There is a general tendency to attribute the popular distrust of the
death penalty to the “softening” effect of civilization. One might
accept that view without really agreeing with its expounder; for it is
the human heart which the expounder believes to have been softened,
whereas there is reason to think that the softening process has
involved the human head.
As a matter of fact, gentlemen experiencing an inhospitality to the
death penalty (including those on the gallows) should not felicitate
themselves; their feeling is due to quite other causes. It is mostly a
heritage of unreason from the dark ages when in all Europe laws were
made and enforced, with no great scruples of conscience, by conquerors
and the descendants of conquerors alien in blood, language and manners.
Between these and the masses of the original inhabitants there was no
love lost. The peasantry hated their foreign oppressors with a silent
antipathy which, like a covered fire, burned with a sullen and more
lasting fervor for lack of vent. Hatred of the oppressor embraced
hatred of all his works and ways, his laws included, and from hatred of
particular laws to hatred of all law the transition was easy, natural
and, human nature being what it is, inevitable.
So there is a distinctly traceable connection between wars of conquest
and sympathy with crime—between the subjugation of races and their
disrespect of law. Here we find the true fountain and origin of
anarchism. A country “occupied” implies a people imbruted. It may some
time “assimilate” with its conquerors, bringing to the new compound, as
in the instance of the Anglo-Saxon combination with the Norman-French,
some of the sturdiest virtues of the new national life; but along with
these it will surely bring servile vices acquired during the period
of inharmony. There is no doubt that much of whatever turbulence and
lawlessness distinguish the American people from the more orderly
communities across the sea is the work of William the Conqueror and his
men-at-arms. The evil that they did lives after them in the congenial
conditions supplied by a republic.
What manner of men the Anglo-Saxons became under Norman dominion before
the moral renascence is shown in all the chronicles of the time. A
Roman historian has described the Saxon of the period as a naked brute,
who lay all day by his fireside sluggish and dirty, always eating and
drinking. Even after the assimilation was nearly complete—no longer
ago than “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” who, by the way,
used to thwack her courtiers on the mazzard when they displeased
her—the homogeneous race was a lawless lot. Speaking of their fondness
for violent bodily exercise and their inaccessibility to the softer
sentiments, Taine says:
This is why man, who for three centuries had been a domestic
animal, was still almost a savage beast, and the force of his
muscles and the strength of his nerves increased the boldness
and energy of his passions. Look at these uncultivated men, men
of the people, how suddenly the blood warms and rises to their
faces; their fists double, their lips press together and their
vigorous bodies rush at once into action. The courtiers of that
age were like our men of the people. They had the same taste
for the exercise of their limbs, the same indifference to the
inclemencies of the weather, the same coarseness of language, the
same undisguised sensuality.
Before he grew too fat, Henry VIII was so fond of wrestling that he
took a fall out of Francis I on the field of the Cloth of Gold.
“That,” says the historian of English literature, “is how a common
soldier or a bricklayer nowadays tries a new comrade. In fact,
they regarded gross jests and brutal buffooneries as amusements,
as soldiers and bricklayers do now. * * * They thought insults
and obscenity a joke. They were foul-mouthed, they listened to
Rabelais’ words undiluted, and delighted in conversation that
would revolt us. They had no respect for humanity; the rules of
proprieties and the habits of good breeding began only in the time
of Louis XIV, and by imitation of the French.”
Such were “our sturdy Anglo-Saxon ancestors” from whom we inherit our
no good opinion of the law and our selfish indisposition to the penalty
of death.