Sunday, Dec. 4, 1904.
The problem of our spiritual attitude toward positive badness,
social and individual wrongdoing, cruelty and oppression, is far
more difficult of solution than the problem of our attitude toward
worth really existent but concealed. The thorny question, how we
are to deal with wicked persons, whether we are to observe the
spiritual attitude toward them, and in what that attitude consists,
requires the most sincere and straightforward treatment.
Should we cultivate an attitude of indifference in such cases? A
ruffian cruelly beats his horse, the poor beast that has rendered him
faithful service for many a day, but is feeble now and sinks beneath
its load. With curses and the sharp persuasion of the lash, the
merciless driver seeks to force the animal to efforts of which it is
plainly incapable. Can we stand by and witness such a scene in
philosophic calm? Shall we say that the wretch is the product of
circumstances, and cannot be expected to act otherwise than he
does? Shall we liken evildoers generally, as at present is customary
in certain quarters, to the sick? Shall we say that such men are the
outcome of their heredity, their education, their environment? I
have known of a husband who in a state of intoxication brutally
struck and injured his wife, while she was holding in her arms a
babe not eight days old. Shall we say that that man was morally
sick, that he could not help becoming intoxicated, and therefore
was not responsible for the havoc he wrought when the demon of
drink had gained possession of him? Shall we say of the syndicate
of traders who hunt the natives on the Congo like rabbits,
massacre and mutilate them, that they are sick? A bad deed done
with intention argues badness in the doer. We impute to the man
the act and its consequences. We cannot separate the sin from the
sinner, and merely condemn sin in the abstract. There is no such
thing as sin in the abstract. Sin is sin only when it is incorporated
in the will of a human individual. We condemn the sinner because
he has wedded himself to the sin. If this were not the case, we
might as well close our courts of justice. We hold men accountable,
then, for their misdeeds, whatever speculative philosophy may urge
to the contrary. How could we revere virtue if we did not stigmatize its
opposite; how could we believe in human worth if we did not condemn
unworth where it appears?
But the ordinary judgment stops short right here. It recognizes
the particular badness of a particular act, and desires that the agent
be made to suffer for it. It says, this act is the expression of an evil
disposition, and it identifies the whole man with the particular act
of which he was guilty. The spiritual attitude is characterized by
discriminating between the particular act and the whole of the
man's nature. It recognizes that there is an evil strand; but it also
sees or divines the good that exists along with the evil, even in the
most seemingly hopeless cases. It trusts to the good, and builds
upon it with a view to making it paramount over evil. Upon the
basis of this spiritual attitude, what should be our mode of dealing
with the bad? There are a number of steps to be taken in order,
and much depends on our following the right order.
The first step is to arrest the course of evil, to prevent its channel
from being deepened, its area from being enlarged. Pluck the whip
from the hand of the ruffian who is lashing his beast; stay the arm
that is uplifted to strike the cowardly murderous blow. Much has
been said of the need of considering the good of society, of
protecting the community at large from the depredations of the
violent and fraudulent; and of subjecting the latter to exemplary
punishment, in order to deter others from following their example.
But the welfare of society and the welfare of the criminal are
always identical. Nothing should be done to the worst criminal, not
a hair of his head should be touched merely for the sake of
securing the public good, if the thing done be not also for his
private good. And on the other hand, nothing can be done to the
criminal which is for his own lasting good that will not also
profoundly react for the good of society, assuring its security, and
deterring others from a like career of crime. The very first claim
which the criminal has upon the services of his fellow-men is that
they stop him in his headlong course of wickedness. Arrest,
whether by the agents of the law or in some other way, is the first
step. The most spiritual concern for a degraded and demoralized
fellow-being does not exclude the sharp intervention implied in
arrest, for the spiritual attitude is not mawkish or incompatible
with the infliction of pain.
This, I think, will be readily granted. But the second step, a step
far more important than the arrest of the evildoer in order to arrest
the evildoing, is more likely to be contested and misunderstood.
