virtues. In their dances and at

their feasts, the warriors recite their deeds of theft, pillage, and

slaughter, as precious things; and the highest, indeed the only,

ambition of a young brave is to secure "the feather," which is but a

record of his having murdered or participated in the murder, of some

human being--whether man, woman, or child, it is immaterial; and after

he has secured his first "feather," appetite is whetted to increase the

number in his cap, as an Indian brave is estimated by the number of his

feathers.'"[183]

"'Conscience,' says Burton, 'does not exist in Eastern Africa, and

"repentance" expresses regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime.

Robbery constitutes an honorable man; murder--the more atrocious the

midnight crime the better--makes the hero.'"[184]

"In Tahiti, the missionaries considered that 'not less than two-thirds

of the children were murdered by their parents.' Mr. Ellis adds, 'I do

not recollect having met with a female in the islands, during the whole

period of my residence there, who had been a mother while idolatry

prevailed, who had not imbrued her hands in the blood of her offspring.'

Mr. Nott also makes the same assertion. Girls were more often killed

than boys, because they were of less use in fishing and in war."[185]

"Williams tells us that 'offences, in Fijian estimation, are light or

grave according to the rank of the offender. Murder by a chief is less

heinous than a petty larceny committed by a man of low rank.'"[186]

"Among the Khonds of Central India, human sacrifices prevailed until

quite lately. 'A stout stake is driven into the soil and to it the

victim is fastened, seated, and anointed with ghee, oil, and turmeric,

decorated with flowers, and _worshipped_ during the day by the assembly.

At nightfall the licentious revelry is resumed, and on the third morning

the victim gets some milk to drink, when the presiding priest implores

the goddess to shower her blessings on the people. After the mock

ceremony, nevertheless, the victim is taken to the grove where the

sacrifice is to be carried out; and to prevent resistance, the bones of

the arms and legs are broken, or the victim drugged with opium or

datura, when the janni wounds his victim with the axe. This act is

followed up by the crowd. A number now press forward to obtain a piece

of his flesh, and in a moment he is stripped to the bones.'

"An almost identical custom prevails among the Marimos, a tribe of South

Africa much resembling the Bechuanas.... Schoolcraft mentions a...

sacrifice to the 'Spirit of Corn' among the Pawnees. The victim was

first tortured by being suspended over a fire. 'At a given signal, a

hundred arrows were let fly, and her whole body was pierced. These were

immediately withdrawn, and her flesh cut from her bones in small pieces

which were put into baskets and carried into the cornfield, where the

grain was being planted, and the blood squeezed out on each hill.'"[187]

"Human sacrifices occurred in Guinea, and Burton saw 'at Benin City a

young woman lashed to a scaffolding upon the summit of a tall blasted

tree, and being devoured by the turkey-buzzards. The people declared it

to be a "fetich" or charm for bringing rain.'...

"Captain Cook describes human sacrifices as prevalent among the

islanders of the Pacific, and especially in the Sandwich group.... War

captives were frequently sacrificed in Brazil."[188]

"The lowest races have no institution of marriage. True love is almost

unknown among them, and marriage in its lowest phases is by no means a

matter of affection and companionship.... In North America, the Tinne

Indians had no word for 'dear' and 'beloved'; and the Algonquin language

is stated to have contained no verb meaning 'to love,' so that when the

Bible was translated by the missionaries into that language it was

necessary to invent a word for the purpose."[189]

"The position of women in Australia seems, indeed, to be wretched in the

extreme. They are treated with the utmost brutality, beaten and speared

in the limbs on the most trivial provocation. 'Few women,' says Eyre,

'will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon

the head or the marks of spear-wounds upon the body. I have seen a young

woman who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost

riddled with spear-wounds.'"[190]

"Collins thus describes the manner in which the natives about Sydney

used to procure wives: 'The poor wretch is stolen upon in the absence of

her protectors. Being first stupefied with blows, inflicted with clubs

or wooden swords, on the head, back, and shoulders, every one of which

is followed by a stream of blood, she is then dragged through the woods

by one arm, with a perseverance and violence that it might be supposed

would displace it from its socket. This outrage is not resented by the

relations of the female, who only retaliate by a similar outrage when

they find an opportunity.'"[191]

"Indeed," says Lubbock, "I do not remember a single instance in which a

savage is recorded as having shown any symptoms of remorse; and almost

the only case I can call to mind, in which a man belonging to one of the

lower races has accounted for an act by saying explicitly that it was

right, was when Mr. Hunt asked a young Fijian why he had killed his

mother."[192]

We have direct evidence, in many present or recent customs, of so-called

civilized or half-civilized nations, that the barbarous customs

described in "The Origin of Civilization," and in the books of many

travellers, are not the original and special inventions of modern

savages merely, but that similar customs prevailed among our

progenitors. Lubbock notices many of these. The marriage ceremonies of

many peoples are particularly suggestive of a time when violent capture

was the means of obtaining a wife, and cruelty of treatment was her

usual portion.[193] Human sacrifices were common among many peoples of

ancient Europe; and the cancellation of responsibility for murder with

fines (often nominal in the case of the murder of a man of lower rank)

was a widely spread custom. "In Russia," writes Lubbock, "as in

Scandinavia, human sacrifices continued down to the introduction of

Christianity. In Mexico and Peru they seem to have been peculiarly

numerous. Mueller has suggested that this may have partly arisen from the

fact that these nations were not softened by the possession of domestic

animals.[194] Various estimates have been made of the number of human

victims annually sacrificed in the Mexican temples. Mueller thinks 2500

is a moderate estimate; and in one year it appears to have exceeded

100,000." "In Northern Europe, human sacrifices were not uncommon. The

Yarl of the Orkneys is recorded to have sacrificed the son of the King

of Norway to Odin in the year 893. In 993, Hakon Yarl sacrificed his own

son to the gods. Donald, King of Sweden, was burnt by his people as a

sacrifice to Odin, in consequence of a severe famine. At Upsala was a

celebrated temple, round which an eye-witness assured Adam of Bremen

that he had seen the corpses of seventy-two victims hanging up at one

time."[195]

A peculiar confusion as to the definition of morality sometimes gives

rise to such vagaries of theory as the defence of murder committed by

savages, and other cruelties practised, on the ground that these things

are not considered sins in the moral code of the peoples among which

they are practised; murder is thus excused on the plea that _wrecking is

also looked upon as permissible_;[196] and Wallace thinks that savages

live up to their "simple moral code" as well as civilized human beings

to their elaborate one, so that they are, in reality, as moral as these

latter. It should not be forgotten, however, that the moral code is

itself the product of the tribe and represents its moral sentiment.

Lubbock remarks that if a man's simple moral code permits him to rob and

murder, the code is at least an unfortunate one for the victims.[197] On

the other hand, Lubbock himself defends human sacrifice as the result of

"deep and earnest religious feeling."[198] But if sympathy were strong,

such sacrifices would be impossible, and the religious code would be

altered just as the religious code of Christians is altered to keep up

with social progress. Opinion and feeling are not two separable things,

one of which may advance while the other remains behind; when feeling

becomes strong enough, the opinion arises that this or that custom

before practised is wrong. As long as man is cruel by nature, however,

conscience will not torment him for cruelty, and it is possible for him

to regard it as wholly justifiable.

But I am of the opinion that moral progress has been made not only since

the time of our savage ancestors, but even also since the time of the

great ancients, in spite of the obstacles to such advancement presented

in the necessity of the moral assimilation of immense races of

savages,--the leavening of the whole of Europe. I believe that modern

civilization has caught up to and surpassed the ancient. The knowledge

we have of ancient peoples is necessarily most imperfect; nevertheless,

we may, I believe, discover considerable evidence of general moral

inferiority to the present day. Any advance that has been made will be

likely to be most observable in those general virtues which lie at the

foundation of all social cooeperation--truthfulness in word and honesty

in act, and the gradual widening of concepts of justice from individual

and class privilege and race prejudice, to the inclusion of mankind as a

whole. And the growth of sympathy will be most noticeable in the

treatment of those classes of beings which possess least physical means

of compelling respect for their rights--animals, children, women, the

poor, and ignorant, and sick, and aged.

We may begin with the children. The Lacedemonian custom of giving over

the weak and defective children to destruction is familiar to us all.

