Justice Mathew pointed out, was a hundred years behind the times, and a
special department of the Humanitarian League was established in order
to advocate certain much-needed reforms. It was felt that in view of the
severity of the penal laws, the inequality of sentences, and the hard
and indiscriminating character of prison discipline, an organized
attempt ought to be made to humanize both the spirit of the law and the
conditions of prison life, and to show that the true purpose of
imprisonment was the reformation, not the mere punishment, of the
offender. In this campaign the League was able to avail itself of a mass
of expert information. It published, in 1893, a very effective pamphlet,
“I was in Prison,” written by Mr. Robert Johnson, director of the
Colonial College at Hollesley Bay; and this was followed, a year later,
by “A Plea for Mercy to Offenders,” an address given before the League
by Mr. C. H. Hopwood, the Recorder of Liverpool, who, with his friend
Mr. Johnson, did great service in showing the futility of long sentences
of imprisonment. I had several talks about that time with Mr. Johnson
and Mr. Hopwood; and they would have thrown in their lot altogether with
the Humanitarian League but for their fear that the inclusion within its
programme of many other questions, such as sport and vivisection, would
alienate sympathy in some quarters from their special subject of prison
reform: it was for this reason that Mr. Hopwood afterwards founded the
Romilly Society.
Two other names stood out conspicuously in the same sphere of work--that
of Dr. W. Douglas Morrison, the well-known criminologist, now Rector of
Marylebone, under whose guidance the League took a prominent part in the
agitation which led to the Prisons Act of 1898, and that of “Lex,” one
of the keenest intellects of his time, whose pen was placed unreservedly
at the League’s disposal. Mr. W. H. S. Monck--for it was he who adopted
that _nom de plume_--was Chief Registrar in Bankruptcy in the King’s
Bench Division, Dublin, a post which he filled with distinction, while
his extraordinarily active and versatile mind found interest in many
other studies: he was a mathematician, an astronomer, a writer on logic,
political economy, and moral philosophy, and withal a chess-player of
note, among which pursuits he never failed to find time to help the
humanitarian cause. His official position made it desirable that his
name should not appear; but many were the press letters that he wrote,
and many the resolutions, memorials, and letters to governmental
departments that he drafted on the League’s behalf. To “ask ‘Lex’ to
draft it” was often the course taken by the Committee when dealing with
some technical matter that needed exceptional care. The two subjects in
which Mr. Monck was specially concerned, besides that of flogging, were
the establishment of a Court of Criminal Appeal and a revision of the
law relating to Imprisonment for Debt; and it was largely his
unacknowledged labours that brought about the one reform and prepared
the way for the other. In his press letters on corporal punishment he
would sometimes adopt the ironic manner; that is, he would write as one
who in part believed in the value of flogging, yet in such a way as to
suggest rather the flaws and failures of the practice, and so to impair
any faith in it which might linger in the minds of his readers.
Among other friends to whom this department of the League was much
indebted were Mr. George Ives, author of _A History of Penal Methods_;
Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner; Mr. Carl Heath; Mr. H. B. Montgomery; Mrs. L.
T. Mallet; Dr. T. Baty, the distinguished authority on International
Law; and Mr. Joseph Collinson, who for some years acted as its honorary
secretary. Mr. Collinson was a young north-countryman, self-taught, and
full of native readiness and ingenuity, who at an early age had
developed a passion for humanitarian journalism, and whose press letters
became as well known as those of Mr. Algernon Ashton, while he had a
marked advantage over that gentleman in having an ethical purpose and
something definite to write about. Any one who should glance over the
files of the chief London and provincial journals, between the years
1895 and 1910, could not fail to see a number of letters signed “Joseph
Collinson,” or to admire the pertinacity with which the humanitarian
view of a host of controversial subjects, in particular those relating
to criminal law and prisons, was brought to the notice of the public.
Especially in regard to the flogging question Mr. Collinson’s services
were of great value.
Thus supported, the Humanitarian League had no cause to fear any
reasoned opposition: our difficulty, rather, was to meet with any; for
our antagonists were mostly anonymous and often abusive correspondents
of newspapers, and the real obstacle with which we had to cope was the
crass weight of prejudice and the immense stability of old institutions.
