THE LAW A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
Using the figurative words, "the law," in their widest possible
sense, to mean the entire system which governs the relations of the
individuals in a community with each other and with the community at
large, we can easily see that in a century's time many changes of law
will have taken place. If it be true that legislative restraints are
mostly necessitated by the ill-conceived energies of mankind, and
that the right function of the law is to assure to each citizen the
largest possible liberty that is consistent with the equal liberty of
every other citizen and of all, then it will be right to believe that
the great extension of general intelligence, and the equally great
extension of general morality, anticipated for the next century,
will render many forms of existing restraint obsolete because
unnecessary. Regarding offences both against the person and against
property as manifestations, for the most part, of unintelligence, we
may expect that increased intelligence will lead to a diminution of
their number. In applying statistics to an examination of the question
whether and to what extent improvements in the general standard of
education have in the past diminished crime, and consequently how
far crime is likely to be still further diminished in the future,
we must be careful to keep in sight two considerations--first, that
an increased vigilance and elaboration on the part of authority
may easily make it appear that crime has failed to diminish under
educational influences, when it is only the detection and punishment
of crime that have been rendered more perfect; and second, that if
one kind of education have not had all the salutary effects expected
of it, it does not follow that a different kind will not have all
this expected efficacy and more. Manifestly, legislation against
crimes formerly outside the reach of the law--that creation of "new
offences" which one hears rather foolishly objected to--will increase
statistics of crime, if we compute crime in terms of prison-admissions;
and the fact that such increase, due entirely to legislation, has taken
place concurrently with some other reform, such as the improvement of
education, obviously does not entitle us to connect the increase with
the reform. The latter may even be operating in exactly the opposite
manner, despite the statistics. A number of new offences were created,
for instance, by what is called in England the Criminal Law Amendment
Act, and it would be easy for a shocked observer of prison statistics
to observe, in a period of years during which the administration of
that useful act was being perfected, dreadful increases in the crimes
which it represses; whereas the fact probably is that crime of this
sort has diminished, largely through the action of the very causes
which would make it appear to have been increasing. Therefore, if
anyone still argues that education as a means of diminishing crime has
proved a failure, it is not upon judicial statistics that he must base
his contentions. Probably that argument is obsolete: but if it were
not, and if it were allowed all the validity of which it is capable,
it would still furnish no ground whatever from which to throw doubt
upon the expectation that in a hundred years' time crime will have
diminished very greatly, as a result of the improved education of the
new era. For indeed, as education is at present conducted, it would
be rather a remarkable thing that it should have any effect upon
criminality at all. What influence increased intelligence may have
in restraining one part of the population from the desire to commit
crime might easily be neutralised by the effect, on another portion,
of the increased craft and subtlety imparted by education. Knowledge
can facilitate crime as well as deter from it. A man who has not
learned to write, it has been shrewdly remarked, will not commit
forgery: but that is not a reason for thinking that a knowledge of
writing tends to promote criminality. The man who, being (perhaps
unduly) proficient in it, becomes a forger, would not necessarily
have remained blameless if he had continued illiterate. He would very
probably have been a thief, which does not require penmanship: but
on the other hand, the increased facility of obtaining employment
when one can write might just as easily have saved him from some
temptations to dishonesty. It is not very rational to expect a great
moral effect upon character from the mere acquisition of knowledge. But
from the moment we conceive that means and methods of education in the
future will be valued in proportion to their influence in developing
character, and especially intelligent self-control, it is impossible
to doubt that the new teaching will be among the most potent of moral
influences. One benefit derived from this will be the possibility
of abandoning legislative restrictions whose effect is inimical to
self-control and to intelligent self-protection. It will no longer be
necessary to protect the people by law from the consequences of their
own foolishness, and we shall have learned that it is much better
for the public to be encouraged to safeguard its own interests than
to be relieved of the necessity to do so.
