a man lives virtuously he must be rewarded. If a man lives virtuously
his reward is in Heaven--that is to say, he takes his chance. His
virtue may assist or may hinder his worldly advancement; but we have
not yet committed ourselves to the conviction that social order will
necessarily go to pieces if virtue is not rewarded. It will only go to
pieces if crime is not punished. Society can reconcile itself to the
one omission; but it cannot reconcile itself to the other.
This inequality of interest in retribution and reward is based perhaps
upon the calculation that while you look after the crimes, the virtues
will look after themselves; and that the virtues will not--for lack
of Birthday Honours--rebel against the society in which they find
themselves.
And really, there is something in it. Virtue is already self-governing;
vice is not. The virtuous and humane part of a man--his will to unite
and co-operate with others for social development and service--inclines
him to accept and make the best of the conditions of life, to take the
rough with the smooth, the hindrances with the aids, the good with the
evil: not, indeed, passively, or without some effort to get rid of bad
smells, bad tastes, bad laws, bad governments--but with a definite
consciousness that in operating against these he is operating not for
his own single benefit, but for the benefit of the community. And that
being so, he can be left, unrecompensed and unrewarded, to face a very
considerable amount of discomfort, adversity, and even injustice,
without becoming either a rebel or a criminal. Although if governed
unintelligently enough, or wickedly enough, he may be turned into both.
But with the criminal it is not so. His social sense is more
rudimentary; and when he finds himself up against adverse and perhaps
unjust conditions, he seeks a solution satisfactory to himself alone.
And I suppose the main idea of the use of punishment (apart from the
vengeful pleasure it gives to those who inflict it) is that it takes
the satisfaction out of him again, making him feel that, in a highly
organised community, the individual solution has uncomfortable
results. And Society’s calculation, in thus punishing him, is (or has
been hitherto) that it is a less troublesome and expensive way of
making him cease to be a nuisance, than educating him, or employing
him, or reforming the social conditions which have produced him.
So long as we believe that Society is right in that calculation, so
long, I suppose, shall we continue to advocate punishment; but when
we come to believe that Society is wrong, we shall begin to advocate
education, employment, social reform, and, above all, human sympathy
and understanding as a substitute; with the idea that they may
gradually do away with the necessity for punishment.
But pending that consummation so devoutly to be wished, most of us will
probably continue to believe that punishment is just and right; and
will find it very difficult to think of Society, and of ourselves--as
all equally criminal along with the individual whom our social contempt
and neglect have de-socialised and made a fit recipient for punitive
treatment.
The temptation to think that punishment is just and right has been
with us from time immemorial; it is probably arboreal, certainly
neolithic; and therefore, to our atavistic instincts, it is supremely
sacred. We have got it firmly into our heads that punishment is a
superior ordering of consequences. And as the law of cause and effect
which we see operating in nature is the basis of our moral sense, we
have fallen to the confused notion that punishment is the same. But
as a matter of fact the two are entirely different. The law of cause
and effect stands for natural consequences; the law of punishment
substitutes artificial consequences; and we fly to punishment largely
as an escape from the results of our age-long indifference to natural
consequences. Having produced the criminal we set to work to destroy
his self-respect, as a short cut to the preservation of our own.
That may sound a puzzling statement; but the more we accentuate the
difference between the criminal and ourselves--the more, superficially,
are we able to get rid of our sense of brotherhood and responsibility.
And so, when bishops go on to the platform to advocate the flogging
of men who live on the earnings of prostitutes, it helps them to
forget that they also are living on the earnings of prostitutes, and
are by their support of a capitalist system involving sweated labour
and degraded housing conditions--neatly and efficaciously driving
the prostitute into the hands of the male “bully”--whom they then
flog for extracting his profit from a damaged article which, in the
public market of supply and demand, they have already wrung dry. The
very monstrousness of the proposed penalty helps us to forget that
we are all links in the same chain of circumstances. In the “bully”
the degrading brutality of the system finally emerges and becomes
patent; just as in war the degrading brutality of our peace system
finally emerges. Then we point to it with horror and cry that we are
peace-lovers! So we are; we have loved peace at a price which we would
not exceed--we ran it on sweated conditions; and we pay for it in war.
For there exist, in every nation, sources of wealth, sufficient--if
equitably distributed and constructively applied for the good of
all--to allay that economic unrest which is the main incentive by
which modern nations are led into war. But in every country alike
there are interests which refuse to pay that price, and which will, if
threatened, precipitate their country into war rather than be held at
a ransom which would merely readjust wealth more equitably to the true
sources of its production.