Before Solon, children were often sold by Athenian parents for debt; and

even during the ages of greatest culture, the exposure of children seems

to have been a common Athenian practice, regarded with little or no

disapproval by the general public. Mahaffy writes: "The cool way in

which Plato in his Republic speaks of exposing children, shows that, as

we should expect, with the increase of luxury, and the decay of the

means of satisfying it, the destruction of infants came more and more

into the fashion. What can be more painfully affecting than the practice

implied by Socrates, when he is comparing himself to a midwife (Theaet.

151 B.). 'And if I abstract and expose your first-born, because I

discover that the conception you have formed is a vain shadow, do not

quarrel with me, _as the manner of women is, when their first children

are taken from them_. For I have actually known some men ready to bite

me when first I have deprived them of a darling folly.'"[199] That the

exposure of children is generally mentioned only incidentally by Greek

writers, is perhaps the strongest argument of all that the custom was

regarded with indifference by the majority. A considerable number of the

exposed children seem to have been rescued to be brought up as

prostitutes, but many must have perished miserably. We have reason for

doubting whether the average Greek would have shown an equal sympathy to

that of Mr. Stephen's modern pickpockets, in the supposed case of danger

to a child on the race-course;[200]--unless, indeed, the child were an

especially fine bit of animal flesh.

The same narrow sort of expediency in morals which permitted the

exposure of children is exhibited, again, in the lack of regard for the

aged shown by the Athenians at all periods of their history;--in Sparta

the old men were treated with some considerable respect. Says Mahaffy:

"The strongest case against the Periclean Greeks, and one which marks

their parentage most clearly from their Homeric ancestors, is the

treatment of their old men. For here it is no inferior class, but their

equals, nay even those to whom they directly owed their greatness, whom

they cast aside with contempt when their days of usefulness had passed

by.... The Greek lawgivers were accordingly most explicit in enjoining

upon children the nurture and support of aged parents who could

otherwise expect little from the younger generation. The Attic law alone

added a qualification, that the children were to be without

responsibility if their parents had neglected to educate them."

Aristophanes describes the treatment of the aged in his "Wasps,"--"where

he declares that the only chance of respect or even safety is to retain

the power of acting as a juryman, so extorting homage from the accused

and supporting himself by his pay without depending on his children.

When he comes home with his fee, they are glad to see him, in fact he is

able to support a second wife and younger children, as the passage

plainly implies, whereas otherwise the father must look towards his son

and his son's steward to give him his daily bread, 'uttering

imprecations and mutterings lest he knead me a deadly cake,' a dark

insinuation which opens to us terrible suspicions."[201]

The women of Greece were comparatively well cared for, as might be

expected in a nation and country peculiarly susceptible to the influence

of grace and beauty; they were consequently of a comparatively admirable

type. However, we are fond, I think, of indulging in this respect, our

preference for believing the romantic; so that we usually select

carefully the best instances and infer that the standard of all Greece

was on this plane. The reasons for this are manifold. We have the habit

of imagining, from Greek art, that all Greek women were beautiful; and

it is unpleasant to associate moral inferiority with great beauty, or to

imagine its being treated with unkindness or disrespect. Again, we are

pleased at discovering examples of love and faithfulness even in the

far-away ages, and the pleasure of the discovery exalts the few

instances with which Greek literature provides us to a disproportionate

importance and significance. Disappointed at not finding their perfect

ideal in their own age and nation, men have pleased themselves with the

imagination of perfection in an object belonging to another age, with

regard to which no sordid reality of every-day relation and common,

vulgar needs could intervene to check enthusiasm. Furthermore, it is

safer to admire those distant from us in time and place, since we are

secure from any demand of faithfulness and self-sacrifice from their

side. Poets and artists have assisted us in this license of agreeable

fancy. So we dwell, with special emphasis, on the beauty of Penelope's

character, which is not at all exceptionally faithful as measured by

modern standards; we warm over the story of Antigone while we pass by,

without special enthusiasm, a thousand instances as admirable in our own

day and within our own observation; and we read, with delight, the tale

of the Greek who encouraged his ignorant child-wife by gentle treatment

until she overcame her timidity, became "tame and docile," and was

persuaded to discard cosmetics and high-heeled shoes and devote herself

to her household duties; though the most of us would regard the forced

marriage of such a child, if it occurred in our own day, as no more than

child-barter, and the conduct of the husband (doubtless not worsened by

his representation of it) as but a moderate exhibition of common

decency. Mahaffy says of the Greeks of the Homeric age: "There is ample

evidence that the lower-class women, the slaves and even the free

servants, were subjected to the hardest and most distressing sorts of

work, the carrying of water, and the grinding of hand-mills; in fact we

see them standing to men-servants nearly in the same relation that the

North-American squaw stands to her husband--over-taxed, slave-driven,

worn out even with field-work, while he is idling, or smoking, or

sleeping."[202] The wives of Athens of all periods were little more than

a higher class of household servants, with almost no share, by

education, in either the science or the art that was the delight of

their nation and made its superiority. The position of the hetairai was

better in some respects; but the apparently widely spread preference of

the Greeks of the cultured classes for what we term unnatural crime

argues against any considerable degree of education even in their case.

Women were sometimes found in the Greek schools of philosophy, but these

were evidently isolated cases. The passage from the Theaetetus above

quoted shows us the unhappy and subservient position of Athenian women

in one respect; and many other passages of Plato throw an unfavorable

light upon their lot; though we have, perhaps, to remember that the

central figure of the Dialogues had some personal reason for being a

woman-hater. "The outcasts from society as we call them were not the

immoral and the profligate, but the honorable and virtuous.

Accordingly, when we consult the literature of the day, we find women

treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more

contemptuous silence in history."[203]

Human sacrifices were not unknown to the earlier Greeks. Of the later

days, of Athenian culture, Mahaffy says: "Plutarch tells us that

Themistocles was forced by the acclamations of the army to sacrifice

three Persian prisoners of distinction brought in just before the battle

of Salamis, though he was greatly affected at the terrible nature of the

sacrifice, so that it appears to have been then unusual. But

Aristophanes, long after, makes allusions to what he calls [Greek:

pharmakoi], as still remembered at Athens, if not still in use (Ran.

732), and which the scholiasts explain, chiefly from Hipponax, as a sort

of human scapegoat, chosen for ugliness or deformity (a very Greek

standpoint) and sacrificed for the expiation of the state in days of

famine and pestilence, or of other public disaster. I think that

Aristophanes alludes to the custom as bygone, though the scholiasts do

not think so; but its very familiarity to his audience shows a disregard

of human life strange enough in so advanced a legal system as that of

democratic Athens."[204]

Mahaffy calls attention to the exceeding cruelty practised by the Greeks

in the Peloponnesian war, and adds: "It was not merely among Corcyreans,

or among Thracian mercenaries, but among the leaders of Greece that we

find this disgusting feature. The Spartans put to death in cold blood

225 prisoners whom they took in Plataea after a long and heroic

defence.... But this is a mere trifle when we hear from Plutarch that

Lysander, after the battle of AEgospotami, put to death 3000 prisoners

(_Alcib._ c. 37 cp. the details in his _Lysander_, c. 13),... Athenians,

men of education and of culture.... The unfortunate Athenian general,

according to Theophrastus (Plut. _Lys._ 13), submits with dignified

resignation to a fate which he confesses would have attended the

Lacedemonians had they been vanquished.

"For the Athenians, with their boasted clemency and culture, were very

nearly as cruel as their enemies. In the celebrated affair of the

Mitylenaeans, which Thucydides tells at length in his third book, the

first decree of the Athenians was to massacre the whole male population

of the captured city. They repented of this decree, because Diodotus

proved to them, not that it was inhuman, but that it was inexpedient."

Mahaffy argues, in opposition to Grote, that there was no real sentiment

of sympathy in the repentance of the Athenians in this affair, for "how

could the _imagined details_ of the massacre of 6000 men in _Lesbos_

have been a motive, when the Athenians did, at the same time, have the

ringleaders executed _at Athens_, and _they were more than 1000 men_

(Thuc. III. 30)." These were "_executed together, by the hands of

Athenians_, not with fire-arms but with swords and knives. A few years

after, the inhabitants of Melos, many hundreds in number, were put to

the sword, when conquered after a brave resistance (Thuc. V. 116), and

here, I fear, merely for the purpose of making way for a colony of

Athenian citizens, who went out to occupy the houses and lands of their

victims."[205]

The practice of torturing witnesses in court was common in Periclean

Athens. On this point, Mahaffy writes: "Our best authorities on this

question are, of course, the early orators, especially Antiphon, in

whose speeches on cases of homicide this feature constantly recurs. It

is well known that in such cases the accused might offer his own slaves

to be tortured, in order to challenge evidence against himself; and it

was thought a weak point in his case if he refused to do so when

challenged. It is also well known that the accusers were bound to make

good any permanent injury, such as maiming, done to these slaves.

