THE RIGHT TREATMENT OF VIOLENCE
Sentimental and humane thoughts and purposes are often, perhaps
generally, based on real life, and have a natural reason for their
being. To “turn the other cheek” or to “resist not evil” may seem at
first glance to have no support in the facts of life, but after all that
which makes for a higher humanity, a longer life, and a more vigorous
community, is the true philosophy. To use violence and force upon the
vicious and the weak must produce the evil that it gives. Like produces
like. Clubs, jails, harsh language, brutal force inevitably tend to
reproduce the same state of mind in the victim of the assault. This is
not merely a fact in human nature. It is a fact in all nature, plant and
animal and man. So long as the gentle springtime rather than the cruel
winter brings vegetable and animal life to an awakening earth, just so
long will kindness and love triumph, produce joy and life, where force
and violence bring only evil and death. Harsh treatment kills plant life,
and kind treatment builds it up. Violence and brutality produce their
like in animal life, and kindness tames and subdues. With gentleness and
kindness a swarm of wild bees may be handled and controlled, but approach
them with violence and force and each bee is converted into a criminal
whose only purpose is to destroy.
With all animal life the same rule exists; even those beasts whose nature
calls for a diet of flesh and blood may be subdued in time by gentleness
and love. Man with his higher intellect and better developed moral being
is much more susceptible to kindness and love. Likewise he more easily
learns to fear and hate. Man readily discerns the feelings and judgment
of his fellows, and as readily renders judgment in return. The outcast
and abandoned form not the slightest exception to the rule—they know
and understand the ones who meet them with gentleness and love, for
these they make sacrifices, to these they are faithful, to these they
exhibit the higher qualities that show the possibilities of the soul.
Cases where one convicted of crime comes from a place of safety and risks
his liberty and life to help save his friend are not rare in the least.
True comradeship and loyalty is met quite as often here as in the higher
walks of life. Nothing is more common in ordinary selfish society than to
see one man refuse all aid and help to another in financial need. Many
convicts and outcasts could teach a much needed lesson of loyalty and
generosity to the exemplary man.
No amount of treatment can reclaim an evil heart if the treatment is
administered without love. As children at school we knew with our young
natural instincts the teacher who loved us and the teacher who despised
us—the one awoke feelings of love and kindness, the other hatred and
revenge. No heart is so pure that it may not be defiled and hardened
by cruelty, hatred and force, and none so defiled that it may not be
touched and changed by gentleness and love. Unless this philosophy of
life is true the whole teaching of the world has been a delusion and a
snare. Unless love and kindness tends to love, then hatred and violence
and force should be substituted and taught as the cardinal virtues of
human life. The mistake and evil of society is in assuming that love
is the rule of life, and at the same time that large classes of people
are entirely outside its pale. No parent ever teaches his child any
other philosophy than that of love. Even to quarrelsome playmates they
are taught not to return blows and harsh language, but to meet force
with kindness and with love. The parent who did not depend on love to
influence and mold the character of the child rather than force would be
regarded not as a real parent but a brute. Force is worse than useless
in developing the conduct of the child. It is true that by means of
force the little child may be awed by superior brute power, but he gives
way only under protest, and the violence that he suppresses in his hand
or tongue finds refuge in his heart. Violent acts are not evil—they
are a manifestation of evil. Good conduct is not goodness. It is but a
manifestation of goodness. Evil and goodness can only be conditions of
the inmost life, and human conduct, while it generally reflects this
inmost life, may be so controlled as not to manifest the real soul that
makes the man.
Every child needs development, needs training to fit him to live in
peace and right relations with his fellow man. Every intelligent and
right-thinking person knows that this development must be through love,
not through violence and force. The parent who would teach his child to
be kind to animals, not to ruthlessly kill and maim, would not teach
this gentleness with a club. The intelligent parent would not use a
whip to teach a child not to beat a dog. The child is not made into the
good citizen, the righteous man, by pointing out that certain conduct
will lead to punishment, to the jail or the gallows. The beneficence of
fear was once considered a prime necessity in the rearing of the child,
and this theory peopled the earth with monsters and the air with spooks
ready to reach down and take the helpless child when he wandered from the
straight and narrow path; but this method of rearing children does not
appeal to the judgment and humanity of to-day. The conduct of children
can only be reached for good by pointing to the evil results of hatred,
of inharmony, of force, by appealing to the higher and nobler sentiments
which, if once reached, are ever present, influencing and controlling
life. The code of hatred, of violence and force, too, is a negative code.
The child is given a list of the things he must not do, exactly as the
man is furnished a list of the acts forbidden by the state. At the best,
when the limits of this list are reached and the forbidden things are
left undone, nothing more is expected or demanded. But no code is long
enough to make up the myriad acts of life. Kindness or unkindness can
result in a thousand ways in every human relationship. If the child or
the man observes the written code through fear, the unwritten moral code,
infinitely longer and more delicate, will be broken in its almost every
line. But if the child or the man is taught his right relations to the
world and feels the love and sympathy due his fellow man, he has no need
of written codes; his acts, so far as those of mortals can be, will be
consistent with the life and happiness of his fellow man. And this not
through fear, but because he bears the highest attitude toward life.
* * * * *
With our long heredity and our imperfect environment, even if the
organized force of the state should disappear, even if the jails and
penitentiaries should close their doors, force would only completely die
in course of time. Evil environment and heredity may have so marked and
scarred some men that kindness and love could never reach their souls.
