* Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.
_Question_. Have you read Chief Justice Comegys' compliments to you
before the Delaware grand jury?
_Answer._ Yes, I have read his charge, in which he relies upon the law
passed in 1740. After reading his charge it seemed to me as though he
had died about the date of the law, had risen from the dead, and had
gone right on where he had left off. I presume he is a good man, but
compared with other men, is something like his State when compared with
other States.
A great many people will probably regard the charge of Judge Comegys
as unchristian, but I do not. I consider that the law of Delaware is in
exact accord with the Bible, and that the pillory, the whip-ping-post,
and the suppression of free speech are the natural fruit of the Old and
New Testament.
Delaware is right. Christianity can not succeed, can not exist, without
the protection of law. Take from orthodox Christianity the protection
of law, and all church property would be taxed like other property. The
Sabbath would be no longer a day devoted to superstition. Everyone
could express his honest thought upon every possible subject. Everyone,
notwithstanding his belief, could testify in a court of justice. In
other words, honesty would be on an equality with hypocrisy.
Science would stand on a level, so far as the law is concerned, with
superstition. Whenever this happens the end of orthodox Christianity
will be near.
By Christianity I do not mean charity, mercy, kindness, forgiveness. I
mean no natural virtue, because all the natural virtues existed and had
been practiced by hundreds and thousands of millions before Christ was
born. There certainly were some good men even in the days of Christ in
Jerusalem, before his death.
By Christianity I mean the ideas of redemption, atonement, a good man
dying for a bad man, and the bad man getting a receipt in full. By
Christianity I mean that system that insists that in the next world a
few will be forever happy, while the many will be eternally miserable.
Christianity, as I have explained it, must be protected, guarded, and
sustained by law. It was founded by the sword that is to say, by physical
force,--and must be preserved by like means.
In many of the States of the Union an infidel is not allowed to testify.
In the State of Delaware, if Alexander von Humboldt were living, he
could not be a witness, although he had more brains than the State of
Delaware has ever produced, or is likely to produce as long as the laws
of 1740 remain in force. Such men as Huxley, Tyndall and Haeckel could
be fined and imprisoned in the State of Delaware, and, in fact, in many
States of this Union.
Christianity, in order to defend itself, puts the brand of infamy on
the brow of honesty. Christianity marks with a letter "C," standing for
"convict" every brain that is great enough to discover the frauds. I
have no doubt that Judge Comegys is a good and sincere Christian. I
believe that he, in his charge, gives an exact reflection of the Jewish
Jehovah. I believe that every word he said was in exact accord with
the spirit of orthodox Christianity. Against this man personally I have
nothing to say. I know nothing of his character except as I gather it
from this charge, and after reading the charge I am forced simply to
say, Judge Comegys is a Christian.
It seems, however, that the grand jury dared to take no action,
notwithstanding they had been counseled to do so by the Judge. Although
the Judge had quoted to them the words of George I. of blessed memory;
although he had quoted to them the words of Lord Mansfield, who became
a Judge simply because of his hatred of the English colonists, simply
because he despised liberty in the new world; notwithstanding the fact
that I could have been punished with insult, with imprisonment, and with
stripes, and with every form of degradation; notwithstanding that only a
few years ago I could have been branded upon the forehead, bored through
the tongue, maimed and disfigured, still, such has been the advance even
in the State of Delaware, owing, it may be, in great part to the one
lecture delivered by me, that the grand jury absolutely refused to
indict me.
The grand jury satisfied themselves and their consciences simply by
making a report in which they declared that my lecture had "no parallel
in the habits of respectable vagabondism" that I was "an arch-blasphemer
and reviler of God and religion," and recommended that should I ever
attempt to lecture again I should be taught that in Delaware blasphemy
is a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment. I have no doubt that
every member of the grand jury signing this report was entirely honest;
that he acted in exact accord with what he understood to be the demand
of the Christian religion. I must admit that for Christians, the report
is exceedingly mild and gentle.
I have now in the house, letters that passed between certain bishops in
the fifteenth century, in which they discussed the propriety of cutting
out the tongues of heretics before they were burned. Some of the bishops
were in favor of and some against it. One argument for cutting out their
tongues which seemed to have settled the question was, that unless the
tongues of heretics were cut out they might scandalize the gentlemen
who were burning them, by blasphemous remarks during the fire. I would
commend these letters to Judge Comegys and the members of the grand
jury.
I want it distinctly understood that I have nothing against Judge
Comegys or the grand jury. They act as 'most anybody would, raised in
Delaware, in the shadow of the whipping-post and the pillory. We
must remember that Delaware was a slave State; that the Bible
became extremely dear to the people because it upheld that peculiar
institution. We must remember that the Bible was the block on which
mother and child stood for sale when they were separated by the
Christians of Delaware. The Bible was regarded as the title-pages to
slavery, and as the book of all books that gave the right to masters to
whip mothers and to sell children.
There are many offences now for which the punishment is whipping and
standing in the pillory; where persons are convicted of certain crimes
and sent to the penitentiary, and upon being discharged from the
penitentiary are furnished by the State with a dark jacket plainly
marked on the back with a large Roman "C," the letter to be of a light
color. This they are to wear for six months after being discharged,
and if they are found at any time without the dark jacket and the
illuminated "C" they are to be punished with twenty lashes upon the bare
back. The object, I presume, of this law, is to drive from the State all
the discharged convicts for the benefit of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and
Maryland--that is to say, other Christian communities. A cruel people
make cruel laws.