"But there were both restrictions and extensions of this practice as yet

but little noticed. It was not the custom to torture slaves who gave

evidence to a fact, but only if they denied any knowledge, or appeared

to suppress it in the interest of their master (Antiphon, Tetral. A,

[Greek: g]). On the other hand, _it was common enough to torture female

slaves and also free men_....

... "Almost all the orators speak of it as an infallible means of

ascertaining the truth. Demosthenes says it has never been known to

fail."[206] The restrictions on certain extremities of torture in court

diminish in importance when we consider that the poor slave stood, in

reality, in all cases, between two alternatives of suffering, that

inflicted by the court and that likely to be inflicted by his master in

case his evidence displeased the latter. That he was a piece of

property of some value was doubtless no more a safeguard to the Greek

slave under the hands of his master than it has been in any modern

slave-holding country; the Greek was doubtless at least as liable as the

man of to-day to forget ultimate loss in the rage of present anger and

the malevolent pleasure of revenge.

The condition of slaves among the Greeks furnishes us, indeed, with one

of our strongest arguments against their moral code. We do not need to

mention the Helots, whose name has become a synonym of degradation and

misery. Slaves formed the greater part of the working population of

Athens, and were much more numerous than the freemen. Nor were they

necessarily even of inferior race or education. Not only did all

prisoners taken in war become slaves, with their descendants forever,

except as their masters chose to emancipate them (and the possession of

such a superfluity sometimes rendered the Athenians generous in this

respect), but, until the time of Solon, freemen might be sold into

bondage for debt,--and not alone for a large debt, but also for a small

one, and not merely until the debt was paid, but for all time. Nor have

we reason to suppose that freemen were treated, even in the days of

Athens' greatest culture, with great humanity. "At the opening of the

Euthryphro there is a story told which is not intended to be anything

exceptional, and which shows that the free laborer, or dependent, had

not bettered his position since the days when Achilles cited him as the

most miserable creature upon earth. 'Now the man who is dead,' says

Euthryphro, 'was a poor dependent of mine who worked for us as a [free]

field-laborer at Naxos, and one day, in a fit of drunken passion, he got

into a quarrel with one of our domestic servants [slaves] and slew him.

My father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then

sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. Meantime,

he had no care or thought of him, deeming him a murderer, and that even

if he did die, there would be no great harm. And this was just what

happened. _For such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon

him_ that before the messenger returned from the diviner he was dead.

And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the

murderer and prosecuting my father.'"[207]

We have not much evidence as to the treatment of animals in ancient

Greece. Race-horses are likely to have been well cared for,--as long as

they were young and swift or beautiful. But it does not appear probable,

from what we know of the Greek attitude towards slaves and dependents,

women and children, that a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

Animals would have flourished in Greece.

When we come to inquire as to the moral status of the Greeks with regard

to honesty, truthfulness, and reliability in general, we find them

particularly lacking. Their failure to come up with modern standards in

this respect "every schoolboy knows." Ulysses is called the "man of many

wiles," with evident intent to compliment. In the poems of Theognis,

favorites with the Greek nobility, "it was openly recommended to fawn

upon your enemy, to deceive him till he was in your power, and then

wreak vengeance upon him. It is usual, among critics, to speak of this

as the attitude of Theognis, and of the special aristocracy to which he

belonged. They forget that we find the same attitude in the moral Pindar

(_Pyth._ ii. 84). It is expounded by Hesiod as proximate (*[Greek: Erg].

165 sqq.), by Thucydides as universal, at a later epoch."[208] Mahaffy

says of the Greeks up to the time of Thucydides, that they "had been

often treacherous and cruel, generally dishonest and selfish; but,

withal, often generous and gentlemanly, always clever and agreeable, and

always carried away by a love of beauty more than by a respect for

truth."[209] At the time of Darius, the Milesians, who had involved that

king in a bloody and expensive war, and burned his Lydian capital, were

yet treated kindly by him when taken prisoners, and settled in his own

country. In return they were always trying to beg or embezzle the

treasure of the king at Susa. "There was, indeed, a single exception,

Scythes, tyrant of Zancle--who asked leave to visit Sicily, and returned

to die in Persia. 'Him Darius considered to be the most righteous of all

those who had gone up to him from Greece, in that he kept his promise to

the great king.'"

"What an evidence of Greek dishonesty. We can well fancy the Aryan

barons of Darius' court speaking in the tone of the Roman Juvenal. To

them, too, the _Graeculus esuriens_ was but too well known,--with his

fascination, his cleverness, and, withal, his mean and selfish knavery.

I need hardly remind the Greek scholar," continues Mahaffy, "that all

through the Ionic revolt, and through the Persian wars, this treachery

and this selfishness were the mainstays of the Persians; in fact, had

they depended upon these more completely, the subjugation of Greece

would have been a mere question of time."[210]

"There was a certain Glaucus at Sparta, celebrated for justice, as well

as in other respects, to whom a Milesian, who had heard of his fame,

came and entrusted a treasure, wishing as he said, to get the benefit of

his justice, since Ionia was disturbed. Of course, such a temptation was

too much even for this paragon of Greek honesty. When the heirs of the

Milesian came with their tokens and claimed the treasure, he professed

to know nothing of the affair," though when they had gone away, he

consulted the oracle as to whether he might spend the money, and was so

strongly rebuked, that he finally gave it back.[211] This Mahaffy

mentions as an instance where the influence of the oracle was a moral

one.

There remains one general and especially significant criticism to be

made on Greek morals as a whole; the great mass of the people were

little cared for and in a state of unfreedom. Professor Robiou of Rennes

aptly remarks that the democracy of ancient times, and that of Athens in

particular, had little in common with modern democracy. "The very large

majority of the working population were slaves, and had, consequently,

no rights of any sort, so that the 'laborers,' at whose political rights

Xenophon and Aristophanes jest, were generally what we call

_patrons_....

"As for the laborers and the inhabitants of the environs and villages,

since political rights could be exercised only at the Athenian Pnyx and

there was no idea of a representative system, it is clear that the

presence of many of them in the assembly could be only an exception, in

spite of the modest indemnity which was offered them; among the country

people the large and middle-class proprietors alone were in a condition

to take part regularly. That is to say, one has no difficulty in

concluding that, in comparison with other times and other countries,

_the Athenian democracy was an aristocracy_."[212] And we may add that,

all things considered, the great mass of the people had less of liberty

and privilege, were far more subject to the despotism and caprice of

the few, than in most modern monarchies. In what modern country not

inhabited by savages would a man be permitted, at the present day, to

throw even a murderer into a ditch and leave him to perish of hunger and

cold? The carelessness of the Greeks in regard to the inner spirit of

morals is often excused on the ground that it was at least combined with

a large degree of tolerance; but this tolerance appears to be, to a

great extent, mythical. The politics of Athens ostracized men whose

opinion was feared by the state, or rather by a certain number of

citizens, and the Greek religion stained its records with the death of

Socrates and the persecution of other philosophers. Stilpo was exiled

for doubting whether the Athene of Phidias was a goddess and the books

of Anaxagoras and Protagoras were publicly burned. There was, moreover,

an inquisitorial bureau at Athens.[213] However, it is true that the

Greeks were, as a people, too little in earnest and too superstitious to

fall into doubt of the national mythology.

We have less difficulty in showing the superiority of modern to Roman

civilization, and for the reason, partly, that we know more about Roman,

than we do about Greek civilization.