Anticipating, therefore, that many existing forms of restraint will
have become obsolete because unnecessary, we may very fairly ask
ourselves whether, in an improved moral and intellectual atmosphere,
it will not have been found advisable to abolish other restraints and
requisitions as a directly remedial measure. The suggestion may, at the
moment, appear chimerical, but so must every intelligent anticipation
of a coming time appear to anyone who approaches the subject without
allowing for the difference of conditions, and conceives of changes
which will take place so gradually as to be almost unperceived,
as if they were to occur per saltum, without any process of slow
moral preparation. So would nearly every social condition of the
present age have appeared individually to a citizen of the world
of 1800, if, possessing intelligence to foresee it, he lacked the
imagination necessary to foresee the accompanying and subservient
conditions. That public opinion should be so shocked by the execution
of capital punishment, that only the most atrocious murders are thus
punished--the sentence, where there is any real extenuation at all,
being habitually commuted nowadays--is a condition which would hardly
have suggested itself even to the most alert imaginations in an age
where small thefts were constantly punished by death. Our sense of
what may be called the accidental influences of punitive measures is
even yet so little developed that only a small minority of the public
at the present day is able to perceive that the deterrent effect of
flogging, as a punishment for violent robbery, is dearly purchased at
the expense of the brutalising relish with which sentences of flogging
are welcomed by the public, and even on the judicial bench, where
expressions of regret that the same penalty cannot be inflicted for
other crimes are still common. Yet it would seem obvious enough that
the sanction given to acts of violence by the deliberate adoption of
hanging and flogging by the law, which is supposed to be the exemplar
of public morality, must tend nearly as much to perpetuate crimes
of violence as fear of these chastisements to deter. In attempting
to foresee the spirit of legislation in the future it is absolutely
necessary to foresee concurrently the spirit of the communities by
which the legislation will be adopted. Anticipating, as we cannot fail
to anticipate, a sedulous care for moral effects in education, we must
anticipate an equal care in legislation. It would be unworthy of the
supremely logical age which assuredly is coming, to use all possible
measures in the schoolroom to foster in childhood self-reliance and
intelligent self-protection, while continuing by "grandmotherly"
government of the people to remove as often as possible any need for
self-reliance in the adult. The advantages attending little bits of
protective law-making often blind us to their ill-effects. It is no
doubt very useful to provide, as we do provide, that condensed milk,
when deprived of its full proportion of cream, shall only be sold in
packages notifying that deprivation. If we did not do this children
would be starved by their parents' ignorance. But the necessity for
this enactment is at least in part created by the existence of a host
of similar laws, the aggregate effect of which is to give a general
impression that anything sold as food is good and useful unless it
bears some warning to the contrary; and meantime every evasion of
commercial morality which does not come under legislative restraint
is naturally held to be perfectly justifiable--not at all a good
thing for commercial morality. Now it would be a highly perilous
measure to abolish, at a stroke, all protective legislation against
adulterated or impoverished foods. We have built up a social condition
in which every man thinks himself entitled to be protected against
such frauds. But in a community which has been taught to take care of
itself, and protect itself against frauds by its own intelligence,
such protections would be retrograde and injurious. The aim of
legislatures in the next century will be to foster all kinds of
self-reliance. They will perceive that even the high importance of
a reform which can be more or less easily enforced by law does not
compensate for the bad effect of thus enforcing it, if it could be
maintained by the spontaneous vigilance of a wisely-nurtured public;
and the degrading effect of superfluous law will be more dreaded than
the temporary dangers against which the law might protect the citizens.
Nevertheless, it is inevitable that, during a period more or less
extended, material progress will be accompanied by numerous legal
enactments such as a perfect state would dispense with, and possibly
the end of all of them will not have been reached even in a century's
time. How invention tends to promote legislation has recently been
noticeable in the new laws affecting automobile traffic on roads. In
a perfect state it would doubtless be unnecessary to provide legal
machinery to compel the owners of powerful and rapid vehicles to
respect the rights of their fellow-citizens and to abstain from
running away without identifying themselves when they had caused an
accident. In proportion as the moral condition of the next century
approximates to perfection, such ordinances as the motor-car laws
will be unnecessary. But for a long time new laws will always be
coming into necessity as a result of new inventions. For instance,
when, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, business is carried
on largely through the medium of recording telephones, wirelessly
actuated, special laws will have to be devised to protect trade
against the various kinds of fraud which this method of transaction
would otherwise facilitate, and some methods will have to be devised
for giving legal force to arrangements made by telephony, akin to the
methods which now give legal force to written contracts. Similarly,
various by-laws will have to be enacted to protect the public against
the accidents incidental to the various methods of rapid transit that
will have come into use. Probably it will no longer be necessary,
and it will have been perceived to be injurious, to protect travellers
against their own rashness.