Two of our adversaries, however, must not go without mention. One was
Mr. William Tallack, then Secretary of the Howard Association, whose
hostility was dangerous because it lurked under the guise of
philanthropy. He was an old gentleman of benevolent demeanour, whose
method it was to sit astutely “on the fence,” making oracular
utterances, now on that side, now on this, so that, like the writer of
an astrological almanack, he might be able in any event to run in and
cry: “I told you so.” In his _Penological Principles_, a work much
advertised in those days, there was plenty of penology, but very little
principle, much more of the Tallack than of the Howard: it was, in fact,
a farrago of platitudes and pieties, which said many things without
ultimately meaning anything at all. Yet, in spite of his much verbiage
and many estimable sentiments, Mr. Tallack was a reactionist; he
belonged to an antiquated school of thought, quite out of sympathy with
the new style of prison reform; and as he lost no opportunity of
disparaging the work of the League, we showed him somewhat emphatically
that that was a game at which two parties could play. This he did not
relish, especially as we were strongly backed up by Mr. Passmore Edwards
in his paper, the _Echo_. A conference was accordingly proposed by Mr.
Tallack, where it was agreed that in future there should be a friendly
arrangement of “hands off” on either side. I remember how, at that
meeting, he told me in his paternal manner, as an instance of the
advantages of not advocating “extreme” measures of reform, that he
enjoyed the privilege of being able, now and then, to have a personal
talk with the Home Secretary. “What would humanitarians think of that?”
The old gentleman was evidently unaware that if he was a _persona grata_
at the Home Office, it was precisely because he was known to be a “tame”
reformer, a parasite of the old system, not a champion of the new, and
therefore useful to those who wished to let matters go on as before.
In a prison-play “The Home Secretary’s Holiday,” which was acted before
the Humanitarian League at one of its social gatherings, Mr. Tallack was
glanced at in the character of Mr. Prim, a Visiting Justice, who dwells
on the value of “segregation,” “introspection,” “self-questioning,” and
“remorse,” as heaven-sent means by which the convicted sinner may be
awakened to a sense of his guilt.
Our other critic, of whom I must say a brief word, was Sir Robert
Anderson, then an ex-Assistant Commissioner of Police; who, being of a
choleric and over-bearing nature, was consumed with wrathful indignation
at the activities of the Humanitarian League. In his book on _Criminals
and Crime_, vengeful tirades against the professional criminal were
accompanied with scarcely less violent abuse of “professional
humanitarians”--a strange term this, to be applied to honorary workers
in an unpopular cause, and by one who had himself been for many years a
salaried official at Scotland Yard! In the same work we figured
variously as “humanity-mongers,” “agitators,” “fools,” “hysterical
faddists,” “doctrinaire philanthropists,” “spurious philosophers,”
“maudlin sentimentalists,” and so on. Authors sometimes describe their
books as “a labour of love.” Sir Robert’s was certainly a labour of
hate, and among the punishments which he indicated as suitable for an
impenitent thief were the gallows, crucifixion, thumb-screws, and the
rack; he added that it was consideration for the community, not for the
thief, that prevented the use of them. It is not pleasant to have to
speak of such a man; one would rather forget him. But in estimating the
savagery of the age, the fact that his most vindictive proposals met
with a good deal of public support is one which cannot be left out of
account.
A thorough-going condemnation of flogging is without doubt a very
unpopular policy; the Humanitarian League lost many members and much
pecuniary support by its steadfastness on this point, especially,
strange to say, among zoophilists and anti-vivisectionists, many of whom
were firm believers in the propriety of vivisecting the backs of
criminals, and would have gone any distance, as I have heard said, “to
see a vivisector flogged.” Not the least valuable part of the League’s
duties was to put a check on foolish talk of that sort; and in this we
had the satisfaction of being warmly supported by so distinguished an
opponent of vivisection as Professor Lawson Tait. It came about in a
rather strange way.
