that the doctrine of unreformative punishment, as expressive of the
Justice of God, was part of its religion; and secondly, that the State
based itself then, as now, on the Will to Power, and not on the Will
to Love. And seeking its safety in terms of power it perpetrated these
atrocities. From those two premises the results were only natural.
Are we going to salve our consciences to-day by mere degrees of
comparison, by saying: “We are not so bad as that now”? Perhaps we are
not so bad; but the basis on which we continue to act has not altered.
The Will to Power (for which the State still stands) must always lag
behind the Will to Love in its understanding of human nature. And
while it lags behind the penal code of the State will always be a drag
upon the social conscience.
Now so far we have been considering this doctrine of punishment in
relation to the criminal section of society--force and punitive
treatment being necessary, we say, for the discipline and control of
the waste products of our civilisation. But in the whole body politic
what does it all come to? What type of mind is finally evolved by the
State which so deals with its human material? What is the final moral
aspect of the State itself?
Examine that question from the international point of view. Why is
every State armed? Because every State, when all is said and done, is
a potential criminal whom other States cannot trust. And though these
States look down upon their criminals, they are proud of themselves.
We are grouped to-day, many States together, in armed alliance for what
(when we took up arms) we believed to be a great and a just cause; and
while we are so grouped we speak well of our Allies. But the groupings
of to-day are not the groupings of yesterday; and the international
spectacle which we have presented age after age has been simply this:
that no nation could trust any other nation to behave morally, justly,
humanely, and for the good of the whole, where single self-interest was
concerned.
So like to its own criminals did each nation remain, that all the
others had ever to keep their instruments of punishment ready to hand
in case of need.
Is not that an extraordinary commentary on the law of punishment; that
not merely does it fail to do away with the criminal within its own
jurisdiction, but reproduces his likeness in all the high places of
the world--giving him his justification by showing him that, where
community of interest ends, States are no other and no better than he?
We all agree that war is a very horrible thing. But at one point it has
a moral value which is not shared so obviously by other penal codes; a
value which people are coming more and more to recognise to-day, and
which will--more than anything else perhaps--help to put an end to war.
For when you seek to punish wrong by going to war, then you yourself
have to share the punishment. Innocent and guilty alike must agonise
and suffer and die. To inflict that punishment you must choose out your
bravest and your best, and send them to share equally with those you
would punish the sentence of suffering and death.
All punishment, inflicted by penal codes, really comes back to
the community; but only in war do we see it shared: actively and
voluntarily by some, passively and unavoidably by others. And perhaps
it is that more than anything else which will eventually persuade
civilised man that war is intolerable--that he cannot punish without
sharing the punishment.
It may sound fantastic to suggest that a like condition should be
definitely attached to our civil and penal system, in order to bring
home to us that all punishment is shared, that what we manufacture in
our prisons becomes a staple commodity.
But I can think of no device that would so quickly and effectively get
rid of that separation of interest which punishment seems to establish.
Imagine that for every prisoner sentenced, a lot fell on someone
else, calling upon him or her to go and share in that demonstration
of society’s failure to produce only good citizens. Imagine the Prime
Minister, about to make an important statement in the House of Commons,
called suddenly by lot to share the incarceration of a defender of the
liberty of the press or of a robber of hen-roosts! Should we have to
wait a month--a week--to have our prisons transformed into places where
human nature was no longer thrown to waste, with its energies cut off
from sane employment and development? Would it not bring home to us--as
perhaps nothing else would--the mill-stone weight on the life of the
nation of all punishment that is not purely reformative and curative?
Would it not very soon put an end to punishment in the old sense
altogether?
You may look upon this suggestion as a fantastic parable; but
spiritually it is what we shall have to do.
“There is only one sin,” said the unknown writer of one of the
most beautiful and famous books of devotion produced during the
middle-ages--the Theologia Germanica. “The only sin is separation.”
We shall never get rid of the criminal till we cease to separate
ourselves from him, till we make his interest our interest, till we
share, willingly and consciously, the responsibility of the society
which has produced him.
CHRISTIANITY A DANGER TO THE STATE
(1916)
The State, which accepts the proposition that force is a remedy, has
logical ground for employing force to secure its ends, until worsted by
the forces opposed to it, or by some other power.
Such a State, naturally and logically, claims the assistance of its
subjects in pursuing a course for which, in time of peace, and with
their apparent consent, it has made great preparation, entailing a vast
expenditure of the nation’s wealth and energy.