It is a well-known phenomenon that periods of material prosperity and
high wages are fruitful in crime. Probably increased consumption of
alcohol in prosperous times is the sole cause of this. There can be
no direct connection between wealth and criminality; the bulk of the
criminal population is, on the contrary, poor. It would be idle to
speculate as to whether the next century will or will not continue
to legislate against intoxicants, because it is morally certain that
intoxicants will have been legislated out of existence already, without
waiting for the period when it would no longer be necessary to abolish
them forcibly. For at present, and in the more immediate future,
there is no ground whatever for anticipating that the legislative hand
will be withheld wherever law-making appears the simplest and most
obvious method of getting rid of any crying evil: and there can be no
doubt that the abuse of alcohol is an evil of precisely the sort that
legislature will be active in suppressing. Some changes in the method
of government will have to take place before Parliament can legislate
against alcohol: but that it will so legislate before the middle of
this century is morally certain. In what country the alcohol law is
first likely to be passed is immaterial. Every country which adopts it
will thereby assist in forcing the same measure upon other countries,
because, with international travel constantly becoming cheaper and more
easy, it is certain that numerous people who object to being deprived
of stimulants and intoxicants in one country will migrate to others
where their appetite can have full play, and will intensify the drink
problem in those countries until these, too, are forced, or will think
themselves forced, to legislate in self-protection. Thus such laws will
become universal. No doubt this condition will be reached gradually,
measures of restriction preceding measures of prohibition. But the
end will be the same, and it will be forced upon the world as much
by the increased evils inflicted by alcohol on nerves increasingly
susceptible to its influence, as by any other consideration. Anyone who
has taken the trouble to observe the nervous and physical condition of
men and women in the average, during even so short a period as the last
quarter of a century, must have been impressed by the marked increase
of neurotic states, not merely in exceptional individuals, but in all
the people. The neurotic temperament is much more adversely affected
by alcohol than any other; and we are all growing more neurotic. All
the conditions of modern life tend that way: and it is not alcohol
alone that will have to go, but all sorts of habit-inducing drugs,
such as morphine, cocaine, and the rest, all of which, like alcohol
itself, will soon be so restricted in regard to their sale that
their abuse will be rendered practically impossible, and their use
restricted to a purely medical employment. It is even quite possible,
and I have already ventured to predict, [30] that when the progress of
neurotism has worked itself out, even such mild exhilarants as tea and
coffee will have to be made the subjects of legal restriction. There
exist many individuals at the present moment upon whom coffee acts
as a stimulant nearly as powerful as alcohol, moderately employed,
upon the rest of us--that is to say, they experience the same mild
exhilaration after a cup of strong coffee as a moderate man does
after a glass of burgundy or a whisky-and-soda. These effects are no
more injurious, at present, than those of a moderate use of wine or
spirits: but they can become perilous, and may develop in all sorts
of ways, when the nervous organisation becomes more delicate. Thus,
the abolition of alcoholic beverages, at present the fad of a minority
not always very respectable in the methods of its propaganda, will
presently be an indispensable feature of social progress.
