_INDURATION_
Though my heading is as old as Chaucer, it has, I must admit, a
Johnsonian sound. Its sense is conveyed in the title of an excellent
book on suffering called _Lest We Grow Hard_, and this is a very
real peril against which it behoves everyone
"Who makes his moral being his prime care"
to be sedulously on his guard. During the last four years we have
been, in a very special way and degree, exposed to it; and we ought
to be thankful that, as a nation, we seem to have escaped. The
constant contemplation, even with the mental eye, of bloodshed and
torture, has a strong tendency to harden the heart; and a peculiar
grace was needed to keep alive in us that sympathy with suffering, that
passion of mercy, which is the characteristic virtue of regenerate
humanity. I speak not only of human suffering. Animals, it has been
said, may have no rights, but they have many wrongs, and among
those wrongs are the tortures which war inflicts. The suffering
of all sentient nature appeals alike to humanitarian sympathy.
It has always seemed to me a signal instance of Wordsworth's penetrating
thought "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," that he assigned to
this virtue a dominant place in the Character of the Happy Warrior--
"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain";
and who, "as more exposed" than others "to suffering and distress,"
is
"Hence, also, more alive to tenderness."
This tribute to the moral nature of the Warrior, whether his warfare
be on land or on sea or in the air, is as true to-day as when Wordsworth
paid it. The brutal and senseless cry for "reprisals" which of late
has risen from some tainted spots of the Body Politic will wake
no response unless it be an exclamation of disgust from soldiers
and sailors and airmen. Of course, everyone knows that there is a
sense in which reprisals are a necessary part of warfare. Generation
after generation our forefathers fought bow to bow and sword to
sword and gun to gun against equally armed and well-matched foes;
this was reprisal, or, if you prefer, retaliation. And when, in more
recent times, the devilish ingenuity of science invented poisonous
gas, there was nothing unmanly or unchivalrous in retorting on
our German enemies with the hideous weapon which they had first
employed.
But this is not the kind of reprisal which indurated orators demand.
They contend that because the Germans kill innocent civilians,
and women, and little children in English streets, Englishmen are
to commit the same foul deeds in Germany. "It is hard," says the
_Church Times_, "to say whether futility or immorality is the more
striking characteristic of the present clamour for reprisals in
the matter of air-raids.... Mr. Joynson Hicks would 'lay a German
town in ashes after every raid on London,' and he is not much worse
than others who scream in the same key." Nay, he is better than
many of them. The people who use this language are not the men
of action. They belong to a sedentary and neurotic class, who,
lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture
inflicted on the innocent and the helpless.
A German baby is as innocent as an English baby, a German mother
is as helpless as an English mother; and our stay-at-home heroes,
safely ensconced in pulpits or editorial chairs, shrilly proclaim
that they must be bombed by English airmen. What a function to
impose on a band of fighters, peculiarly chivalrous and humane!
I refer to the pulpit because one gross and disgusting instance
of clerical ferocity has lately been reported. A raving clergyman
has been insolently parodying the Gospel which he has sworn to
preach. Some of the newspapers commended his courage; and we do
not know whether his congregation quitted the church or his Bishop
rebuked him. Both results are possible, and I sincerely hope that
the latter is true. The established and endowed teachers of religion
have not always used their influence on the side of mercy; but on
the question of reprisals I have observed with thankfulness that
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London have spoken
on the right side, and have spoken with energy and decision. They,
at any rate, have escaped the peril of induration, and in that
respect they are at one with the great mass of decent citizens.
I am no advocate of a mawkish lenity. When our soldiers and sailors
and airmen meet our armed foes on equal terms, my prayers go with
them; and the harder they strike, the better I am pleased. When a
man or woman has committed a cold-blooded murder and has escaped
the just penalty of the crime, I loathe the political intrigue
which sets him or her free. Heavy punishment for savage deeds,
remorseless fighting till victory is ours--these surely should be
guiding principles in peace and war; and to hold them is no proof
that one has suffered the process of induration.
Here I am not ashamed to make common cause with the stout old Puritan
in _Peveril of the Peak:_ "To forgive our human wrongs is Christian-like
and commendable; but we have no commission to forgive those which
have been done to the cause of religion and of liberty; we have
no right to grant immunity or to shake hands with those who have
poured forth the blood of our brethren."
But let us keep our vengeance for those who by their own actions
have justly incurred it. The very intensity of our desire to punish
the wrong-doer should be the measure of our unwillingness to inflict
torture on the helpless and the innocent. "Lest we grow hard"--it
should be our daily dread. "A black character, a womanish character,
a stubborn character: bestial, childish, stupid, scurrilous,
tyrannical." A pagan, who had observed such a character in its
working, prayed to be preserved from it. Christians of the twentieth
century must not sink below the moral level of Marcus Aurelius.