This claim of the State for the personal service of its citizens is
always latent even in peace-time; but in peace-time the great majority
of the services it requires are rendered upon a voluntary basis, and
generally in exchange for a monetary equivalent.
Only, therefore, when the State is pressed by necessity to make an
extreme assertion of its claims for personal service does it find
itself actively opposed by citizens who have never in their own lives
and consciences accepted the proposition that force is a remedy for
evil.
It is true that many of these objectors have paid taxes without
resistance for the upkeep of Army and Navy. If they have done so
conscientiously and not merely negligently, it has probably been
upon the lines of “rendering to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s,”
and from a recognition that all the devices of barter and exchange
(including a coin-currency) are a material convenience devised by
the State, which may legitimately be given to or withdrawn from the
control of the individual without affecting his personal integrity.
Men so minded may say quite plausibly: “My worldly goods you can take
or leave; my pockets you may fill or empty; but my body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost, and if I am called upon to give personal service
for the infliction of legal penalties, for the suppression of civil
commotion, or for the prosecution of war, then I am asked for service
in a form which I can only render if my conscience approves.”
Faced by this contention, the State has often thought wise to admit, or
to make allowance for, a claim which nevertheless it will not recognise
by law. People who object to jury-service for the enforcement of a
penal code which is against their conscience, are frequently excused
without fine or penalty. The same allowance would probably be made to
excuse any one opposed to capital punishment from assuming the office
of hangman. Yet capital punishment only exists because a majority in
the State believes it to be essential to public safety; and if there
were a dearth of hands ready to undertake the task, it would then
become a test of good citizenship for all to offer themselves; and the
conscientious objector, whose argument was tolerated and respectfully
listened to the day before, would suddenly become a disreputable object
to all law-abiding men, unless the State were weak enough, or wise
enough, to provide him with the right of exemption. If it did so he
would immediately cease to be disreputable in the eyes of the law, his
right to a conscience being granted.
That concession has frequently been made in the past to people
who, calling themselves Christians, have held tenets subversive of
State-authority. When religious conformity was considered necessary
to the spiritual security of the State, Nonconformists resisted, till
the State made allowance for them. When the taking of an oath was
considered necessary for the security of truth in the witness-box,
Quakers resisted, till the State made allowance for them. When the
coercion of Ulster was considered necessary for the well-being of
Ireland, men who had taken the oath of military obedience threatened
a conscientious strike, and the State made allowance for them.
Incidentally they became the heroes of that party which is to-day most
strenuous in its detestation of those later conscientious objectors who
refuse to take the oath of military obedience; but nobody was sent to
prison for uttering propaganda in their praise!
Now the reason why the State could tolerate them was not a moral
reason; it was simply upon the calculation that, while still pursuing
its policy of physical force, it could afford to do without them. It
could allow non-conformity based upon Christian teaching, or upon
conscientious scruples, to streak the current of its policy, without
thereby suffering any deflection of its course.
But it is quite different when the State, driven by its belief in the
rightness and the remedial value of physical force, comes to commit
the whole of its resources to the prosecution of war. The existence
of the conscientious objector then becomes a more inconvenient factor
in the situation; it may even, from the State’s point of view, become
a dangerous one. Then those insidious Christian idiosyncrasies, which
have so often been allowed to withstand authority, must have all
possible ground cut from under them, lest it should afford standing
to a new social ideal. We have it on the authority of the public
prosecutor himself that, if all men became conscientious objectors,
war would no longer be possible; and from such a catastrophe the State
must, of course, be saved by all possible means.
It is at this point, therefore, that the latent claim (which in
peace-time is often more honoured in the breach than in the observance)
becomes insistent and active. The State must have--if it can get
it--the personal service of all its able-bodied citizens. And thus,
practically for the first time, the rival claims of law and conscience
upon a man’s allegiance come to be fought out in public on a large
scale; and if the Nation is engaged in a popular war, or in one where
the vast majority believes that it has righteousness upon its side,
then there will inevitably be much prejudice in the public mind against
the conscientious objector; whereas there might be much sympathy for
him (though not really on the principle for which he contended) if he
were refusing to fight in a war which happened to be unpopular, or
which a great number of people regarded as unjust.
But if we want to get to the true basis of the principle against which
the conscientious objector is contending (a principle which cannot
logically be separated from any form of government built up on force)
we must not colour our view with the rightness or wrongness (in our
own estimation) of the war in which we are engaged, since we obscure
thereby that quality of allegiance which is claimed by the State.