Unless all criminologists are wrong in their deductions, something
like fifty per cent. of all crime will be got rid of when alcohol no
longer exists to cause crime. There are further ameliorative influences
certain to be at work which will tend to reduce the sorts of crime
chiefly troublesome at present. Adopting the familiar division of
crime into (a) offences against the person and (b) offences against
property, it is very easy to see that what may be called private crime
(as distinguished from crime against the body politic) will diminish
automatically. When the extremes of wealth and poverty have become as
much less marked as I have endeavoured to show that they must become,
it is evident that the temptation to offences of greed will be greatly
diminished. A large proportion of all these crimes arises out of
poverty alone, or out of poverty coupled with stupidity. A man who
has not enough intelligence to earn is very likely to steal in order
to provide for himself; and one who is equipped by the knowledge of
a trade is consequently not so liable to be dishonest as one who is
less hopefully situated. He is also likely to be more intelligent,
and consequently better qualified to perceive that the balance of
comfort is on the side of the honest worker and not on the side
of the burglar or thief. Anyone who has had occasion to observe
the proceedings of criminal courts must have noticed the frequency
with which the description "labourer" is adopted by the offenders
charged. "Labourer" means an unskilled worker--a man who has learned
no trade, and brings nothing to his work but thews and sinews. It
is much less common to find a trade claimed: one rarely sees a thief
or burglar described on the charge sheet as "John Doe, carpenter," or
"Richard Roe, gas-fitter." They do not even profess to have a trade. Of
course where a man's business is such as to lend itself to criminal
pursuits, the case is different: one finds banknote forgers described
as "engravers" and "lithographers," and makers of counterfeit money
as "die sinkers." But in the average of crime--at least crime of
the more stupid sorts--it is the tradeless man who is nearly always
charged. It is impossible to resist the inference that poverty is
a determining cause in most crimes of greed. In a hundred years'
time the spread of technical education will have thinned the ranks of
the unskilled. At the same time the inducements to honesty and steady
industry will have been enormously increased through the universality
of the profit-sharing system; and the position of the steady worker
will have become so greatly more attractive than that of the casual
thief, that only the utmost stupidity can tempt anyone to the latter's
course of life. Self-respecting labour for a share in the profits
of labour, instead of mechanical toil for wages that do not bear any
relation to profits nor to anything else except the fluctuations of
the labour-market, will so elevate the average of industrial character
that it will be rare for workmen to drift into crime. At the same
time, and similarly, the restraint placed upon undue accumulation
of wealth will diminish temptation to crimes of greed at the other
extremity of social life. It will no longer be worth anyone's while
to organise colossal schemes of dishonest company-promoting. Thus,
crimes against property are certain to become relatively infrequent,
because the greatest temptations to them will have been removed.
Apart from the largely preponderating number of cases in which
offences against the person--assaults and the like--arise now out of
intoxication, the tendency to crimes of violence will also diminish
as the temper of society grows milder. An age so much advanced in
sentimentality as to revolt against the cruelty of breeding horses for
traction and cattle for food is not likely to be fruitful in offences
of violence. These offences, where associated neither with drink nor
robbery, probably arise more often from jealousy between the sexes
than anything else. It is unfortunately impossible to suggest that
sexual jealousy can be wholly eliminated from human nature. But no
doubt its violent exhibition will have been educated out of us to
a large measure. Other personal offences, as rape, criminal assault
and various criminal vices will doubtless diminish in frequency as
a consequence of general moral improvement. In short, the work of
the policeman will be greatly eased in the course of this century,
and no doubt many functions at present relegated to the police, such
as the direction of street traffic, the care of vagrant dogs, and the
like, will be performed by officials of a different character. Even
these duties will be far less onerous than they now are, when we have
become intelligent enough to see that the best way for every man to
secure his own freedom and comfort is to respect the freedom and the
rights of others.
It remains an open question whether at some time during this century
it may not be temporarily needful for the State to undertake the
restraint of offences against the intellect, such as the publication
of false or grossly exaggerated news, and of matter calculated to
encourage vice, as betting. No doubt the balance of advantage is in
favour of the entire freedom of the Press; but it cannot be denied
that this freedom is at present greatly abused. It would be easy to
name a dozen types of periodicals whose forcible suppression would be
an enormous gain to the public; and in an age so increasingly prone to
look to the governing body for assistance in every conceivable matter
no one can deny the probability of some legislative steps being taken,
when the public first begins to concern itself seriously with public
morals. But this possibility is much nearer at hand than the end of
this century; at the latter period public opinion will probably be
well able to take care of itself, and any laws of the kind I have
suggested will, like numerous other forms of legislation, including
many now operative, have fallen into desuetude because there will be no
temptation to the misdemeanours they are, or may be, framed to repress.