The second step consists in fixing the mark of shame upon the
offender and publicly humiliating him by means of the solemn
sentence of the judge. It may be asked, What human being is fit to
exercise this awful office of acting as judge of another? Remember
the words of Shakespeare in King Lear: ". . . .See how yond
justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change
places; and . . . . which is the justice, which the thief?" Or recall
what the Puritan preacher said when he saw from his window a
culprit being led to the gallows: "There, but for the grace of God,
go I." In other words, had I been born as this man was, had I been
played upon by the influences to which he was subject, had I been
tempted as he was, how dare I say that I should not have fallen as
he did? Had it not been for some grace extended to me through no
desert of mine, I might be traveling the road on which he travels
now.
Furthermore, can we say that the sentence of the judge is
proportioned to the heinousness of the deed? Is the murderer who
in a fit of uncontrolled passion has taken a human life--it may have
been his first and only crime--necessarily more depraved than the
thief; or is the thief in jail who has indeed broken the law,
necessarily more depraved than numbers of others who have
dexterously circumvented the law, violating the spirit though
keeping within the letter of it? Is even the abject creature who
strikes his wife more abandoned than a man of the type of
Grandcourt in _Daniel Deronda_, whose insults are dealt with a
marble politeness, and who crushes his wife's sensibilities, not with
a vulgar blow but with the cold and calculating cruelty of a cynic?
When it comes to passing moral judgments and fixing blame, and
especially to measuring the degree of another's guilt, who of us is
good enough, who of us is pure enough, who of us is himself free
enough from wrong to exercise so terrible an office? Is not Lear
right, after all: ". . . .change places; and. . . .which is the justice,
which is the thief?"
It may be said in reply to these objections: First, that the judge
does not speak in his private capacity, but that he delivers the
judgment of mankind on the doer and the deed, serving as the
mouthpiece of the moral law, so far as it is incorporated in the
human law. We should select the highest characters available for
so exalted a duty, but freedom from even great human infirmity we
cannot expect to find. Again, it is not the judge's business to fix the
degree of moral guilt; that not even the best and wisest of men can
do. The inscrutable fact of the degree of moral guilt eludes all
human insight. Only omniscience could decide who is more guilty
relatively to opportunities, advantages, circumstances; who has
made the braver effort to escape wrongdoing; whether the admired
preacher, or the culprit on his way to the gallows; whether the
President in the White House or the wretch behind the bars. The
office of the judge is to pronounce that crime has been committed,
irrespective of the subtle question of the degree of guilt. Murder
has been done, property has been stolen, the sin and the sinner
wedded together. The office of the judge is to declare the fact of
that infelicitous union, and to pronounce the penalty according to
the law. And this, in particular. The object of the punishment
which the law pronounces is not vindictive chastisement of the
culprit. The object of punishment is purely reformatory. Only it
must not be forgotten that there can be no reformation without
penitence, and no penitence without self-abasement. And this
consists in confessing one's self guilty, admitting that the guilt has
become a part of one's being, and humbling one's pride to the
ground. The public sentence pronounced by the judge, the shame
which he fixes upon the culprit, has, then, for its object to pave the
way toward reformation, to break down the defenses which the
sophistry of wickedness sets up, to compel the man to see himself
as others see him, to force him to realize to the full the evil of his
present state. Not to blast him utterly, not to exclude him forever
from the kindly society of men, but to lead him into the way along
which--if he travel it--he may eventually return, though perhaps
only after many years, to human fellowship. If the verdict is
pronounced in any other spirit, it is false and inhuman. The
methods to be employed to bring about reformation must often be
severe and painful, and one of these methods is shock, shock sharp
and sudden enough to loosen the incrustations of evil habit,
and to shake a wicked nature down to its foundations. The
purpose of the trial of a criminal in a court of justice, and of the
verdict in which the trial culminates, is to supply such a shock, a
searching and terrible experience, yet salutary and indispensable in
order that better things may ensue.