The League held a meeting in Birmingham; and a local member, who had the
arrangements in hand, got Mr. Tait to preside, but by some oversight did
not sufficiently apprise him beforehand of our aims and objects. When he
entered the room--a formidable-looking figure, with slow gait, massive
build, and heavy brows--he was seen to be in a towering rage. The storm
broke at once. Instead of the usual complimentary remarks from the
chair, he told us in wrathful tones that he knew nothing of the
Humanitarian League, and that it was most improper that he should have
been left thus uninformed. This was true, and we wished the earth would
swallow us up; but there was nothing for it but to go on with the
business of the meeting, and while the speeches were being made Mr.
Tait sat and studied the League’s printed manifesto. As he read it, the
gloom gradually left him; he began to mutter approval of point after
point, then to chuckle with satisfaction, and presently he turned to me
(I happened to be sitting next to him) and told me that he was in
complete agreement with our programme. A great good humour now took the
place of his former resentment, and presently he spoke at some length,
and himself moved a resolution that the objects of the League were
“worthy the support of all good citizens.” He declared that he felt
almost as strongly on the question of prison punishments as on that of
vivisection, and severely censured the clamour for the lash that had
been raised by some woman-suffragists of Edinburgh. It was then that he
used the words prefixed to this chapter: “Why not bring back at once the
boot, the stake, and the thumbscrew?”
That there are numbers of persons who would be quite willing to bring
back, if it were possible, the medieval forms of torture cannot for a
moment be doubted by any one who, like myself, has had the experience of
working for over twenty-five years for the discontinuance of flogging.
There are, of course, many reasonable advocates of corporal punishment
in one or another of its forms; but there are many more to whom the cry
for flogging, and for more and yet more flogging, has become a veritable
craze, as was seen when, in the agitation for the lashing of “white
slavers” in 1912, a frenzied shriek of passion went up from a large
section of the people. “We know,” said a Member of Parliament at the
time, “the extraordinary hysterical emotion which this Bill has aroused
throughout England. We get letters from all sorts of people, chiefly
women, ‘flog them,’ ‘crucify them,’ and anything else you like. It is a
cry we have had all down the ages.”[31] That there has been such a cry
all down the ages is likely enough; but the age which tolerates it can
hardly claim to be a civilized one.
In _The Flogging Craze, a Statement of the Case against Corporal
Punishment_,[32] a book published for the Humanitarian League in 1916,
with a preface by my friend Sir George Greenwood, I availed myself of
the large amount of material amassed by the League during its long
campaign against flogging, in the hope that such a work--the first of
its kind, if pamphlets be excepted--might prove useful to many social
reformers, who, though instinctively opposed to the use of the lash, are
often silenced by confident assertions of its efficacy, and are unaware
that in this, as in similar discussions, humanity and reason go hand in
hand.
Let me now turn to another and still more gruesome form of torture. It
is fitting, perhaps, that the twin tyrannies of Flogging and Vivisection
should be linked together as Lawson Tait saw them, for they are indeed
kindred expressions of one barbarous spirit. I use, for the sake of
brevity and convenience, the customary term “vivisection,” though there
is force in the objection raised against it by certain humanitarian
writers, that the Latin word somewhat conceals the vileness of the
practice, and though the phrase suggested by Mr. Howard Williams,
“experimental torture,” is more strictly appropriate to the nameless
thing for which a name has to be found. Here, at any rate, in the
twentieth century of our barbarism, is torture in its most naked
form--the rack, not indeed “without any of its intellectual reasons,” as
was said of the lash, but torture as surely as the boot and the
thumbscrew were torture. As for the intellectual reasons alleged in
excuse of the practice, it was pointed out in _Animals’ Rights_ that
before holding vivisection justified on the strength of its utility, a
wise man will take into consideration the other, the _moral_ side of
the question, “the hideous injustice of torturing a sentient animal,
and the wrong thereby done to the humane sense of the community.” This
contention was quoted and corroborated in an unexpected quarter, viz. in
a book published in 1901 by a Russian doctor, V. Veresaeff,[33] who,
though himself justifying vivisection, did not conceal his misgivings as
to the ethical aspect of the practice. “The question,” he said, in
reference to the passage in _Animals’ Rights_, “is plainly put, and
there can be no room for any equivocation. I repeat that we ought not to
ridicule the pretensions of the anti-vivisectionists--the sufferings of
animals are truly horrible; and sympathy with them is not
sentimentality.” In view of that admission, I will waste no words in
discussing the pretence that anæsthetics have relieved the vivisected
animals of their “truly horrible” sufferings. It is not so, even in this
country, where the legal restrictions are a farce; and if it were so
here, the rest of the world would be open to experimentation unlicensed
and unlimited.