The Romans were, from the beginning, a robust and warlike people, and

the military discipline which made them conquerors extended into their

social relations and even into their family life. The exposure of

children appears to have been a common practice, and looked upon

leniently even after direct infanticide was visited with some degree of

general disapproval. Parents were the absolute masters of their

children, having the power to put them to death, or to sell them as

slaves; and this was not only true of children in their younger years,

but during the whole life of the father. Livy and Valerius Maximus give

numerous instances of parents who had put their children to death. It is

recorded, however, that Hadrian banished a man who had killed his son,

and decreed that whatever a son might earn in military service should

belong to himself; while Alexander Severus forbade the killing of adult

sons, and Diocletian rendered the sale of children illegal.[214] Lecky

however remarks that "the sale of children in case of great necessity,

though denounced by the Fathers, continued long after the time of

Theodosius, nor does any Christian emperor appear to have enforced the

humane enactments of Diocletian."[215]

Human sacrifices occurred among the Romans far more frequently than

among the Greeks, and continued even down to a late date, says Mahaffy.

"In the year 46 B.C., Caesar sacrificed two soldiers on the altar in the

Campus Martius. Augustus is said to have sacrificed a maiden named

Gregoria. Even Trajan, when Antioch was rebuilt, sacrificed Calliope,

and placed her statue in the theatre. Under Commodus, and later

emperors, human sacrifices appear to have been more common; and a

gladiator appears to have been sacrificed to Jupiter Latialis even in

the time of Constantine. Yet these awful rites had been expressly

forbidden B.C. 95; and Pliny asserts that in his time they were never

openly solemnized."[216]

If, however, the direct sacrifice of human victims came in time to be

forbidden, there grew out of it, at a comparatively early period, a

custom very nearly if not quite as barbarous, which was practised on an

immense scale and down to a late date; namely, the gladiatorial

contests. The men who took part in these contests were either slaves,

criminals, military captives, or men especially trained for the

"profession." Many of these last were exposed children who had been

rescued for the purpose; their number being also recruited from other

ranks. Lecky seems to excuse the condemnation of military captives to

these shows, saying that their fate "could not strike the early Romans

with the horror it would now inspire, for the right of the conquerors to

massacre their prisoners was almost universally admitted."[217] The

argument is similar to that noticed and criticised above--one bad

principle cannot be an excuse for another, though the two are,

doubtless, in this case, cooerdinate. Every criminal can give us a reason

for his crime out of the uniformity of his own character. The question

is, simply, whether we are considering the facts from a purely

indifferent standpoint, as historical, or from an ethical standpoint;

and if from the latter, then we must have some standard of measurement.

We may choose to make this, in all cases, the average of the period and

nation; though there will be, in that case, considerable difficulty in

determining the average. Or we may use some ideal standard, which, as

ideal, does not vary with all variations of the society considered, but

is constant. But we have no logical right, having assumed the one

standard, to confuse it with the other, treating the two as

interchangeable. The standard of any age by which men judged their deeds

is also part of the morality of the age, by which we may judge it. As

for the criminals who fought in the arena, they were sometimes pardoned,

when victorious, so that society received back again its most muscular,

or skilful and alert criminals. Of all Roman authors and rulers, Lecky

mentions only Seneca, Plutarch, Petronius, Junius Mauricus, and Marcus

Aurelius, who condemn the games.[218] Cicero is undecided on the

subject; rather in favor of them. The great satirist, Juvenal, though he

repeatedly mentions, does not condemn them. And "of all the great

historians who recorded them not one seems to have been conscious that

he was recording a barbarity, not one appears to have seen in them any

greater evils than an increasing tendency to pleasure and an excessive

multiplication of a dangerous class." On the other hand, the attempt to

introduce them into Athens was unsuccessful.[219]

An immense increase of gladiators and gladiatorial shows took place in

the earlier days of the empire, when the increase of slavery freed a

large portion of the Roman population from the necessity of labor, and

men came to occupy themselves with amusements, on the one hand as a

profession, on the other as means of passing the time. In the days of

the Republic, the slaves were comparatively few in number and probably

treated with more care, though scarcely with much consideration; all

things were permitted the master by law, says Lecky, though probably the

censor might interfere in extreme cases. "The elder Cato speaks of

slaves simply as instruments for obtaining wealth, and he encouraged

masters, both by his precept and his example, to sell them as useless

when aged and infirm."[220] Under Titus and Trajan probably occurred the

greatest number of shows that "were compressed into a short time,... and

no Roman seems to have imagined that the fact of 3000 men having been

compelled to fight under the one, and 10,000 under the other, cast the

faintest shadow upon their characters."[221] Moreover, "the mere desire

for novelty impelled the people to every excess or refinement of

barbarity. The simple combat became at last insipid, and every variety

of atrocity was devised to stimulate the flagging interest. At one time

a bear and a bull, chained together, rolled in fierce contest along the

sand; at another, criminals dressed in the skins of wild beasts were

thrown to bulls, which were maddened by red-hot irons, or by darts

tipped with burning pitch. Four hundred bears were killed on a single

day under Caligula; three hundred on another day under Claudius. Under

Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants; four hundred

bears and three hundred lions were slaughtered by his soldiers. In a

single day, at the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus, five thousand

animals perished.... Lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses,

hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles and serpents, were

employed to give novelty to the spectacle. Nor was any form of human

suffering wanting. The first Gordian, when edile, gave twelve

spectacles, in each of which from one hundred and fifty to five hundred

pair of gladiators appeared. Eight hundred pair fought at the triumph of

Aurelian. Ten thousand men fought during the games of Trajan.... Under

Domitian, an army of feeble dwarfs was compelled to fight, and more than

once female gladiators descended to fight in the arena. A criminal

personating a fictitious character was nailed to a cross, and there torn

by a bear. Another, representing Scaevola, was compelled to hold his hand

in a real flame. A third, as Hercules, was burnt alive upon the pile. So

intense was the craving for blood, that a prince was less unpopular if

he neglected the distribution of corn than if he neglected the games;

and Nero himself, on account of his munificence in this respect, was

probably the sovereign who was most beloved by the Roman multitude.

Heliogabalus and Galerius are reported, when dining, to have regaled

themselves with the sight of criminals torn by wild beasts. It was said

of the latter that 'he never supped without human blood.'" Moreover, the

prince was most popular who, at the show of thumbs, "permitted no

consideration of economy to make him hesitate to sanction the popular

award."[222] "Even in the closing years of the fourth century, the

prefect Symmachus, who was regarded as one of the most estimable pagans

of his age, collected some Saxon prisoners to fight in honor of his son.

They strangled themselves in prison, and Symmachus lamented the

misfortune that had befallen him from their 'impious hands,' but

endeavored to calm his feelings by recalling the patience of Socrates

and the precepts of philosophy."[223]

The conquest of Greece is alleged to have bettered somewhat the position

of Roman slaves, since it involved the introduction of many slaves who

were the intellectual superiors of their masters. But whatever good this

may have effected seems to have been counteracted by the increase in

number of the slaves and the consequent diminution in value of the

individual slave as a piece of property. On the whole, the position of

the slaves of North America, before the war of emancipation, bad as it

was in some cases, seems to have been, on the average, quite

paradisiacal when compared with that of their Roman forerunners. It has

already been mentioned that Cato urged his compatriots to sell their

aged slaves. Old and infirm slaves were constantly exposed to perish on

an island in the Tiber. It was also customary, in case of the murder of

the master, to put all the slaves of the household to death who were not

in chains or helpless at the time of the murder. The testimony of the

slave was generally received only under torture; he might be tortured in

the attempt to compel evidence against his master; but, if he, of his

own free will, accused his master of any crime, except treason, he was

condemned to the arena. There were different punishments for slaves and

for men of rank. "Numerous acts of the most odious barbarity were

committed. The well-known anecdotes of Flaminius ordering a slave to be

killed to gratify, by the spectacle, the curiosity of a guest; of Vedius

Pollio feeding his fish on the flesh of slaves; and of Augustus

sentencing a slave who had killed and eaten a favorite quail, to

crucifixion, are the extreme examples that are recorded; for we need [!]

not regard as an historical fact the famous picture in Juvenal of a

Roman lady in a moment of caprice, ordering her unoffending servant to

be crucified. We have, however, many other very horrible glimpses of

slave life at the close of the Republic and in the early days of the

Empire. The marriage of slaves was entirely unrecognized by law, and, in

their case, the words adultery, incest, or polygamy had no legal

meaning.... When executed for a crime, their deaths were of a most

hideous kind. The ergastula, or private prisons of the masters, were

frequently their only sleeping places.... We read of slaves chained as

porters to the doors, and cultivating the fields in chains. Ovid and

Juvenal describe the fierce Roman ladies tearing their servants' faces,

and thrusting the long pins of their brooches into their flesh. The

master, at the close of the Republic, had full power to sell his slave

as a gladiator or as a combatant with wild beasts."[224]