From what has been said, it follows that the death penalty as a
punishment even for the worst crimes is morally untenable; for
either the culprit is really irredeemable, that is to say, he is an
irresponsible moral idiot, in which case an asylum for the insane is
the proper place for him; or he is not irredeemable, in
which case the chance of reformation should not be taken from
him by cutting off his life. The death penalty is the last lingering
vestige of the _Lex Talionis_, of the law which attempts to
equalize the penalty with the crime, a conception of justice which
in all other respects we have happily outgrown. It does not
necessarily follow that the immediate abolition of capital
punishment is expedient. It is not expedient in fact, because of the
condition of our prisons, and because of the abuses to which the
pardoning power of the State is subjected; because security is
lacking that the worst offenders, before ever they can be
reclaimed, may not be returned unrepentant into the bosom of
society, to prey upon it anew with impunity. But, then, we must
not defend the death penalty as such, but rather deplore and do our
utmost to change our political conditions, which make it still
unwise to abolish a form of punishment so barbarous and so
repugnant to the moral sense.
The step which follows the arrest and condemnation of the
evildoer is isolation, with a view to the formation of new habits. A
change of heart is the necessary pre-requisite of any permanent
change in conduct; but the change of heart, and the resolution to
turn over a new leaf to which it gives birth, must be gradually and
slowly worked out into a corresponding practice. The old body of
sin cannot be stripped off in a moment; the old encumbrance of
bad habits cannot be sloughed off like a serpent's coil. The new
spirit must incorporate itself slowly in new habits; and to this end
the delinquent must be aided in his efforts by a more or less
prolonged absence from the scene of his former temptations.
He must be placed in an entirely new and suitable environment,
and encouraging pressure must be exerted upon him to acquire
new habits of order, diligent application to work, obedience,
self-control. It is upon this idea that the moral propriety of
imprisonment and of prison discipline is based, whether the actual
treatment of prisoners be in accord with it or not.
And so we may pass on at once to the last and chief element in
the process of the reclamation of the evildoer, namely, forgiveness.
An angel's tongue, the wisdom and insight of the loftiest of the
sages, would be required to describe all the wealth of meaning
contained in the sublime spiritual process which we designate by
the word pardon. It is a process which affects equally both parties
to the act, the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. It
exalts both, transfigures both, indeed establishes a new tie of
wonderful tenderness and sublimity between them. The person
who forgives is a benefactor.
Is it a little thing, when a man is sunk in the slough of poverty,
denuded of all the decencies of life, harassed day and night by
grinding cares, knows not whither to turn to find shelter and food,
for some fellow human being, moved by pure human kindness, or
let us rather say moved by respect for the worth which he sees in
his perishing fellow-man, to come to the aid of the latter, to lift
him out of his distress, to place him on sun-lit levels, to put him on
his feet and give him a new chance, to open for him a new career
in which effort may meet with its reward? Such an act of human
helpfulness is not a little thing; the man who does it is rightly
esteemed a great benefactor. Or is it a little thing to save the
imperiled sick, to bring back from the brink of the grave a precious
life, already despaired of? This, too, surely is not a little thing,
and the good physician who accomplishes such a miracle is rightly
esteemed a benefactor to whom lifelong gratitude is due.
But there is a yet greater thing, a benefit, by the side of which even
these--great as they are--appear almost insignificant. To take a
man who is sinking in the moral slough and has no courage left to
rise out of it; to give him back his lost self-esteem, that jewel
without which health and wealth are of little avail; to put him in a
position once more to look his fellow-men straight in the eye; to
place him morally on the sun-lit levels; to put him morally on his
feet--this assuredly is the supreme benefit, and the man who
accomplishes this for another is the supreme benefactor. And a
note of exquisite moral beauty is added if the benefactor be the
same person whom the guilty man had injured. This is what is
meant by forgiveness. This is why forgiveness is so divine a thing.