The special application of the word “vivisection” to physiological
experiments has led to a belief, in many minds, that the vivisecting
scientist is the sole torturer of animals. This is unjust both to the
laboratory and to its victims. The crusade against vivisection would be
much strengthened if those who take part in it would remember that the
cruelties of science are only part of the great sum of cruelty that in
various forms disgraces the dealings of mankind with the lower animals.
Granted that the worst barbarities of the vivisector exceed those of the
sportsman or the slaughterman, both in duration and intensity, it is
still a fact, as scientists have often pointed out, that there are other
tortures than those of the laboratory, and that to some of these the
name “vivisection” might as accurately be applied. For example, clumsy
castration of domestic animals, as the law is beginning to recognize,
is nothing less than “farmyard vivisection”; the “docking” of horses’
tails is vivisection in a very revolting form; in the seal-fishery the
wretched victims of “fashion” have often been skinned alive; nor can it
be pretended that the torture of the egrets, flung aside to die when
their nuptial plumes have been torn off, demands a milder name than
vivisection; yet some zoophilists, who look upon a vivisecting
physiologist as a fiend, do not hesitate to wear an aigrette or a
sealskin cloak, or to be the owners of docked horses or cropped dogs. It
is impossible to draw a strict line of division between those
barbarities which amount to torture and those which fall short of it,
and it is convenient that the cruelties of sport and fashion should be
dealt with under a separate head; nevertheless there is one other
practice on which a few words must be spoken before this chapter is
closed.
Under the antiquated methods of transport and butchery still permitted
in England, it is impossible to doubt that something not far removed
from torture is often practised in the cattle trade; for which reason,
while aware that in vegetarianism lies the only full solution of the
diet-question, humanitarians have long pressed for an amelioration of
the worst features of cattle-ship and shambles, and, as a minimum, for
the establishment of public abattoirs in place of private
slaughterhouses. Even in this respect, owing to the supineness of the
County Council, London has been left at the mercy of “the trade,” though
in some other districts there has been a gratifying improvement. The
Humanitarian League, enjoying the advantage of being advised by such
experts as Sir Benjamin Richardson, Mr. H. F. Lester (whose _Behind the
Scenes in Slaughterhouses_ we published in 1892), Mr. Charles W.
Forward, Mr. C. Cash, and Mr. R. S. Ayling, lost no opportunity of
making known the need of this long postponed reform; but the subject
being so repulsive it was always difficult to enlist the sympathies of
the public, that is, of the very persons whose conscience ought to have
been touched; or, if any interest _was_ awakened, it might be among
those who were traditionally or professionally opposed to the changes
desired.
This danger was once curiously illustrated at a meeting held by the
League in the rooms of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals, when Mr. John Colam, the Secretary of that Society, took the
chair, and Mr. C. W. Forward gave an address on the Jewish method of
slaughtering. A mere handful of our friends attended, but the hall was
packed from end to end with Jewish visitors, who had seen the
announcement of the meeting in the papers, and rallied to the defence of
their ritual. We had intended to move a resolution, strongly condemning
the Jewish system, but we decided, after a hurried consultation with Mr.
Colam, that an academic discussion would better suit the circumstances;
and fortunately it did not occur to our Hebrew friends to propose and
pass a resolution of the contrary kind: they talked long and volubly,
and we were glad they did nothing worse. The meeting, however, was not
without result, for it led, a couple of months later, to the reception
by the Jewish Board of Shecheta of a deputation from the Humanitarian
League, at which the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Adler, was present, and gave us a
very courteous reply. The Jewish system of “casting,” he said, which had
especially been criticized as barbarous, was a good deal misunderstood
owing to the word by which it was described: in reality the animals were
not “cast,” but “let down gently with ropes.” Mr. Forward, however, who
had often witnessed the process, remained unconvinced on this point: it
seemed to him that it was the public that was being let down gently with
words.
