The other day, to my great astonishment, I caught a train; it was a
train going into the Eastern Counties, and I only just caught it. And
while I was running along the train (amid general admiration) I noticed
that there were a quite peculiar and unusual number of carriages marked
“Engaged.” On five, six, seven, eight, nine carriages was pasted the
little notice: at five, six, seven, eight, nine windows were big bland
men staring out in the conscious pride of possession. Their bodies
seemed more than usually impenetrable, their faces more than usual
placid. It could not be the Derby, if only for the minor reasons that
it was the opposite direction and the wrong day. It could hardly be
the King. It could hardly be the French President. For, though these
distinguished persons naturally like to be private for three hours, they
are at least public for three minutes. A crowd can gather to see
them step into the train; and there was no crowd here, or any police
ceremonial.
Who were those awful persons, who occupied more of the train than a
bricklayer’s beanfeast, and yet were more fastidious and delicate than
the King’s own suite? Who were these that were larger than a mob, yet
more mysterious than a monarch? Was it possible that instead of our
Royal House visiting the Tsar, he was really visiting us? Or does the
House of Lords have a breakfast? I waited and wondered until the train
slowed down at some station in the direction of Cambridge. Then
the large, impenetrable men got out, and after them got out the
distinguished holders of the engaged seats. They were all dressed
decorously in one colour; they had neatly cropped hair; and they were
chained together.
I looked across the carriage at its only other occupant, and our eyes
met. He was a small, tired-looking man, and, as I afterwards learnt, a
native of Cambridge; by the look of him, some working tradesman there,
such as a journeyman tailor or a small clock-mender. In order to make
conversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going. His mouth
twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said: “I don’t
s’pose they’re goin’ on an ’oliday at the seaside with little spades
and pails.” I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein of
literary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down to
Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, and
had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when we
had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak,
grey eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea. I
knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same, because all
modern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind.
Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune
one is trying to remember) he said: “Well, I s’pose we ’ave to do it.”
And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his
second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of the
English democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense of
pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness.
.....
It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out. For every
practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a
tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party it
is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if
possible without bodily violence. Now people talk of democracy as
being coarse and turbulent: it is a self-evident error in mere history.
Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent: for it
means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealing
to the different people. Democracy means getting those people to vote
who would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian
ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have
not the cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in my
friend in the train. The only two types we hear of in this argument
about crime and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types.
We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no
problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything: as if
one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in
bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For
if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be
virtuous--which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and
more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who
says, with a sort of splutter, “Flog the brutes!” or who tells you
with innocent obscenity “what he would do” with a certain man--always
supposing the man’s hands were tied.
This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and
unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian
and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel.
Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet
anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this
man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually
doubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be
“done” to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better it would be if
nothing need be done. But something must be done. “I s’pose we ’ave to
do it.” In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there is
only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart
and comedy in his head.
.....
Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem of the
proper treatment of criminals is that both parties discuss the matter
without any direct human feeling. The denouncers of wrong are as cold as
the organisers of wrong. Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity.
Let me take one practical instance. I think the flogging arranged in our
modern prisons is a filthy torture; all its scientific paraphernalia,
the photographing, the medical attendance, prove that it goes to the
last foul limit of the boot and rack. The cat is simply the rack without
any of its intellectual reasons. Holding this view strongly, I open the
ordinary humanitarian books or papers and I find a phrase like this,
“The lash is a relic of barbarism.” So is the plough. So is the fishing
net. So is the horn or the staff or the fire lit in winter. What an
inexpressibly feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack--a relic of
barbarism! It is as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow, and
we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion. There is
nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Man is a
relic of barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism.
But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is
simply a relic of sin; but in comparative history it may well be called
a relic of civilisation. It has always been most artistic and elaborate
when everything else was most artistic and elaborate. Thus it was
detailed exquisite in the late Roman Empire, in the complex and gorgeous
sixteenth century, in the centralised French monarchy a hundred years
before the Revolution, and in the great Chinese civilisation to this
day. This is, first and last, the frightful thing we must remember.
In so far as we grow instructed and refined we are not (in any sense
whatever) naturally moving away from torture. We may be moving towards
torture. We must know what we are doing, if we are to avoid the enormous
secret cruelty which has crowned every historic civilisation.
The train moves more swiftly through the sunny English fields. They have
taken the prisoners away, and I do not know what they have done with
them.