THE JUDGE OF THE CRIMINAL
But even if some men deserve punishment, who is to judge? The old
injunction still comes back and ever will return when man arraigns his
fellow, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” To find a
judge without sin in the ordinary meaning of the world is necessarily
out of the question. They must of course pretend to be holier than the
rest, and organized society helps out the farce and fraud. At the best,
one guilty man is set up to judge another,—one man filled with his
weaknesses, his infirmities, his shortcomings, sets himself up to judge
not only that his fellow man is a criminal but that he himself is better
than his fellow. And yet all the past and the present has conspired to
make him good, to keep him from temptation, that he might the better
pass judgment on another, while all the world has conspired to place the
victim where he is. Verily, in the light of infinite justice, no greater
crime could be committed than to judge and condemn your fellows, and if
there shall ever be a final day when the crooked is made straight and
the purpose of all shall be revealed and understood, safer far will be
the man who has received the sentence than the one who has dared to pass
judgment on another’s life and pronounce it bad.
But how is this judge to determine the guilt or innocence of his fellow?
He cannot know his life and does not seek to know. To understand fully
another’s life would require infinite pains and such research as no
judge could give or pretend to give. The judge cannot balance up the
character of his victim; he simply seeks in a poor, clumsy, imperfect
way to ascertain whether he did a certain act. Whatever else he did, his
attitude of mind, his necessities, his early training, his opportunities
and temptations, the number of temptations resisted before one proved
too much—all of this is beyond the power of a human judge to know; yet
all of it bears upon the real character of the man and should go to show
whether, on the whole, he deserves blame or praise, and the extent of
each.
In the light of all this, how many human souls could be guiltily cast
out as bad? It requires infinite pains and almost infinite knowledge to
judge one’s physical condition. A man is suffering from some ailment and
a doctor is called to treat him. The disease may be of long standing and
located in some organ beyond the reach of sight and hearing; he patiently
watches every symptom to know the real condition of the physical man and
the cause that made him ill. He calls the wisest surgeons to consult and
these may never be able to locate the disease, or the cause that made the
patient as he is. But twelve untutored jurors and a judge wantonly and
carelessly set themselves up to pass on the condition of a human soul—a
soul no man has seen or by any chance can ever see,—a life they do not
know and could not understand and do not even seek to understand. They
take this soul and, with their poor light, which at the best is blackest
darkness, they pronounce it bad, and in violence and malice deny it the
right of fellowship with its human brothers, each equally a portion of
the great Infinite which takes all of good and all of bad and makes of
these one great, divine, inclusive whole.
The judge must and does view the conduct of his victim according to
his own ideas of right and wrong. At his best he takes with him to the
judgment tribunal every prejudice, bias and belief that his education,
surroundings and heredity have left on him. He measures the condemned
by the ideal man, and the ideal man must be himself, or one made from
his weak, fallible concepts of right and wrong. Naturally he places
little weight or value upon those vices which are a portion of his own
character, or those virtues which he does not possess, or especially
admire. A judge can see no character or virtue in an accused man, who
would rather suffer imprisonment or death than to betray his fellows.
In the judgment of the courts the betrayer is rewarded, the man of
character and worth condemned. A judge reads the code, “Thou shalt not
steal.” He cannot understand how a so-called thief should have forcibly
taken a paltry sum. He cannot conceive that he, himself, could under any
circumstances have done the like. Such conduct must come from a depraved
and wicked heart—a devil that dwells within the culprit. The common
thief looks at the judge arrayed in fine linen and living in luxury and
ease, with nothing to do but pass judgment on his fellowman. He dimly
understands how much easier it is for the judge to obtain his large
salary than for him to get the poor wages of his hazardous and shifting
trade. But the judge does not begin to comprehend that, if he could
not have received his salary or obtained a tolerable life in any of the
endless grades of activity between his profession and the thief’s, very
easily he might have been the victim with some other fortunate man to
pronounce him bad. Human judgments are not passed in view of all the
circumstances of the case. If this was the condition of human judgments,
no man could be condemned.