The question of the form which the repression of crime will take a
hundred years hence can only be answered if we first endeavour to
see what the developments of penology, or the science of punishment,
are likely to be during the next hundred years. Naturally, they will
have the same tendencies as the society which produces them. We may
safely anticipate that the more savage punishments, as death, flogging
and painful labour will be eliminated, together with all punishments
that are not believed to be reformatory in their character. And even
the relatively mild penalty of long imprisonment may to the gentler
mind of a new age appear unduly vindictive.
Punishment will be regarded as a diminishingly necessary evil; and
our "object all sublime" will not be to make it fit the particular
crime for which it is awarded, but to make it diminish crime as a
whole. Punition as a moral force will be judged according to its effect
in two different directions, namely, its force as a means of reforming
the convicted individual by preventing his relapse into crime, and its
force as a means of deterring other persons from committing the same
crimes at all; and of these two the second will be considered greatly
the more important in an age that will be logical as well as mild;
because it is obviously a greater object to produce an effect upon
the minds of a possibly great number than to produce it upon the mind
of one culprit. Consequently, although a benevolent solicitude for
the reformation of the detected offender will not be excluded from
the consideration of future penologists, the deterring from crime of
the tempted classes will be much more demanded. As to this, it cannot
be questioned that improvements in detection and in legal procedure
(eliminating the chances of escape for the guilty without endangering
the freedom of the innocent) are capable of accomplishing a great
deal more than could possibly be looked for from any alteration in
the nature of the punishment used. Experience shows that hitherto
a ferocious punishment not very certainly applied does not deter
anything like so much as comparatively mild punishment with very
little chance of escape. Coining, for instance, is less common
now than when coiners were slowly pressed to death under weights,
if detected; and the diminution of this crime has not been due to
fear of the punishment now long abandoned; neither was that penalty
removed from our system of criminal law because it had done its work
and stamped out counterfeiting. On the contrary, improvements in the
minting of real money, by rendering the detection of counterfeits
easy, may be said to have almost eliminated the offence in question,
and this result is all the more remarkable when we remember that,
owing to the appreciation of gold, real silver shillings, half-crowns
and other pieces just as good in assay as the royal mintage could be
coined by counterfeiters at a handsome profit.
Our very proper anxiety to avoid every possible chance of committing
and punishing the innocent doubtless enables many guilty persons to
escape every year; and probably quite half the prisoners acquitted
at every assize are really guilty in some degree. The jurisprudence
of a hundred years hence will certainly have been so much improved
that innocent persons will rarely be accused at all, and that
guilty ones will not be able to escape on technical grounds: and
with improved detective methods the chances of escape in any given
case will be greatly diminished. What punishments are inflicted will
be of a reformatory character, and no doubt provisional release,
freed from the many crying scandals of the ticket-of-leave system,
will play a great part in scientific penology. Recidivism will, of
course, be the subject of much sharper punishment. In the meantime,
the study of mental science in its relation to crime will have made
great strides, and if the views of our own age in regard to heredity
should be maintained, a very great source of crime will probably be got
rid of altogether, because men and women with just that mental twist
which leads to crime will, by one device or another, be absolutely
prevented from propagating their race. [31]
It is impossible to work out here the various methods of individual
reform applicable to convicts of various sorts, because the nature of
these methods must necessarily depend, to a great extent, upon the
conditions of a society of which only the most salient and extreme
peculiarities can be foreseen even by the most imaginative. But all
evidence seems to suggest that actual crime will have become much
diminished in amount, while the necessity for dealing with what
may be called technical crimes--misdemeanours, and offences against
regulations made for the convenience of society rather than for the
defence of life and morals--will probably have been reduced to a
minimum, partly by the intelligence of the population, and partly
through the fact that the minor offences will have ceased to be
dealt with by law, and will be sufficiently repressed by natural
causes. Not only, therefore, will the amount of necessary restraint
become less, through the diminution of crime and of temptation to
crime, but the employment of legal restraint will be less demanded,
the latter being recognised as, when avoidable, dangerous to public
morals. And, while criminal law will be less active, civil litigation
will also probably be much less heavy. The same causes which will
tend to make us more careful to avoid committing offences against
the common right of others, will make us more scrupulous to perform
contracts. And as a consequence of the improved morality which there
seems every reason to anticipate, a hundred years hence, it will no