War has come to us--not as a punishment divinely imposed--(a splendid
old lady of ninety told me the other day that the war was God’s
visitation upon us for our divorces and for having given votes to
women)--war has come upon us, not as a punishment for these offences
against Taboo, but as a natural consequence of our social peace
conditions. And at present, in the mentality of nations, punishment
(not of the system, but of the criminal act which has finally emerged
from it to horrify us) is the only remedy.
And so punishment still appears to us as the very bed of justice--the
foundation stone of morality. If you do not insist on it, social order
will go to pieces. And as we have attempted scarcely any criminal
reform without punishment--and none till the day before yesterday--the
contention is accepted as true for lack of witnesses against it.
The standpoint toward human nature of our generally accepted “moral
code” is that of a devout believer in corporal punishment--of that
kind of parent who says: “I have to flog my boy because he is so
untruthful.” And the idea that the untruthfulness is the product of the
corporal punishment never enters the parental mind.
But this vengeful exercise of parental authority is only a secondary
symptom of belief in a vengeful order of Creation--of a God whose
method it was to vindicate the moral law, not by bringing home to
ill-doers through natural consequences the defects of certain courses
of conduct, but by expressing His moral indignation in exemplary
punishments of an arbitrary kind--generally of a miraculous character.
When man first conceived of God, he conceived of Him as a sort of Dr.
Busby--one in whose mind the Rod was the beginning and end of wisdom;
and the Rod of Heaven operated by intervention, over and above the
operations of Nature--the law of cause and effect. Natural consequences
did not sufficiently vindicate divine justice. A belief in miraculous
and vengeful intervention and a belief in “exemplary” legal punishment
go together; and will, I believe, die together.
A great deal of Old Testament teaching is merely an elaborate extension
of _Punch’s_ picture of the British workman holding a brick’s end over
an unfortunate batrachian, and saying, “I’ll l’arn ye to be a toad!”
And all he succeeds in doing is producing a dead toad instead of a live
one; the species itself remaining entirely unaltered.
That is a parable of the doings of our theologians, since theology was
invented for the Fall of Man. And if humans came to the conclusion that
that was the mind of God, it is no wonder that they imitated Him, and
do so to this day.
We must believe in punishment as the proper reward of crime--we must
even believe in unreformative punishment as the proper reward of crime,
if we believe in a Hell to which lost souls are relegated against their
will, and there kept with no hope whatever of cure or betterment from
the process. And that is what the whole of Christendom believed about
Hell when Christians really did believe in it.
Unreformative punishment upon earth was a necessary consequence of that
belief; and, therefore, belief in punishment for the sake of punishment
became universal.
And over against it--quite unregarded--stood the new gospel of
humanity--“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you and
persecute you.” And then the reason, the key to it all:--“That ye may
be children of your Father which is in Heaven, for He maketh His sun to
rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on
the unjust. Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in
Heaven is perfect.”
The Sermon on the Mount, which threw over the doctrine of punishment
on earth, threw over with equal emphasis the doctrine of punishment in
Heaven--of any arbitrary or miraculous intervention for the betterment
(to moral ends) of the law of natural consequences.
“Be ye the children of Creation!” is the real human solution--not by
harking back (as opponents would pretend) to the savagery of a lower
species, but by accepting the spiritualising impulse of evolutionary
forces--which have brought us to this great development from the
mentality of the lower animal world--the knowledge that we are all part
of one whole.
And it is on that recognition of an underlying unity (from which we
are inseparable) that the great natural revolution of our ideas about
crime and punishment must be brought about. If we cling to the violent
and the arbitrary, and the separative solution (of which miraculous
retribution is the corollary) we are in the Dark Ages still.
It must have been the experience of many whose work has taken them
not only into slums but into prisons and police-courts, that the
oppressive sense of Evil triumphant, strong and proud of itself, has
weighed more heavily upon them in the prison and in the police-court
than in the slum; for the slum only represents the neglect of Society,
but the administration of our penal code represents its stereotyped
preoccupation (with sympathy and understanding almost entirely
eliminated) on a problem which nothing but sympathy and understanding
will ever solve. There Society is in its trenches fighting against the
human nature which it first violates and then fears.
We, law-makers and law-abiders, are in league with--and are dependent
for our material prosperity and protection upon--a system which is very
nearly as bad as the crimes we denounce. And until we have made our
system very much more beautiful, very much better, and more convincing
to the criminal and the revolutionarist--it is only by fear and a
punitive code that we can keep it going.
It is not possible to maintain such adjuncts to our social system
as profiteering, exploitation, class privilege, wage-slavery,
race-subjection, international jealousy, without a penal code and its
logical outcome, war. If we want to get rid of the one we must have
a whole mind to get rid of the others too. Do not let us pretend to
separate them, for we cannot. Not only does the attempt produce weak
practical results--it produces also a false mind.