It might take generations to stamp out hatred or destroy the ill effects
of life; but order and kindness most surely would result, because nature
demands order and tolerance and without it man must die. No doubt here
and there these so-called evil ones would arouse evil and hatred in
return, and some sudden act of violence would for a time occasionally
be met with violence through mob law in return. But uncertain and
reprehensible as mob law has ever been it is still much more excusable
and more certain than the organized force of society operating through
the criminal courts. Mob law has the excuse of passion, of provocation,
not the criminal nature of deliberation, coldness and settled hate. Mob
law, too, generally reaches the object of its wrath, while evidence is
fresh and facts are easily understood and unhampered by those rules and
technical forms which ensnare the weak and protect the strong. And unjust
and unwise as the verdicts of mob law often are, they are still more
excusable, quicker, more certain and less erring than the judgments of
the criminal courts.
But neither civil law nor mob law is at all necessary for the protection
of individuals. Men are not protected because of their strength or their
ability to fight. In the present general distribution of weapons, in one
sense, every man’s life is dependent on each person that he meets. If
the instinct was to kill, society as organized presents no obstacle to
that instinct. When casual violence results it is not the weakest or most
defenceless who are the victims of the casual violence of individuals.
Even the boy at school scorns to war upon a weaker mate. The old, the
young, the feeble, children and women, are especially exempt from
violent deeds. This is because their condition does not call for feelings
of violence, but rather awakens feelings of compassion, and calls for aid
and help. The non-resistant ever appeals to the courageous and the manly.
Without weapons of any kind, with the known determination to give no
violence in return, it would be very rare that men would not be safe from
disorganized violence. It is only the state that ever lays its hands in
anger on the non-resistant.
Neither would non-resistance in the state or individual indicate
cowardice or weakness or lack of vital force. The ability and inclination
to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life.
The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper
and more common than physical bravery. In the lower animals it is more
pronounced than in man. The bulldog and the fighting cock are quite as
conspicuous examples of physical bravery as the prize-fighter or the
soldier. The history of all warfare shows either that physical bravery is
not an indication of great excellence or that supreme excellence is very
common, in fact almost a universal possession. Under the intoxication
of patriotism, or the desire for glory, or the fear of contempt, most
men will march with apparent willingness into the face of the greatest
danger. Often it requires vastly more courage to stay at home than to
enlist—more courage to retreat than to fight. Common experience shows
how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men
will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse
an unpopular cause. An army well equipped and ready for action has
less terror for the ordinary man than the unfavorable comment of the
daily press. True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of
the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one’s own purpose,
and the sufficiency of one’s own approval as a justification for one’s
own acts. This attitude is not that of the coward, for cowardice is
really disapproval of self, a consciousness of one’s own littleness and
unworthiness in the light of one’s own soul, which cannot be deceived.
* * * * *
Intelligent men are willing to accept many truths that they believe
are not fitted for the universal acceptance of mankind, and however
they may feel that punishment is wrong they still urge that it will not
do to teach this doctrine to the great mass of men and to carry its
practice into daily life. But sooner or later all conduct and all life
must rest on truth. It is only fact that can form a basis for permanent
theories that tend to the preservation of the race. No one is too poor,
or too young, or too vicious to know the truth, for the truth alone is
consistent with all the facts of life, and this alone can furnish any
rule of life. The truth alone can make free. When society is taught the
truth that it is wrong to punish, to use force, to pass judgment on man,
it will have no need for jails. The man who really knows and understands
this truth can have no malice in his heart, can use no force and violence
against his fellow, but will reach him with love and pity. The man or
society that understands this truth will know that so-called crime is
only so-called crime; that human conduct is what the necessities of life
make of the individual soul. Then in reality, as now only partially, men
will turn their attention to the causes that make crime. Then will they
seek to prevent and cure, not to punish and destroy. Then man will learn
to know that the cause of crime is the unjust condition of human life;
that penal laws are made to protect earth’s possessions in the hands of
the vicious and the strong. Man will learn that poverty and want are
due to the false conditions, the injustice which looks to human law and
violence and force for its safeguard and protection. Man will learn
that crime is but the hard profession that is left open to a large class
of men by their avaricious fellows. When new opportunities for life are
given, a fairer condition of existence will gradually be opened up and
the need for violence and the cause of violence will disappear.
Instead of avenging a murder by taking a judge, sheriff, jurors,
witnesses, jailer, hangman, and the various appendages of the court,—by
taking these and staining their hands with blood and crime, the world
will make the original murder impossible, and thus save the crimes of
all. Neither will the vicious control without the aid of law. Society
ever has and must ever have a very large majority who naturally fall
into order, social adjustment and a rational, permissible means of life.
The disorganized vicious would be far less powerful than the organized
vicious, and would soon disappear.
Punishment to terrorize men from violating human order is like the threat
of hell to terrorize souls into obedience to the law of God. Both mark
primitive society, both are degrading and debasing, and can only appeal
to the lower instincts of the lower class of men. Most religious teachers
have ceased to win followers by threats of hell. Converts of this sort
are not generally desired. The religion that does not approach and appeal
to men along their higher conduct is not considered worthy to teach
to man. And those souls who cannot be moved through the sentiments of
justice and humanity, rather than threats of eternal fire, are very, very
rare, and even should such a soul exist the fear of hell would cause it
still further to shrivel and decay.
Hatred, bitterness, violence and force can bring only bad results—they
leave an evil stain on everyone they touch. No human soul can be rightly
reached except through charity, humanity and love.