The League had the satisfaction of seeing the Jewish system strongly
condemned in the official report (1904) of the Committee appointed to
consider the Humane Slaughtering of Animals; but nothing has yet been
done to carry the recommendations of that Committee into effect, the
supposed sanctity of a “religious” usage having been allowed, as usual,
to outweigh the clearest dictates of humaneness.
There are not a few other current and strongly-rooted practices to which
the title of this chapter might justly be applied; but enough has now
been said to show that the merry month of May, in the year of grace
1640, did not witness, as has been supposed, quite the last instance of
the infliction of Torture in this favoured land of the free.
XI
HUNNISH SPORTS AND FASHIONS
Half ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.
KEATS.
From the subject of torture we pass naturally to that of sport; indeed,
it is difficult to separate them, for they are psychologically and
actually akin. There is undoubtedly an element of sport in the gloating
over savage punishments, and some of the sufferings which sportsmen
inflict, such as the hunting to death of a timid deer or hare, cannot
fairly be distinguished from torture. But when I speak of “sport” in
this connection, I mean of course _blood-sport_; not the manly games of
playing-field or river, but the quest for personal recreation at the
expense of pain to others. The term “blood-sports” was first used, as
far as I am aware, by Mr. John Macdonald, who, under the name of
“Meliorist,” was the author of some suggestive articles that appeared in
the _Echo_; anyhow, the Humanitarian League borrowed the word from him,
and finding that it “went home,” made a point of using it on every
possible occasion. It is the right and proper expression for the
practices which it connotes.
The League published in 1914 a volume of essays on _Killing for Sport_,
with Preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw, in which the various aspects of
blood-sports were for the first time fully set forth and examined from
the standpoint of ethics and economics: the book, in fact, formed a
summary of the League’s arraignment of certain bloody and barbarous
pastimes, just as _The Flogging Craze_ was a record of its protests
against the continued use of the lash. I will here mention only a few of
the more salient features of a long campaign.
For ten years, from 1891 to 1901, the League made the Royal Buckhounds
serve as a “peg”--and a very useful peg it was--on which to hang an
exposure of the cruelty of stag-hunting.[34] The doings of the
Buckhounds were watched from season to season; detailed accounts of the
“runs” were published, in contradiction of the shuffling reports sent to
the papers by patrons of the Hunt, and a number of horrible cases of
mutilation were dragged into light. Questions were put in Parliament;
leaflets, articles, and press letters printed in hundreds, and many
lectures given at various clubs and institutions.
In this work we had the sympathy of many distinguished public men and
the support of a section of the press (notably of the _Star_, which was
then edited by Mr. Ernest Parke); but every possible difficulty was put
in our way by officials, whether of the Court, the Government, or the
Hunt, who in this case, as in all, desired nothing more than to save
themselves trouble by letting things go on as before. Red tape cared
little whether carted stags continued to be disembowelled on iron
palings and worried by hounds. For example, when, in 1898, we wished to
lay before Queen Victoria the case _against_ the Royal Hunt, in answer
to Lord Ribblesdale’s book, _The Queen’s Hounds_, her private secretary,
Sir A. Bigge, refused to bring the League’s publications to her notice;
the Home Secretary also declined to do so, and so did the Prime
Minister, each and all of them cordially advising us to apply elsewhere.
Thus thwarted, we hit on the expedient of _petitioning_ the Queen to
allow the counter-case to be sent to her, and in this way the Home
Office was finally forced to do what it had declared to be “contrary to
practice.” The Queen, as we had known since 1891, from a private letter
addressed to Mr. Stratton by Sir Henry Ponsonby, had been “strongly
opposed to stag-hunting for many years past”; and when this fact was
published after her death it settled the fate of the Buckhounds.