The objection I have to the whipping-post is that it is a punishment
which cannot be inflicted by a gentleman. The person who administers the
punishment must, of necessity, be fully as degraded as the person who
receives it. I am opposed to any kind of punishment that cannot be
administered by a gentleman. I am opposed to corporal punishment
everywhere. It should be taken from the asylums and penitentiaries, and
any man who would apply the lash to the naked back of another is beneath
the contempt of honest people.
_Question_. Have you seen that Henry Bergh has introduced in the New
York Legislature a bill providing for whipping as a punishment for
wife-beating?
_Answer._ The objection I have mentioned is fatal to Mr. Bergh's bill.
He will be able to get persons to beat wife-beaters, who, under the
same circumstances, would be wife-beaters themselves. If they are not
wife-beaters when they commence the business of beating others, they
soon will be. I think that wife-beating in great cities could be stopped
by putting all the wife-beaters at work at some government employment,
the value of the work, however, to go to the wives and children. The
trouble now is that most of the wife-beating is among the extremely
poor, so that the wife by informing against her husband, takes the last
crust out of her own mouth. If you substitute whipping or flogging for
the prison here, you will in the first place prevent thousands of wives
from informing, and in many cases, where the wife would inform, she
would afterward be murdered by the flogged brute. This brute would
naturally resort to the same means to reform his wife that the State
had resorted to for the purpose of reforming him. Flogging would beget
flogging. Mr. Bergh is a man of great kindness of heart. When he reads
that a wife has been beaten, he says the husband deserves to be beaten
himself. But if Mr. Bergh was to be the executioner, I imagine you could
not prove by the back of the man that the punishment had been inflicted.
Another good remedy for wife-beating is the abolition of the Catholic
Church. We should also do away with the idea that a marriage is a
sacrament, and that there is any God who is rendered happy by seeing a
husband and wife live together, although the husband gets most of his
earthly enjoyment from whipping his wife. No woman should live with
a man a moment after he has struck her. Just as the idea of liberty
enlarges, confidence in the whip and fist, in the kick and blow, will
diminish. Delaware occupies toward freethinkers precisely the same
position that a wife-beater does toward the wife. Delaware knows that
there are no reasons sufficient to uphold Christianity, consequently
these reasons are supplemented with the pillory and the whipping-post.
The whipping-post is considered one of God's arguments, and the pillory
is a kind of moral suasion, the use of which fills heaven with a kind
of holy and serene delight. I am opposed to the religion of brute force,
but all these frightful things have grown principally out of a belief in
eternal punishment and out of the further idea that a certain belief is
necessary to avoid eternal pain.
If Christianity is right, Delaware is right. If God will damn every body
forever simply for being intellectually honest, surely he ought to
allow the good people of Delaware to imprison the same gentleman for two
months. Of course there are thousands and thousands of good people in
Delaware, people who have been in other States, people who have listened
to Republican speeches, people who have read the works of scientists,
who hold the laws of 1740 in utter abhorrence; people who pity Judge
Comegys and who have a kind of sympathy for the grand jury.
You will see that at the last election Delaware lacked only six or seven
hundred of being a civilized State, and probably in 1884 will stand
redeemed and regenerated, with the laws of 1740 expunged from the
statute book. Delaware has not had the best of opportunities. You must
remember that it is next to New Jersey, which is quite an obstacle
in the path of progress. It is just beyond Maryland, which is another
obstacle. I heard the other day that God originally made oysters with
legs, and afterward took them off, knowing that the people of Delaware
would starve to death before they would run to catch anything. Judge
Comegys is the last judge who will make such a charge in the United
States. He has immortalized himself as the last mile-stone on that road.
He is the last of his race. No more can be born. Outside of this he
probably was a very clever man, and it may be, he does not believe
a word he utters. The probability is that he has underestimated the
intelligence of the people of Delaware. I am afraid to think that he is
entirely honest, for fear that I may underestimate him intellectually,
and overestimate him morally. Nothing could tempt me to do this man
injustice, though I could hardly add to the injury he has done himself.
He has called attention to laws that ought to be repealed, and to
lectures that ought to be repeated. I feel in my heart that he has done
me a great service, second only to that for which I am indebted to the
grand jury. Had the Judge known me personally he probably would have
said nothing. Should I have the misfortune to be arrested in his State
and sentenced to two months of solitary confinement, the Judge having
become acquainted with me during the trial, would probably insist on
spending most of his time in my cell. At the end of the two months he
would, I think, lay himself liable to the charge of blasphemy, providing
he had honor enough to express his honest thought. After all, it is
all a question of honesty. Every man is right. I cannot convince myself
there is any God who will ever damn a man for having been honest. This
gives me a certain hope for the Judge and the grand jury.
For two or three days I have been thinking what joy there must have been
in heaven when Jehovah heard that Delaware was on his side, and remarked
to the angels in the language of the late Adjt. Gen. Thomas: "The eyes
of all Delaware are upon you."