This is the reason why, when an act of genuine forgiveness occurs,
"the music of the spheres" seems to become audible in our nether
world. And this is also the reason why we often see such a strange
kind of tie springing up between a person who has been chastised
and the one who has chastised him in the right spirit and then
forgiven him--a tie into which there enters shame for the wrong
done, gratitude for the unmerited good received, and a reverence
akin to idolatry toward the one upon whose faith in him the sinner
rebuilt his faith in himself.
There should be some organ of the State to exercise this office of
forgiveness toward criminals, this pardoning power in the finer
sense of the term. The prison warden, if he be a man of the right
stamp, sometimes exercises it. The Society for the Befriending of
Released Prisoners has here an appropriate function open to it;
also the employer who after due inquiry has the courage to dismiss
suspicion and to give work to the released prisoner.
The methods and principles which I have described in the case of
the criminal are used for illustration, not that I am interested today
in discussing the special problem of the criminal, but because
principles can best be exemplified in extreme cases. The same
methods, the same maxims should control punishment in general;
our dealings, for instance, with the misdeeds of which our own
children are guilty. Here, too, there should be by no means
unvarying gentleness and pleading, but when need arises the sharp
check, that evil may be instantaneously stopped. Here, too, there
should be the temporary disgrace, the clear presentation of the
magnitude of the fault, if it have magnitude, the humiliation that
calls forth penitence and good resolutions. Here, too, there should
be sedulous care, to work out the better habits. And all these steps
should be taken with a view to ultimate reconciliation, forgiveness,
and the holier bond between parent and child.
But now can we take one step further? Can we dispose our minds
and our hearts in the same fashion toward oppressors? I have in
mind, for instance, the hard proprietors of houses who pitilessly
wring the last penny from their tenants; the cruel taskmasters who
drive the workers, sometimes only children not yet full-grown,
twelve and fifteen hours a day; the unscrupulous exploiters on a
large scale, who raise the price of the people's food, and in their
eagerness for fabulous gain conspire by every corrupt means to
crush their less crafty or less shameless competitors. As we hate
wrong, must we not hate them? Shall we assail greed and
exploitation merely in the abstract? What effect will that have?
Which one of the oppressors will not hypocritically assent to such
abstract denunciation? If we seek to produce a change, must we
not proceed to more specific allegations and point the finger of
scorn at the offenders, saying as the Prophet Nathan said to King
David: "Thou art the man"? Is it not necessary to arouse the
popular anger against the oppressors and to encourage hatred
against the hateful?
Clearly the case is not the same as that of the criminal in the dock.
He stands there dishonored; the evil he has done has been brought
home to him; he is covered with the garment of shame. But those
others are invested--despite the evil they have done and are still
doing--with every outward symbol of success; they triumph
defiantly over the better moral sense of the community; they
inhabit, as it were, impregnable citadels; they have harvested
unholy gains which no one seems strong enough to take from
them; and the influence they wield in consequence of their power
to benefit or harm is immense. Is it a wonder, then, that such
oppressors are branded as monsters, and that the hoarse note of
some of the Hebrew psalms is sometimes to be heard re-echoing in
the cry of the social radicals of our time--Let vengeance be visited
upon the wicked; let the oppressors be destroyed from the face of
the earth!
But the logical and inevitable conclusion of the thought I have
developed to-day is, that we are bound to recognize the
indefeasible worth latent even in the cruel exploiter and the
merciless expropriator. I have already sufficiently indicated that the
spiritual view is consistent with severe and stringent treatment.
Checks there should be by the heavy hand of legislation laid upon
the arrogant evildoers. They should be stopped if possible in
mid-career. The oppressed, also, should oppose those who oppress
them. No one is worth his salt who is not willing to defend his
rights against those who would trample on them. So far from
ruling out conflict, I regard conflict as a weapon of progress--an
ethical weapon, if it be waged with the right intentions.