The attempt to separate one thing from another, one human being from
another, is at the root of our belief in punishment. Punishment helps
to separate, helps to make us feel separate; it does not unite.
An English judge declared quite recently that the main object of
punishment was not to reform the criminal but to protect society. And
so long as that is true, the criminal is just as conscious as we are
that the discipline laid on him is the expression of a divided standard
of morality, knowing perfectly well that we in like circumstances
should not think such punishment good for ourselves or our children.
For is it not true that wherever a local or group interest comes to
be established, there the members of that group cease to believe that
punishment from any outside power or authority is good for them?
Take the family--those of you who believe in punishment--those who
profess to be law-abiding; one of its members commits a theft. Is he
handed over to the police to be dealt with according to law? Not at
all. On the contrary, everything is done to enable him to escape the
punishment. We don’t believe in legal punishment when it comes to
our own circle. And we only believe in legal punishment for others,
because, loving and understanding them less, we are unwilling to take
as much trouble about them.
And that same vicious principle of belief in punishment only for
others mounts up and up through every communal interest that has
established itself in our midst on a unity of feeling closer than that
which obtains generally. Every class-interest, every trade-interest,
every party-interest that stands combined for its own benefit does
all it can to evade the punishment of its members by the larger and
more impersonal authority of the State. Scandals are hushed up in the
police; scandals are hushed up in the Army; scandals are hushed up in
the Cabinet; everything possible is done to prevent our penal code
from acting equally on the vested interests in which we specially are
concerned.
And yet we say that we believe in punishment!
But if we do honestly believe in punishment, ought we not then to
insist not merely that the administration of our law-courts should
be impartial and judicial, but that the source and promotion of our
State-prosecutions should be impartial also? Probably most unreflecting
people think that they are. But again and again the Government, when
it chooses or refuses to put the law into motion and prosecute, though
nominally the accuser, is really the accused, using its powers for the
saving of its own skin, to keep the case out of court--sometimes even
in spite of the protests of the magistracy itself. Again and again the
judicial scales have been fraudulently weighted--not in court but out
of it by the interests of party government.
Let us take a rather notorious instance where this was done.
Within quite recent times, two men have conspired--the one to raise an
army of rebellion if Home Rule were imposed on Ulster; the other to
raise an army of rebellion if conscription were imposed on Ireland.
The crime in each case was precisely the same; but the punishment was
different. The one--the more recent--was sent to prison for it without
trial. The other, equally without trial, was elevated to Cabinet rank.
Now, each of these men, in conspiring to break the law, did probably
what he conscientiously thought to be right under the circumstances.
That we can believe. But it is very difficult to believe that the
Government (when, with the connivance of Parliament, it punished the
same offence so differently) thought that it was doing right--the equal
and the just thing in each case. It was only doing the convenient
thing to cover its own blunders. And the question is, therefore,
whether--morally--the Government was not the real criminal.
But if we ask whether it is going to be punished for it, the answer
is--probably not.
It is not my point to urge that the Government should be punished, but
only to show how--as administered to-day--punishment is an arbitrary
and artificial device, partially applied or not, according to the
prosecutor’s political convenience.
The consequence--the logical consequence of this corrupt inequality
of State-prosecution, is that a Government which does such things is
misliked and distrusted by men of honest character--and so weakens its
hold on the more judicious minds of the community--and eventually, one
may hope, its power over the country’s policy.
One might point further to another instance. The Society of Friends,
by its official committee, recently published, without submitting it
to the Censor, a pamphlet called _A Challenge to Militarism_. For
that corporate act of a committee of twenty--all equally guilty--the
Government (to avoid too great a scandal) selected two members for
prosecution, and got them sent to prison for six and for three months.
About a fortnight later another challenge to militarism, a pamphlet
entitled _A League of Nations_, was published, without being submitted
to the Censor, by Lord Grey of Falloden; and he has not been sent to
prison for it.
Now if we believed in punishment, we should want the Government
punished for these acts of corrupt favouritism in State-prosecution.
But if we believe in natural consequences--those which I have already
indicated--we shall confidently anticipate that in the end (the real
end) divine justice will be done; and that these ephemeral misdoings
will eventually help the spirit of man to a better and larger
understanding of the follies which are committed when men substitute
the Will to Power for the Will to Love.
And if we can--as we are going to--if we can leave injustice when done
in conspicuous high places to the natural and logical consequences,
without applying the penal code, why cannot we trust natural
consequences a very great deal more, where smaller and more humble
misdemeanours are concerned, and give to those natural consequences a
greater unity of effect by irradiating them with the true spirit of
man--love, joy, gentleness, peace, against which there is no law?