doubt have become possible to execute a reform which many thinkers have
desiderated as an element of perfected polity. It is hardly necessary
here to recapitulate the arguments in favour of the contention that
the cost of civil suits should be borne, as the cost of criminal
prosecutions is always supposed to be borne, by the State. That
the man who brings successfully an action at law, or successfully
defends one, should be able to do so only at an expense to himself,
is against public policy: and there are even now numerous cases every
year in which even the unsuccessful party in a lawsuit is really doing
the public a service. In a perfect state of public morality he would
always be doing so: and in a hundred years' time he will certainly
be more often worthy of public thanks than he is now--he will be
less often seeking to impose or defend a wrong. As matters stand,
it is notorious that the grant of costs following the judgment in a
civil suit is only a partial relief to the successful suitor. He has
to pay his solicitor more than his solicitor can obtain leave from
the taxing master to collect from the other side; while if (as not
infrequently happens) the other side cannot pay, the costs awarded
by the Court have to be borne by the winner of the suit. It is a
frequent reply of dishonest defendants, when threatened with legal
proceedings, that they "will meet the plaintiff in the Bankruptcy
Court." On the other hand, a man will often submit to oppression rather
than be subjected to the expense of even a successful defence. Every
litigant who maintains his right, whether as plaintiff or defendant,
renders very much the same service to the public which we often hear
applauded on the part of persons who "come forward to prosecute"
in criminal or misdemeanour cases. He is assisting to make probity
profitable and evasion dangerous; in other words, he is subserving
public morality and helping to repress dishonesty. It would be much
to the public advantage that his costs should be borne by the public
purse, and borne generously, every expense legitimately incurred
being allowed him. Logically, he ought also to receive a sufficient,
and even a fairly liberal, solatium for his trouble and loss of time:
and an honest loser ought to be able to receive a certificate from the
court entitling him to the same amenities, the withholding of which
would constitute a deterrent penalty against factious litigation. But
it may be urged on practical grounds that to make the path of the
litigant too easy would lead to too much invocation of the law, and
that the full recognition of the public usefulness of litigants must
be postponed to the millennium--which age of ideal perfection will
not occur (it may be thought necessary to concede) a hundred years
hence. And it is not difficult to imagine means by which the public can
be protected against the factious and unnecessary litigation to which,
in the absence of some safeguard, we should certainly be exposed. The
plaintiff might be required to obtain some sort of fiat, such as is
required now before a suit of criminal libel can be prosecuted: and
there would be no hardship in the litigant who failed to obtain the
fiat being left to bear his own expenses up to the time of failure,
though, in the event of his success, he would of course have them
repaid. The legal machinery for obtaining permission to sue need not
be made too complicated: it must not be allowed to develop into a
sort of preliminary trial. Probably some sort of arrangement as the
above will be instituted a hundred years hence, and all law-costs
borne by the State, except in the case of obvious dishonesty or bad
faith; the trouble and loss of time necessarily incurred exercising
a restraining influence upon the litigious.
In regard to the general machinery of the law it would be tedious to
attempt to foresee all the reforms of which the growing complexity
of human affairs will certainly impose the necessity upon us. The
clumsiness of a system by which important civil cases have to be tried
three times, in ways differing in detail, before a final decision is
reached, needs no insisting upon: and there is a manifest inconsistency
in the fact that an action about a matter worth £101 can be twice
appealed, while a man tried for his life, or something even more
important than life, has no appeal at all against an adverse verdict,
except to a secret tribunal of Civil Service clerks--for in the
"commutation" of sentences the Crown stands for the Home Secretary,
and the Home Secretary is necessarily obliged to depend upon his
assistants, who in their turn may very possibly have to derive their
information from officials whose credit would be damaged if some fact
favourable to the prisoner came out. To admit this inconsistency is
not by any means equivalent to admitting the necessity for courts
of criminal appeal: and anyone who knows the methods of criminal
jurisprudence in the United States must recognise that such courts are
capable of abuse highly dangerous to public morality, so dependent upon
respect for law. But with the great increase in scrupulosity and in
the mildness of public temper which the tendencies of human development
clearly vaticinate for the next century, it seems impossible to doubt
that some method will be adopted by which criminal trials can be
reviewed, even though the class of cases in which the necessity for
review is most often mentioned now will no doubt have disappeared with
the abolition of capital punishment. And it does not seem likely to
be beyond the ingenuity of the coming time to discover some means by
which civil cases can be settled in one trial, instead of requiring
three, without danger to the justice of any individual suit.