Lecky admonishes us that we should not judge the whole institution of

Roman slavery by this one side of the picture. He calls attention to the

respect in which learned Greek slaves were often held, as showing a

better phase of the system; but it is quite possible that certain slaves

or classes of slaves should be held in respect and that the rest of the

slaves should be treated, nevertheless, with anything but respect or

kindness. The great wonder to the modern mind is that the Romans felt at

liberty to hold learned Greeks slaves at all. Lecky points out that

slaves were emancipated in great numbers; but we must remember, first,

that slaves were very plentiful, further, that freedmen and their

descendants remained bound, by a sort of feudal tie, to their former

masters until the third generation, and moreover that it was considered

an honor to have many freedmen in one's following; so that the advantage

of manumission was often, as Lecky himself says, on the side of the

master. Slaves were sometimes emancipated to prevent their revealing

crimes of their masters under torture, and many slaves were given their

liberty especially in order that they might make a show in the funeral

train. Augustus, indeed, found it necessary to restrict emancipation by

will to _one hundred slaves_.[225] Seneca mentions that masters who

ill-treated their slaves were the object of public odium; but then it

may occur to us to inquire what the Romans considered ill-treatment;

some of the laws which Lecky cites in evidence of the improvement of the

slave's position in the third or last of the periods under which he

considers this position may appear to his readers as much evidence

against, as in favor of, kindness on the part of the masters. "The

Petronian law," he says, "which was issued by Augustus, or more probably

by Nero, forbade the master to condemn his slave to combat with wild

beasts without a sentence from a judge." We may inquire as to how

difficult it was to obtain such a sentence. "Under Claudius some

citizens exposed their sick slaves on the island of AEsculapius in the

Tiber to avoid the trouble of tending them, and the emperor decreed that

if [!] the slave so exposed recovered from his sickness, he should

become free, and also that masters who killed their slaves _instead of

exposing them_ should be punished as murderers.... Under Nero, a judge

was appointed to hear their complaints, and was instructed to punish

masters who treated them with barbarity, made them the instruments of

lust, or withheld from them a sufficient quantity of the necessaries of

life.... Domitian made a law, which was afterwards reiterated,

forbidding the Oriental custom of mutilating slaves for sensual

purposes, and the reforms were renewed with great energy in the period

of the Antonines.[226] Hadrian and his two successors formally deprived

masters of the right of killing their slaves; forbade them to sell

slaves to the lanistae or speculators in gladiators; destroyed the

ergastula or private prisons; ordered that, when a master was murdered,

those slaves only should be tortured who were within hearing; appointed

officers through all the provinces to hear the complaints of slaves;

enjoined that no master should treat slaves with excessive [?] severity;

and commanded that, when such severity was proved, the master should be

compelled to sell the slave he had ill-treated."[227] The humanity of

the last law is open to dispute. Moreover, Lecky does not notice, here,

that Constantine nevertheless felt it necessary to limit the punishment

of slaves by prohibiting its administration with a cudgel, though not

with the lash, and forbidding poison, mortal wounds, various kinds of

torture, stoning, hanging, mutilation, or throwing from a height.[228]

But he mentions two facts which indicate some degree of humanity in

certain directions, and namely: that, though the law did not recognize

the marriage of a slave, "it appears not to have been common to separate

his family;" also, that the private property of slaves was recognized by

their masters, though part or all of it usually reverted to the master

on the death of the slave. The great mass of evidence goes to show,

however, that what the Romans termed humanity to slaves would have been,

in the eyes of modern "civilized" peoples, extreme barbarity.

Women, among the Romans, were, like their children, under the control of

the head of the family--father or husband. "The father disposed

absolutely of the hand of his daughter and sometimes even possessed the

power of breaking off marriages that had been actually contracted. In

the forms of marriage, however, which were usual in the earlier periods

of Rome, the absolute power passed into the hands of the husband, and he

had the right, in some cases, of putting her to death." "The power

appears to have become quite obsolete during the Empire; but the first

legal act (which was rather of the nature of an exhortation than of a

command) against it was issued by Antoninus Pius, and it was only

definitely abolished under Diocletian."[229] Roman women had, at first,

no share by law in the heritage of their fathers; but public opinion

revolted, in some cases, from the law, and gradually this was

considerably altered. When marriage became, under the Empire, a mere

matter of mutual consent, divorce a mere matter of repudiation, the

daughter, though married, often remained in her father's house, having

full control over her own property. Practically, if not always legally,

the position of women among the Romans seems to have been considerably

better than among the Greeks; Roman wives became, gradually, far more

nearly the equals of their husbands than Greek wives ever were, and

appear to have received a proportionately greater degree of love. Their

position, however, falls far behind that of even German women at the

present day, and certainly much behind that of every other civilized

nation.

After recording the use of animals in the public games, there is little

need of considering the subject of their treatment specially; there can

be no doubt as to its probable nature; though certain famous Romans had

their brute favorites.

It is sometimes argued that, though we are morally superior to the

Greeks and Romans in some respects, we fall short of their standard in

other respects. Doubtless new forms of evil may arise in later periods,

which were impossible under old forms of government and the social

relations of earlier peoples. Each period and nation will, according to

its circumstances, have its own peculiar forms of vice and misery. But

the question which we are considering is not whether or not we have some

forms of evil which the ancients did not possess, but whether the

particular forms which prevail among us are or are not worse than those

which prevailed in Greece and Rome, and, in general, whether the average

of sympathy and altruistic action in modern times and among the foremost

peoples is greater than the average among the Greeks and Romans. And it

must be recollected, moreover, in considering the question, that while

the evil in our midst is brought very vividly before our eyes through

the medium of our many methods of news-carrying and of wide personal

observation,--through our railways, our telegraphs, our many newspapers

and periodicals,--we have, in reality, when all is told, very scanty

knowledge of the daily life of the common people, of the ordinary,

every-day miseries and sufferings, among the Greeks and Romans. But

there are some features of these facts that tell in favor of modern

times; for the ancients were but little impressed by the miseries of the

poorer classes; and just the spirit that notes and makes much of our

modern inhumanity is evidence of a broader sympathy peculiar to our

later times.

Of Europe as a whole in the centuries after Rome's decline and its loss

of power, it is not necessary to say much, in order to prove the moral

superiority of modern times. We are all acquainted with the fierce

contests between Christianity and its opponents, with the mutual

persecutions, the martyrdoms of Christians and the retaliation of

Christians upon "heretics," with the license and bigotry of the clergy,

the robbery and oppression of the poor and dependent by these as well as

by the titled castle-owners, the burning of "witches," the general

intellectual and moral darkness which spread and covered even the lands

of former comparative civilization and was lifted only as Europe as a

whole advanced to a higher stage.

But without entering into any extended discussion of this complicated

process of development as a whole, after the disturbance of the old

equilibrium, it may not be undesirable to note the general course of

events in some one country as typical, not in its special features, but

in its general moral import, of the course of development in the other

countries of Europe also.

The manner of the growth of state and social recompense for evil out of

individual and tribal vengeance has already been touched upon. The enemy

within, and the enemy without the tribe, the foe of the battle-field and

the criminal were regarded, at many stages, with much the same feeling

of animosity, the advantage being rather in favor of the criminal. To

the Greek all those who were not Greeks were barbarians, against whom

but little justice or mercy was necessary; and, as we have seen, the

Romans condemned to the arena their war-captives equally with their

criminals, together with slaves who were also, originally, war-captives.

Crime is, in ruder societies, hardly distinguished from other forms of

aggression that are, later, not included under this head. The definition

of crime differs greatly in different periods of a people's history,

changing as the conceptions of morality as duty to society as a whole

emerge from the crude conceptions of individual and tribal constraint

through revenge. It is for this reason that the history of criminal law

and the administration of "justice" constitute, in reality, a history of

moral evolution. There is nothing that is a clearer index of the moral

status of a people than its treatment of those considered to be

malefactors.

Caesar and Tacitus both mention human sacrifices as taking place in

England before the Roman conquest; but little is known certainly on the

subject. The Romans, of course, introduced their own laws and customs,

which existed side by side with many ancient ones not wholly abolished.