Furthermore, when speaking of oppression, I have in mind not
merely the cupidity of the few as it operates mercilessly upon the
many, but also the banded arrogance of the many as it sometimes
displays itself in contempt for the rights of the few. From
whichever side oppression proceeds, there should be resistance to
it; the check imposed by resistance is one of the means of
educating to new habits those who find themselves checked.
Individuals, and social classes, too, as history proves, learn to
respect the rights which they find in practice they cannot traverse.
First come the limits set to the aggression, and then the opening of
the eyes to perceive the justice of the limitation. But conflict is an
ethical weapon only if it is wielded like the knife in the surgeon's
hands. The knife wounds and hurts; the method is apparently cruel;
but the purpose is benevolent. So should the battle of social reform
be animated by concern not only for the oppressed, but also for the
oppressor. And such a motive does not exceed the capacity of
human nature, but, on the contrary, is the only motive which will
permanently satisfy human nature. Certain of the Socialists have
made it their deliberate policy for years to stir up hatred between
the poor and the rich, on the ground that hatred alone can
overcome the lethargy of the masses and arouse in them the
intensity of feeling necessary for conflict. On the contrary, hatred
engenders hatred on the opposite side, action provokes reaction.
As the individual can be uplifted in his life only by accepting the
spiritual motive, by trying to act always so as to recognize in
others and to make manifest the indefeasible worth of the human
soul, so the social classes can be uplifted only by acting on the
same spiritual motive. Despite the efforts of a hundred years, the
real progress that has been achieved in ameliorating the relations
between the social classes at the present day is slight, and
sometimes one is impelled to doubt whether there has been any
progress at all. The egotism of one side is met by the egotism of
the other side. But appeals to mass egotism will no more elevate
mankind, than appeals to individual egotism. Appeals to
sympathy also will not permanently help. Only the highest motive
of all can furnish the power needed to accomplish the miracle of
social transformation; only that conflict which is waged for the
purpose not of striking down the oppressor and rescuing his
victim, but for the rescue of both the victim and the oppressor, will
attain its end.
The oppressor may be regarded as a man who has consented so to
degrade himself as to become for the time being a heartless
automaton, ruthlessly working for gain, a being like one of those
terrible ogres of the popular mythology who feed on human flesh.
But he is not a mere automaton or ogre. There is a better side to
his nature, as we often discover, to our amazement, when we learn
about the facts of his private life. These private virtues do not
indeed condone his social sins--far from it--but they indicate that
there exists a better side. If that side could be made victorious, if
conditions could be shaped so as to starve out the worse nature
and bring to the fore the better nature in the oppressor as well as in
the oppressed, the problem would be advanced toward a solution.
There is a story told of two brothers, sons of the same father, who
grew up in the same home and were deeply attached to each other.
It happened that the older wandered away and fell into the power
of an evil magician, who changed him into a ravening wolf. The
younger mourned his loss, and treasured in his heart the image of
the brother as he had been in the days before the wicked spell fell
upon him. Impelled by his longing, he at last went out into the
world to find his brother, and if possible to redeem him. One day
as he passed through a lonely forest, a hungry wolf set upon him.
The horrid, brutal face was near to his, the hot breath breathed
upon him, and the fierce eyes flamed into his own. But by the
might of his love, the younger brother was able to detect beneath
the wolfish disguise the faint outlines of the brother whom he had
long ago lost, and by the strength of his gaze, which saw only the
brother and refused to see the wolf, he was able to give shape and
substance to that faint outline. The outer frame of brutishness
gradually melted away, and the human brother was restored to his
senses and to his home. This is a parable of the spiritual attitude
toward oppressors, toward those who oppress the people in
public, as well as toward those who oppress us in our private lives.
We must liberate them from the brutal frame in which they are
inclosed; we must give them back their human shape!