It is sometimes questioned whether trial by jury will continue a
feature of modern civilisation. The remark of a legal cynic that
"the man with a good case is always safe with a judge, while the man
with a bad case has always a chance with a jury," is sufficiently
sound to make it a question whether juries are worth the trouble
given to the members of them, and the vast amount of additional
labour which their employment inflicts on the courts of which they
are a feature. The conditions which make trial by jury "the blest
palladium of our liberties" have passed away in civilised countries,
and to a great extent in Ireland. It is no doubt characteristic of
the British people that we should so long as this have retained the
use of juries in civil suits, though even here there are many cases
(especially in divorce and libel) where the average common sense of
a jury is really helpful to the judge, and constitutes a check upon
his prejudice or impatience. There was a time when the jury was a
genuine safeguard against oppression in private as well as Crown
cases, and it is like us, as a nation, to have retained them when
their usefulness in this respect was happily obsolete. But it seems
to the writer pretty certain that in civil trials juries will have
been dispensed with long before the end of this century, and this
dispensation will probably be the stepping-stone to a system whereby
criminal causes will be tried by a bench of judges, instead of by
a judge and jury. The whole tendency of modern conditions (in which
must be included our growing, and highly discreditable, individual
impatience of the trouble of jury-service) seems to point to this. [32]
Reforms of judicial procedure of course constitute only a relatively
small part of the legislative work which will have been accomplished by
the end of the century. Apart from the work of gradually remodelling
the law with the idea (which nowhere seems to suggest itself to
present-day legislators) of making it act beneficially upon public
character, there will no doubt be a vast amount of work for the
various parliaments of the world in codifying existing statute-
and common-law systems, which in all communities have fallen
into complexity and confusion of a degree which makes them highly
unsatisfactory instruments of social protection: and there will also
be a great amount of constructive legislation, particularly in regard
to the tenure of land, to the simplification of conveyancing, to a
more intelligent machinery of contracts, to the equitable handling of
such accidental or conditional sources of wealth as we call "unearned
increment" and the discovery of unexpected minerals, to the useful
limitation of inheritance, and to other matters too numerous to be
safely named. And in order that these great works may be accomplished,
it is quite certain that, not only in England, but in all those
States where really free parliaments exist, great reforms will have
been found necessary, and will have become so much a part of the
machinery of legislation and administration a hundred years hence,
that our descendants will hardly be able to realise how Government
was ever carried on without them. Indeed, it is by the difficulty of
administering anything at all by parliamentary methods--every year
more evidently breaking down--rather than by the desire to undertake
large schemes of legislation, that statesmen will in a very short time
be forced to initiate the changes whose full development will have
become time-honoured by the end of this century. The organisation of
political opposition in parliaments has reached a point which makes it
evident that before long the minority in parliaments will have become
a nonentity. The minority, in fact, has already, here and in other
countries (of which the Austro-Hungarian empire is, at the moment,
the most noticeable example), become so powerful for obstruction
of business that, by a sort of paradox, its power is on the eve of
complete destruction. At St Stephen's the effect of obstruction working
in this manner is plainly visible. Whatever party is in power will
always, so long as the existing system continues, be obliged to silence
the opposition by the force of parliamentary machine; and whatever
party is in power will always be accused of tyranny and autocracy by
the other party. In practice there is no method by which any important
government measure can be passed through the House of Commons except
by force. It is a mere farce to make a show of debating the details
in committee. Naturally the Opposition, when it does not want the
measure passed at all, will delay its passage to the last possible
moment, and will make its enactment impossible unless a term is set
to the deliberations of committee of the whole house. Whether the
time granted by the Government be long or short makes no difference:
it is impossible to pass any serious and complex bill except by the
closure. In other words, the Government (which practically means
the Civil Service officials and parliamentary draftsmen employed by
the particular department concerned with the bill--the Home Office,
the Local Government Board Office, the Exchequer, or what not)
must triumph. Even the suggestions of individual supporters of the
administration in power must be ignored, unless there is a cave