The torture and burning of slaves for various offences was customary.

These penalties were gradually mitigated. But the invasion of the

Teutonic tribes seems to have introduced many new barbarities. In the

first half of the tenth century, for instance, appears a law which

condemned to the stake female slaves who had stolen from any but their

masters, the wood to be piled about them by eighty other slaves of their

own sex; this last office being designed, doubtless, to impress the

lesson upon the minds of the eighty attendants. Later, many heretics

were burned, and the writ for the burning of heretics was not abolished

until the reign of Charles II., though it was practically annulled by

the laws of 1648. However, in 1649, a number of women were burned for

witchcraft in Berwickshire, and burning continued to be practised, much

later, in cases of heresy and witchcraft; still later in cases of high

and petty treason, and up to the time of George III., for murder. In the

thirtieth year of the latter's reign, a statute was passed substituting

hanging for burning. In 1784, a woman was burnt at Portsmouth for the

murder of her husband. During the last years, however, in which the

sentence was carried out, it seems to have been customary for the

executioner to wring the malefactor's neck before the burning. But

comparatively trivial offences, among these false coining, were classed

as treason, and it is noticeable also that the stake seems to have been

a favorite punishment in the case of women-offenders, even in later

days.[230] In the year 1530, two persons of the household of the Bishop

of Rochester having died from poison thrown into some porridge by the

cook, an "Act of Poisoning" was passed, according to which offenders

coming under its definition were to be boiled to death. The statute was

shortly afterwards repealed, but the bishop's cook was publicly executed

in accordance with its provision.[231]

But simple burning or hanging was, for the most part, considered much

too good for the man who had committed high treason; he was given the

mere mockery of a trial, and, if convicted, was hanged, was taken down

while yet alive, disembowelled, and his entrails burnt, was beheaded,

and quartered. Law modifying this penalty first comes into prominence in

the reign of William III.[232] When Richard I. sailed with his army for

the Holy Land, it was ordained that whoever killed a man on board ship

was to be tied to the corpse and thrown into the sea, whosoever killed a

man on shore was to be burnt alive with the corpse, while simply drawing

blood with a knife was to be punished with the loss of a hand, and a

thief was to be shaved, treated to a head-bath of boiling pitch and

feathers, and put ashore at the first place the vessel touched at.[233]

The payment of blood-money was a common custom among the Teutons, and

so little distinction was made between greater and lesser crime that,

while a murderer could commonly buy off the relatives of his victim, the

petty thief often suffered death or mutilation for his offence. Pike

says of these punishments in the early history of Britain: "It was for

the free man of low estate, for the slave, and for women, that the

greatest atrocities were reserved. Men branded on the forehead, without

hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger

which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all

who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a

churl. The horrors of the Danish invasions had no tendency to mitigate

these severities; and those who were chastised with whips before were

chastised with scorpions afterwards. New ingenuity was brought to bear

upon the art of mutilation, which was practised in every form. The eyes

were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper lip were cut off;

the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there is reason to believe,

the whole body was flayed alive."[234] The law of the tenth century,

according to which a female slave who had committed theft was burnt

alive by eighty women-executioners, has already been mentioned; parallel

to this law was the law that a male slave who was a thief was to be

stoned to death by eighty slaves, any one of whom, who missed the mark

three times, was to be whipped three times. "If a thief was a free

woman, she was to be thrown down a precipice or drowned."[235] The law

did not favor women.

The dividing line between mutilation and torture is a difficult one to

draw. One of the earlier forms of "trial" was by ordeal. The accused,

with his hand bound in cloth, was compelled to snatch a stone from elbow

or wrist-depth in a caldron of boiling water, or to lift a weight of

heated metal. If, at the end of three days, when the cloth which bound

the arm was removed, no scald or burn was visible, the accused was

pronounced innocent. These ordeals took place in the church with much

sprinkling of holy water and other ceremony. The clergy themselves seem

to have had less trying substitutes for these ordeals, often being

compelled only to take oath on the sacrament, or to partake of

consecrated bread or cheese which was supposed to produce evil results

in case of guilt. As Pike suggests, it is quite possible that, as

priests had the preparing of this bread or cheese, it may sometimes have

come up to expectations in this respect; as it is also possible that the

cloths bound on the arm of the layman who was to undergo the ordeal of

fire or water may have been differently arranged in different

cases.[236] As late as the reign of King John, trial was made by ordeal,

and mention is also made of it in the reign of Henry II. It was not

formally abolished until the year 1219.[237] For remaining mute before

accusers in court, the dire penalty of imprisonment with starvation was

inflicted, in the reign of Edward I., and to this punishment was added,

about the time of Henry IV., torture by the press.[238] In 1570, a man

found guilty of forging warrants for the arrest of two persons was

sentenced to the pillory for two days, on the first of which one ear, on

the second the other, was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner

that he must "by his own proper motion" tear it away.[239] The rack is

supposed to have been introduced into England in the reign of Henry VI.,

and in the reign of Henry VIII. was added "Skevington's Daughter," an

instrument by which offenders were compressed rather than extended until

"the miserable human being lost all form but that of a globe." Blood was

forced from fingers, toes, nostrils, and mouth, and ribs and breast-bone

were commonly broken in. The thumb-screw was also in use, and there was

a "Dungeon among Rats," and a chamber in the Tower called "Little Ease,"

in which it was impossible either to stand upright or to lie at full

length.[240] The press was not abolished until the reign of George

III.[241] It is recorded of the case of Burnworth, tried for murder in

1726, that he bore pressure of nearly four hundred weight, for an hour

and three-quarters, before begging for mercy and pleading Not Guilty. He

was, however, found guilty and hanged.[242] In 1630, Alexander Leighton

was punished for "framing, publishing, and dispensing a scandalous book

against kings, peers, and prelates," in the following manner: he was

whipped, put in the pillory, had one of his ears cut off and one side of

his nose slit, was branded on one cheek with a red-hot iron, was

afterwards returned to the Fleet to be kept in close custody, and seven

days later was whipped again at the pillory, had the other ear cut off,

his other nostril slit, and his other cheek branded.[243] As late as

1734, John Durant, who "either was, or pretended to be, deaf and unable

to read," had his thumbs tied and the knot drawn hard because he did not

answer the accusation of the court; he was also threatened with the

press.[244] Excepting in cases where the press was used, torture was

not, according to Pike, practised in England after the first part of the

seventeenth century; but the case just cited is a contradiction of so

broad an assertion.

The introductions of customs of penance did much towards rendering the

differences in the punishment and general treatment of the poor and

rich, the humble and noble, more conspicuous. As for the clergy, they

had special benefits given them, and were accustomed, in the early days

of Britain, to murder, rob, and indulge their passions very nearly as

they chose, without interference from the state.[245] But the Benefit of

Clergy, which rendered any one subject to it, "practically exempt from

the ordinary punishments for most of the greater crimes," was

applicable, in later centuries, not only to clergymen proper, but also

to all clerks, the term including every one who had been married and

could read.[246] The position of the slave after the Teutonic invasion

has been noticed. The position of the churl was nearly as bad. "The

infliction of a penalty which he could not pay, and which none would pay

for him, rendered him utterly bankrupt in freedom.... If he left the

place assigned to him it was held that he had stolen his own body. He

could be summarily hanged when caught, and his life was worth nothing to

his lord, or even to his kindred, unless they redeemed him. This was the

fate which was continually impending over the free man of low estate if

he had the misfortune to make enemies among those who had the power to

save or condemn him."[247] In the reign of Edward I., "a statute was

passed which made it a grave offence to devise or tell any false news of

prelates, dukes, earls, barons, or nobles of the realm. Others, too,

were enumerated as being within the meaning of the act--the Chancellor,

the Justices of either Bench, and all the great officers of state."