One of the reasons why we dare not be humane and curative instead of
punitive to our criminals lies in the fact that the standard of life
in which we have allowed honest and hard-working millions to subsist
outside our prisons, has been so inhuman and degraded that if we made
our prisons really humane, really curative, they would be a reward
instead of a punishment.
We dare not offer so beautiful a temptation.
And so it is separation again--the separation of class from class,
of rich from poor, which makes impossible the standardising of our
prisons from living tombs into genuine reformatories and sanatoria.
If we had not separated ourselves in our national life from a sense
of responsibility for the poverty and misery around us, we should not
be driven into so separate a treatment of our criminals. We cannot
afford to humanise our prisons, while we will not afford to humanise
our slums. Again and again, when you appeal for real prison reform, the
obstructive argument arises: “Why should we take so much trouble for
the criminal, when hundreds of thousands of the honest struggling poor
are so much worse off?”
But we have to take trouble anyhow; and the more unintelligently we
take trouble the greater is likely to be the cost of our criminals per
head to the State. In New York State, America, where Mr. Mott Osborne
has been trying to establish the principle of self-government among
the prisoners of Sing-Sing, there was actually a danger that (under an
extension of the system) the prisons might become self-supporting. And
at once trade interests did everything they could to get it condemned;
the contractors were afraid of losing their State contracts.
That is just one little glimpse of what we are up against where vested
interests are concerned--interests so strongly represented in the
legislatures even of “free nations.” But we are up against something
much bigger than that. We are up against a moral reluctance of the
whole community to pronounce the word “Brother.” For if the State is
going to show a really understanding mind toward the criminal, it has
got to show it just as much to the whole social problem of poverty and
disease. And that is going to cost the State more money than it is
prepared to spend on anything--except on War.
Crime is sometimes a very shameful thing. But is not the record of the
way powerful States have dealt with crime in the past more uniformly
shameful even than crime itself? Has not that record stood out as a
ghastly blind spot in the conscience of Christian Society?
People of conservative mind are so extraordinarily ready to make
excuses for organised Society which they will not make for the
individual. “That was a cruel age,” they will say, when you recall the
judicial horrors perpetrated against human nature three hundred, two
hundred, one hundred years ago; it was tradition, it was custom. But
there were nations, professing Christianity--a doctrine having exactly
the same basis then as now--the same creed, the same gospel, the same
divine life of compassion and mercy exemplary of what Heaven required
in the conduct of man to man; and there were rulers and administrators
with minds and power of reason just as capable as our own--giants
of intellect some of them--who, with all their profession of
Christianity--interpreting it to the supposed needs of the State--have
left to us this ghastly record of a penal code worse than the crimes
it was set to remedy. That penal code--the obsequious servant of
State-authority--stood hundreds of years behind the average individual
conscience of the community. And yet in moral authority we exalt it
above the individual! In age after age the conscience, the living
conscience of this country went to prison and to execution to bring
it just a little more up-to-date. Revolting juries refused to convict
because of its savageries; and still it moved slowly and reluctantly,
cruel in its fear of the human nature it did not understand.
Less than a century and a half ago a girl of fourteen was sentenced
in this country to be burned alive for counterfeit coining; only
eighty-five years ago a boy of nine was sentenced to death for breaking
a pane of glass and stealing two pence. The sentences were not carried
out, but they were pronounced. I suppose it was still considered
“exemplary” to remind the criminal classes of what powers the law had
over them.
Now let us imagine that some individual caught a boy indulging in petty
theft; and to punish him--in hot blood perhaps--took him and hung him
up by the neck till he was dead. Should we not be inclined to say that
so rabid a wild beast must be exterminated from the face of the earth,
lest he should have descendants like himself?
Yet that is what our own Courts of Justice--the authorised instrument
of the people of England--were doing in cold blood to young boys in
the time of Charles Lamb. They had not the excuse of national danger,
or war; yet we don’t think that our ancestors ought to have been
abolished off the face of the earth for doing it, or for allowing it.
We manage to forgive them, because after all they were--our ancestors.
When it comes to a State-act, the individual shares the responsibility
with so many that he is able to shift it from his conscience.
But in that process what had the State done to itself? In so dealing
with the criminal--it had become a criminal, making of itself a moral
monstrosity--all the more foul because in the perpetration of such acts
it declared that it was doing no wrong!
How, one may ask, was it possible for such penalties as these, and
others even more savage than these, to become embedded in the penal
code of a civilised and a Christian State?