The State’s claim--latent in peace-time and liable to emerge whenever
war or crisis shall arise--is not that its citizens should fight for
it when the cause is just and right, but that they should fight for it
in any case, if it orders them. That claim, made by every State with
more or less urgency, we are now invited to view with horror operating
at its full efficiency throughout a Prussianised Germany. Thus exalted
and perfected, it has become, we are told, a danger to the world;
in such a State the moral conscience of the individual has become
atrophied by subordination, and he is not free to choose between right
and wrong. But war only brings home to us the logic of a situation
which in peace-time we have burked; and now, in order to combat the
evil, in its fullest manifestation, men in this country are asked to
give their souls into similar keeping--to accept, that is to say, the
over-riding of individual conscience by the law of State-necessity.
It is a claim which any State, founded on force, is bound eventually
to make; it is a claim which anyone who believes force to be evil is
bound to repudiate. The follower of the one school draws his ethics
from the established rules of the body politic to which he belongs;
the follower of the other draws them, it may be, from the personal
example and teaching of One whom the body politic of his day regarded
as a criminal, and put to death; of One whose followers, it may be said
further, were persecuted in the early centuries of the Christian era,
not because of their opinions, but because, in practice, they were a
danger to the State. The Roman mind was very logical; and only when
Christianity had become absorbed in the State system and had accepted
the view that physical force and persecution were good social remedies,
only then did Christianity cease to be an apparent danger and a fit
subject for persecution.
But the primitive Christian standpoint is always liable to emerge; and
when it does, then we get the opposing principles of two incompatible
schools. And we must keep these principles in mind--the principle
of conduct based upon a personal example rejecting force, and the
principle of conduct based upon a social edifice relying upon force
for its well-being and advancement; otherwise we confuse the issue,
and weaken our appreciation of the moral position which each side
assumes. It is surely quite evident that the State, while based upon
force, cannot (except as an indulgence) countenance the claim of any
individual to make the morality of its action the test for personal
allegiance and service. And so this State-claim must be unequivocably
defined, otherwise we do not really know where we are.
Now many fervent supporters of the doctrine that State-necessity must
stand supreme above individual conscience, confuse matters by importing
the moral equation, and by arguing for the compelling principle from
particular instances where moral considerations seem to favour it: “Our
Cause is just; therefore, etc.,” is the line on which they contend. But
the State’s claim stands independent of the justice of its cause; and
“My Country right or wrong!” is the real motto which the objector to
conscientious liberty is called to fight under.
All that the State-backers say as to the obligation for Englishmen to
fight Germany to-day, applies equally to the obligation for Germans
to fight England. So while we continue to assert that a man must fight
here with us for the cause of liberty, honour, righteousness--in a
word, for God--we assert equally that in another country he must
subject his conscience to the claims of the State, and fight for
oppression, dishonour, unrighteousness--in a word, for the Devil (and
that in spite of the baptismal vows which oblige him to “fight manfully
under Christ’s banner,” not merely against sin, as he individually is
concerned, but sin spiritually combined in its symbolic representative,
and defended by the temporalities of the world). From which we must
argue that, if Christ were here on earth to-day, born of German
parents, he would be called upon to fight in the ranks of Germany; that
if he were born of English parents he would be called to fight for
England; while, if again, born of Jewish parents, he might be accorded
the alternative privilege of fighting for England which was not his
country, or of being deported to Russia to fight for the persecutors of
his race.
The conscientious objector, on the other hand, feels bound to take
the moral equation of all such particular instances as a guide to
his diagnosis of the evils of war; and he comes thus to regard the
expedient of war as altogether so bad a remedy for evil that he dares
to doubt whether Christ would be seen bearing arms on either side;
and he is probably strengthened in that conviction by the fact that
modern conditions of war tend more and more to involve the weak,
the innocent, and the helpless in the ruin and suffering wrought by
industrial and financial exhaustion, invasion and blockade, and that
“arms of precision” are so unprecise and blind in action that they
are quite as likely, when directed against towns, to destroy the
non-fighters as the fighters. And the conscientious objector finds a
difficulty in seeing Christ serving a gun for the artillery of either
side (however righteous the cause) which may have for immediate result
the disembowelling of a mother while in the pains of child-birth, or
the dismembering of young children.