Under Richard II., the statute was reenacted and made more

stringent.[248]

For most trivial offences of all sorts, extreme punishment was meted

out. Mutilation was often inflicted merely for the killing of game

belonging to the King's forests, and though the Forest Charter of Henry

III. provided that no one should, in future, lose life or limb for the

sake of the King's deer, the penalty does not seem to have gone out of

use at this period, for other offences. In the reign of Edward III., a

tailor was sentenced, for brawling in court, to imprisonment in the

Tower of London for life and the loss of his right hand; "and the rolls

of Gaol Delivery of this period show conclusively that the ordinary

punishments were hanging, the pillory, and the tumbrel or

dung-cart."[249] Late in the reign of Henry VIII., an act was passed

condemning any person who struck another so that blood was drawn, within

the limits of the King's house, to the loss of his right hand. The

pillory was in use up to the reign of Queen Victoria; "it could be

applied to perjurers and suborners of perjury until the year 1837. It

was even applied to women for no greater crime than fortune-telling,

late in the eighteenth century."[250] "Of the other punishments

associated with the old spirit of violence, and inflicted in public, the

chief was whipping. It was commonly awarded to men guilty of petty

thefts.... Instances in which women were whipped were by no means

uncommon at the very end of the eighteenth century." Until 1808,

pocket-picking, until 1811, stealing from bleaching-grounds, were

punished with death. In 1813, 1816, and 1818, a bill was introduced to

abolish capital punishment for a theft of five shillings from shops; but

it was defeated in the House of Lords. In 1820, the amount necessary to

the death-sentence was raised to L15. Until 1832, horse, cattle, and

sheep stealing, theft from a dwelling-house, and forgery, were capital

offences. In 1833, house-breaking; in 1834, returning from

transportation before expiration of the sentence; and, in 1835,

sacrilege and letter-stealing ceased to be punished with death. But it

was not until 1861 that hanging was limited by law to cases of murder

and treason.[251]

The worst element of the punishment by pillory or in any manner in

public did not lie so much in the punishment itself, as in the violence

of the mob, which appears to have been regarded as a legitimate part of

the ceremony, and against which the criminal seldom received any

protection. Sometimes, the man or woman sentenced to the pillory for a

petty offence died of stoning at the hands of the onlookers; and Pike

writes of the burning of a woman in 1721, for coining: "Her last wish

was that she might say a prayer in peace. But the mob which had come out

to take its ease and its pleasure had no mind to sacrifice its rights

for the comfort of a criminal. A woman at the stake was a good butt for

filthy missiles and ribald jests; the yelling rabble would not permit

the poor wretch to collect her thoughts, or to hear her own words, and

instead of sympathy they gave her stones. When the fire was kindled,

even the consuming flames must have seemed less cruel than the men and

women standing around."[252]

We all know the condition in which Howard found the prisons of his day;

and if we possess strong powers of imagination, we may perchance be able

partly to conceive what must have been their state in days when the

people knew but very little of what passed within prison-walls, and the

keepers wielded an almost absolute power over the prisoners. If the

abuses which were common even two centuries ago were to occur in only a

few instances to-day, the whole English nation would flame with

indignation. In the fourteenth century, jail-breaking was frequent in

cases where the prisoner could afford to pay for his escape; judges were

often bribed; a "clerk" who was delivered over to the bishop before or

after sentence, according to the Benefit of Clergy, could still be

acquitted by the bishop in case the requisite number of compurgators

were found to swear to belief in his innocence; and, moreover, clerks

who had been convicted could not afterwards be tried for any offence

committed before their conviction. On the other hand, if a woman

attempted to obtain sentence against the murderer of a relative, she had

not only to fear the revenge of the man's allies, who seem to have had

things very much their own way; but in case courage deserted her at the

last, and she failed to appear against the accused, she was "waived" or

outlawed; again it may be remarked that the laws of England did not

favor women.[253] Writs were forged, juries were packed, judges,

justices, and sheriffs bribed. In the reign of James I., the young

countess of Essex, who, having fallen in love with Lord Rochester during

the absence of her husband, had obtained a divorce to marry him, became

angry with a friend of her lover who counselled him against the

marriage, caused him to be imprisoned in the Tower, had the Lieutenant

and under-keeper of the Tower replaced by friends of hers, and through

the aid of these administered poison to him. The countess and her

husband were arrested on charge of causing the death, and the former

pleaded, the latter was proved, guilty. Yet the two were pardoned,

_though some of their accomplices were executed_.[254]

It is impossible that such customs should exist, in legal relations, in

connection with great justice and sympathy in other relations. Some

allowance may be made for idiosyncrasy, for individual and national

peculiarities; it is possible that a bloody-minded and cruel ruler may

find pleasure in petting pigeons, but his pleasure will be likely to be

rather of an egoistic order, and his apparent kindness easily turned to

cruelty if anger comes upon him. So, too, the cruel potentate may prove

a kind husband and friend, as long as his own interests coincide, and do

not conflict, with those of his friends or his family. But the man who

is consistently treacherous and unfeeling in any one relation will not,

as a rule, show consideration and tenderness in other relations, except

in so far as these other relations subserve his own ends of gain or

vanity; the point where they part company with such ends is the point

where he will resort to another mode of action. The same is true of

nations. Accordingly, we find brigandage and open robbery common even

down to the end of the last century, and not only on the part of the

poorer classes, or rather not so much on their part as on that of

princes, nobles, and even the clergy; we find pirating and wreckage

common on the sea; we find intrigue upon intrigue at court, nobles and

members of the royal family continually plotting each other's murder,

but nevertheless escaping punishment and received with adulation; we

find the much-praised heroes of the Crusades devasting the lands through

which they passed, violating wives and daughters of their hosts, and

deserting to the enemy for bribes; we find wholesale massacres of

unoffending Jews; we find perjury a profession, station an excuse for

nearly every crime, religion a cloak for extortion and vice, and

oppression of the poor and lowly universal. And yet we weep over modern

deterioration!

We forget, when we read--perhaps with an exclamation that man is as much

a savage as ever--how the onlookers at the burning of the Shanghai made

no effort to save lives but only to secure spoil, that it is only a

short time since such scenes must have been common enough on all the

shores of Europe; we forget, when we shudder with horror at an

exceptional case of unjust or brutal punishment on the borders of our

civilization, that it is not long since torture and mutilation,

barbarities of every sort, were practised among the foremost nations of

the world, and for the most trivial offences. Nor do we always remember,

when we grow indignant at the hard case of our poor, that there was a

time when the excess of indigent population was prevented only by

famines and pestilences which killed their thousands upon thousands, and

of which we very seldom see the like in modern times; we forget that

there was a time when the desperate rising of the continental peasantry

against the bitter oppression of the landowners drew from even the

reformer Luther the exclamation that the revolters ought to be throttled

collectively. I have no intention to underrate present evils or to

excuse them by past ones. I see no reason for believing that the present

age should rest upon its laurels; on the contrary, I believe that we are

only at the beginning of civilization; but I see no need for denying

past evolution in order to make this assertion. Starvation is not easier

to a man to-day, because it is proved to him that many more men died of

hunger in the past than die of it in the present century. But just for

this reason, I fail to understand why there should be so much effort

expended by certain reformers in the attempt to disprove what history

and observation yet so plainly show,--namely, that the condition of the

masses at present, taken for all in all, is much better than it has ever

been before; that misery is not so extreme or proportionately so widely

spread; that the worst sorts of crime are decreasing; that justice is

more general, and that sympathy is warmer, than in any previous age. It

is true that we have new methods of exploiting the poor; but we need to

consider how our ancestors would have used those opportunities had they

possessed them; and we need also to remember, with regard to a

particular form of evil, that some time is necessary for society as a

whole to grow to a comprehension of its increase and importance, and to

reach unanimity of opinion as to action for its removal. As forms of

evil change, some one particular form may increase for a time,

swallowing up in itself, as the larger wave accumulates several small

ones, various other forms, until the slowly gathered resistance of

public opinion brings the reaction.

We may gather valuable evidence as to our progress, even in comparison

with recent times, by reference to our artistic literature. True, the

great writers have often been far ahead of their times. But if we regard

the average, we shall soon perceive the signs to which I refer. The

stilted mannerisms of the ancient novel mark the absence of democratic

feeling, and witness to the less general diffusion of true kindness,

which, wherever it appears, tends to simplicity, having no need of

mannerisms. Nothing, too, is more indicative of our advancement than the

change in conceptions of humor; for to know what a nation laughs about

is to know what are its ideals and shortcomings. Earlier humor is often

mere vulgarity or brutality, or a mixture of the two; obscenity, vice,

and the heartless torture of the weak and helpless are its favorite

themes, and appear in the characters of its heroes and ideals. The

truthfulness of Victor Hugo's description of earlier British "fun," in

his "L'Homme qui rit," is borne witness to by English literature.