He holds further (and it is a tenable argument addressed to any Power
which maintains despotic sway over an alien race, declaring such sway
to be acceptable to the people concerned, while treating as “seditious”
any reluctance to regard it as acceptable), he holds that, if the worst
comes to the worst, submission to force, or mere passive resistance
thereto, is more lifesaving, both morally and physically, than the
setting of force against force even for the defence of “liberty.” He
holds, probably, that Finland, in her policy of passive resistance to
Tsarist domination, has better conditions and prospects to-day than
Serbia; that the present fate of India, as the result of submission to
a stronger Power is preferable to the present fate of Belgium; even
though the Government forced upon it be more alien to the genius of
its races than is the German to the Flemish. He may believe that in
the long run India is more likely to escape from being Britainised by
bowing to the subjugating Power, than Britain is likely to escape from
being Prussianised by a hurried adoption of a similar system to that
which she has set out to destroy. He may even think (for there is no
limit to the contrariety of his views) that if England wins handsomely
in this war by adopting the Prussian system of militarism, she is more
likely to retain it than if she gets beaten. In a word he thinks war
the most hazardous of all remedies for the evils it sets out to cure.
The State, on the other side, sees the very gravest danger to that
edifice of worldly power which is summed up in the word “imperial,” if
once it allows the individual conscience to pick and choose the moral
terms of its allegiance. And the better the argument the conscientious
objector can present from political parallels in other countries, or
from the failures and blunders of past history, the more dangerous
becomes his propaganda and the more rigorously must it be suppressed.
The State’s claim to our duty to-day is precisely the same, neither
more nor less, than it would be if it required our services for the
prosecution of a second Boer War, a second Opium-trade war against
China, or a second war against the Independence of America. The causes
of the war might be no more reputable than in these cases, but the
State’s claim on our allegiance would remain the same. “It is not for
you,” the State says, in effect, “to judge whether I am right or wrong,
if I come to claim your services for war.”
Now nobody, I presume, is so convinced of the perennial purity of his
country’s motives, or that its foreign policy has in the past been
so safe-guarded by democratic control, as to claim that it has never
waged foolish or unjust wars. Most reasonable people will admit that
the State is, in matters of morals, a fallible authority. The claim
is, therefore, that of a fallible authority for the unquestioning
obedience of its citizens in a course of action which may involve the
ruin, torture, and death of an innocent people, or the subjugation of
a liberty-loving race. That claim by a State which stands based on the
doctrine that Might is a surer remedy and defence than Right, is a
perfectly logical one. I have not a word to say against it.
But when that claim is made for the State by followers of Christianity
on Christian grounds, then I am anxious to relieve the State of the
entanglement they would thrust upon it. I am sure that a State which
bases its authority on Might is weakened and not strengthened by any
attempt to sanction its claim as being compatible with the Christianity
taught by Christ. The less Christianity a State pretends to when it
goes to war, the more is it likely to conduct its war effectively,
and to find no mental hindrance in its way as it advances to its true
end--the destruction of its enemies.
Because our counsels were mixed with a certain modicum of Christianity,
we had a reluctance early in the war to use asphyxiating gas, exploding
bullets, and certain other improved devices for adding to the frightful
effectiveness of war. We still hesitate to smear phosphorus on our
shells so as to make wounds incurable, or to starve our prisoners
because we hear that our fellow countrymen are being starved in
Germany. In some instances with the help of the _Daily Mail_ the
doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” has carried
the day for us; but it is not a Christian doctrine, and elsewhere
Christianity, or its shadow, still holds us by the leg. The _Morning
Post_, seeing the national danger we were in from these divided
counsels, rightly demanded a Government that would “stick at nothing,”
but has only partially succeeded in securing what it wants.
Now the conscientious objectors have been trying to do us the service,
which we have ignored, of pointing out from the very beginning that
war is not and cannot be Christian, and so showing us that when a
nation goes to war Christianity is the real danger. The bigger the
bulk of genuine and practical Christianity in any country, the more
impossible is it for that country to adopt effective methods of war.
The reluctance which we feel to shell out phosphorus, or to starve
civilians, will in the genuinely Christian State make itself felt at a
much earlier stage of warlike practice, long before those particular
devices have been applied or even thought of; and it will arise (to
the discrediting of all power which places Might above Right) from
the assertion that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is not
Christian doctrine, and is, in result, no remedy for the evil it sets
itself to avenge.