All modern literature marks the progress of the democratic idea. Our

history and our art are full of the people. The very unrest and

dissatisfaction of the time are signs of a more general and a better

education, an increase of sympathy in degree and extent, and, I believe,

of better nourishment and a more energetic physique. The higher ideals

which were once the property of the few are become the property of the

many. Our institutions are grown more democratic and humane. We have our

free hospitals and dispensaries, our soup-kitchens and cheap

lodging-houses, our asylums for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, old

people and orphans, the weak and afflicted of all kinds, our guilds,

"Settlements," and "Open-air" charities, our creches, our refuges and

reformatories, our societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

and to Animals, our "Open Doors," and "Midnight Missions," our trade and

industrial schools, and our free schools and scholarships and free

libraries. In times of famine, disease, and disaster, we band together

to aid, and funds for the distressed pour in from every side, and not

only from people of the nation to which the sufferers belong, but often

also from those of distant parts of the world. Fancy the Greeks

subscribing to a fund in aid of cholera-stricken barbarians; imagine the

Romans, even, clubbing together, in every part of the world to which

they had wandered, to succour the sufferers by a Johnstown flood; or

conceive of the wealthy classes of the Middle Ages furnishing fires and

food as did the Parisians during the unusual winter cold of 1890-91!

Not only has sympathy become more wildly diffused within the state; it

has spread outside it also. National narrowness is slowly disappearing.

The federation of the states of Europe and of the civilized world is no

longer looked upon as a mad-man's fancy but as a sober possibility or

even a probability. It is now agreed that war between the

English-speaking nations of the earth,--between England and her

colonies, or England and the United States, is very nearly, if not

quite, an impossibility. The union of three of the most powerful nations

of Europe, not for war but for peace, is assuredly of great political

importance in itself; but of even more importance in the influence

insensibly exerted by its continuance upon the opinions of the world.

The masses of the people themselves are becoming more and more

cosmopolitan, and we have an ever-increasing number of international

unions and congresses, political, scientific, artistic, and ethical.

On the whole, it is, perhaps, as much a lack of imagination as anything

which makes us fall into the mistake of underestimating our own age and

overestimating all others. The crimes and abuses far away in times

different from our own are difficult to conceive, and stir our blood

even less than those distant in space; the sufferings of the Middle

Ages, or even of one or two centuries ago, are more difficult to realize

and move us less than a famine or flood in China or a murder in the

heart of Africa. The things immediately before our eyes affect us most;

and it is well, for many reasons, that this is so. Nevertheless,

idealization of the past is evil in its consequences. For, if present

progress is to some men an excuse for easy-going inactivity, the extent

of existing evil is even more often an excuse for the same selfish

course.

Man has had, in all periods, the tendency, in his discontent with the

present, to invest with ideal attributes of every sort some past period

in which the special evils he deplores did not, perhaps, exist; the

dissatisfied of all times have imagined a golden age somewhere in the

past. The old, who look on the innovations of a younger generation with

distrust, and are likely to mistake, in remembrance, the gold of their

own life's morning for an outer radiance independent of their youth, add

to our delusion; while the young confuse their increasing knowledge of

the evil of the world with an increase of the evil itself. But the more

science progresses, and the greater our acquaintance with the facts of

history becomes, the more these delusions tend to disappear. The

much-praised simplicity of our ancestors was, in truth, a half-savagery,

where the higher forms of justice were not practised, that finer tact

and consideration which makes life best worth living was unknown, and

many of the faults which we most deplore in our own day were considered

rather virtues than otherwise. It is a moral pity that poets and

philosophers have lent the beauty of their verse and the dignity of

their eloquence to the idealization of the past. Indeed,

"I do distrust the poet who discerns

No character or glory in his times,

And trundles back his soul five hundred years,

Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,

To sing--oh, not of lizard or of toad

Alive i' the ditch there,--'twere excusable,

But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,

Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,

As dead as must be, for the greater part,

The poems made on their chivalric bones."[255]

It is an especial pity that the reformer should ever devote his effort

to the upholding of the old idea of the inferiority of the present to

the past. Not in the past, but in the future, lies the Golden Age of

man.

FOOTNOTES:

[183] "The Origin of Civilization," pp. 397, 398.

[184] Ibid. pp. 402, 403.

[185] Ibid. p. 398.

[186] Ibid. p. 407.

[187] See, as above, pp. 368, 369.

[188] Ibid. p. 371.

[189] Ibid. p. 69.

[190] Ibid. p. 72.

[191] Ibid. pp. 112, 113.

[192] See, as above, p. 405.

[193] See Lubbock, "Prehistoric Times," also especially Chaps. III. and

IV. of "The Origin of Civilization."

[194] Cause or effect, which? Mexico is not a country poor in animal

life.

[195] "The Origin of Civilization," pp. 372, 373.

[196] See "The Origin of Civilization," p. 396.

[197] Ibid. p. 398.

[198] Ibid. p. 371.

[199] "Social Life in Greece," 3d ed. p. 272.

[200] "The Science of Ethics," p. 237.

[201] "Social Life in Greece," p. 243 _et seq._

[202] "Lectures on Primitive Civilization," p. 219 _et seq._

[203] Mahaffy: "Three Epochs in the Social Development of the Ancient

Greeks," pp. 31, 32.

[204] "Social Life in Greece," p. 238.

[205] "Social Life in Greece," p. 234 _et seq._

[206] Ibid. p. 239 _et seq._ The italics are mine.

[207] "Social Life in Greece," p. 272 _et seq._

[208] "Social Life in Greece," p. 97 _et seq._

[209] Ibid. p. 157.

[210] "Social Life in Greece," p. 160 _et seq._

[211] Ibid. p. 162 _et seq._

[212] "Les Institutions de la Grece," p. 47 _et seq._

[213] Lecky, "History of European Morals," I. p. 398.

[214] Ibid. p. 299 _et seq._

[215] Lecky, "History of European Morals," II. p. 31.

[216] "The Origin of Civilization," p. 372.

[217] "History of European Morals," I. p. 285.

[218] "History of European Morals," I. p. 286 _et seq._

[219] Ibid. p. 276.

[220] Ibid. p. 301.

[221] "History of European Morals," I. p. 287 _et seq._

[222] Ibid. p. 280 _et seq._

[223] "History of European Morals," I. p. 287.

[224] "History of European Morals," I. p. 302 _et seq._

[225] Ibid. p. 236.

[226] Compare, however, "History of European Morals," I. p. 263: "Ionian

slaves of a surpassing beauty, Alexandrian slaves, famous for their

subtle skill in stimulating the jaded senses of the confirmed and sated

libertine, became the ornaments of every patrician house, the companions

and instructors of the young.... The slave population was itself a

hotbed of vice, and it contaminated all with which it came in contact."

[227] "History of European Morals," I. p. 303 _et seq._ The italics are

mine.

[228] L. O. Pike, "Crime in England," I. p. 20.

[229] "History of European Morals," II. p. 299.

[230] L. O. Pike, "A History of Crime in England," I. pp. 51, 344 _et

seq._; II. pp. 138, 176, 177, 287, 379 _et seq._

[231] Ibid. II. pp. 81, 82.

[232] Ibid. I. p. 226; II. pp. 85, 86, 174 _et seq._, 324 _et seq._

[233] Ibid. I. pp. 168, 169.

[234] "History of Crime," I. p. 50.

[235] Ibid. p. 51.

[236] "History of Crime," I. p. 52 _et seq._

[237] Ibid. I. pp. 204, 210.

[238] Ibid. I. p. 210 _et seq._

[239] Ibid. II. p. 85.

[240] Ibid. II. pp. 87-89.

[241] Ibid. II. p. 346.

[242] Ibid. II. p. 283.

[243] "History of Crime," II. pp. 162, 163.

[244] Ibid. II. p. 284.

[245] Ibid. I. p. 52 _et seq._, p. 146 _et seq._

[246] Ibid. I. p. 297 _et seq._

[247] Ibid I. p. 89 _et seq._

[248] "History of Crime," II. p. 398 _et seq._

[249] Ibid. I. p. 213.

[250] Ibid. II. pp. 82, 83, 377 _et seq._

[251] Ibid. II. p. 450 _et seq._

[252] See as above, II. p. 288.

[253] As above, I. p. 270 _et seq._

[254] Ibid. II. p. 145 _et seq._

[255] Mrs. Browning, "Aurora Leigh."