which might turn out the ministry altogether. In detail, therefore,
we are governed, not by Parliament, but by the permanent officials,
so far as really important Government measures are concerned: and it is
quite evident that bills introduced by private members will very soon
not be considered at all. The private member is rapidly being reduced
to nothingness by the force of parliamentary development. Meantime,
the waste of public time by the introduction and debating of bills
which the Opposition eventually succeeds in destroying, is appalling,
and of course it is aggravated by the idiotic rule which destroys
at the end of each session all the work which has been begun and
not completed. The system, not less imbecile, in which opinion is
ascertained in Parliament is another great time-waster. It is only
necessary to ask for a single moment what our grandsons, or even
the younger of our children, will think of a Parliament in which a
vote was taken by solemnly walking through lobbies, with elaborate
arrangements for counting and checking the members (when it might
all be done by the simple use of an electric signal in front of each
seat in the chamber) in order to perceive the miserable inadequacy
of even the mechanical arrangements of all the parliaments of the
world. And if even all the crass follies and mediæval stupidities of
modern parliamentary arrangements were reformed, as nine-tenths of
them could be by any competent board composed of a few engineers,
electricians and architects, we should still be in possession of a
legislative machine such as the intelligence of a hundred years hence
would laugh to scorn if its restoration were suggested.
Nor is this all. The whole institution of parliaments, as a contrivance
for giving effect to the will of the peoples, has long been utterly
inadequate, and must be reformed from the bottom. We elect members
to carry out schemes of legislation and forms of policy never fully,
and sometimes not even partially, formulated, upon which, even if
they were set out in full detail, we could not possibly have any
complete influence in giving our votes. For instance, let us suppose
that, at a general election, one party wishes to increase the Navy,
to abolish publicans' compensation, and to legalise marriage with
a deceased wife's sister: while the other party not only objects
to all these three proposals but also wishes to put a protective
tariff on foodstuffs and machinery, to give Home Rule to Ireland,
and to disestablish the Church of England. A Home Ruler who was
also a teetotaler could not vote for either party without outraging
one or other of his convictions. A believer in the support of our
national supremacy who also considered that the Church ought to
be disestablished would have to choose between voting against the
increase of the Navy or against the Disestablishment: and the Deceased
Wife's Sister Bill advocate must vote against all the proposals on
the other side (all of which he may agree with) if he do not wish
to assist in perpetuating what he believes to be a hardship to his
fellow-countrymen, and very possibly to some of his own friends, or to
himself. And any of these perplexed voters, having somehow contrived
to strike a balance with his conscience, and to give a vote, will,
perhaps, in a year's, or in six years', time find that he has been
the instrument of placing in power an administration which is now
proceeding to pass measures that he abhors. He has no redress. Nor,
abandoning the extreme case of such highly-mixed policies as I have
endeavoured to amuse the reader by imagining, has the voter who changes
his mind, or who finds that he has been bamboozled with false promises,
any means of helping to undo the harm he has helped to do. It used to
be said that, on an average, parliamentary government worked well--that
it carried out in a rough way the will of the people. But the peoples
of a hundred years hence are going to be much more particular about
matters of such high importance. They are not going to be content
with a rough approximation in matters of the very highest moment when
they are able to secure with perfect accuracy most of their wishes
in matters of quite minor importance. They will not be satisfied to
know exactly what time it is at any moment of the day (as of course
they will know, all instruments for time-measuring being controlled
by wireless synchronisation) and not to know exactly what their rulers
are going to do about matters upon which the very fate of the country
may depend. Neither will they have remained so stupid as to think that
whatever one body of politicians considers right must be right and
that whatever another body thinks right must necessarily be wrong. It
is quite certain that in a really intelligent age so clumsy a system
as that of party government will have been relegated to oblivion.
The political machinery to replace it will be of a nature determined by
causes much too complex to be foreseen, except in the merest outline,
as yet; and probably it will, like most political institutions, be a
development rather than an invention. The system, already talked of,
by which any matter of great national importance should be made a
referendum, the subject of a direct vote by the whole nation, is no
doubt capable of ingeniously modified arrangement so as to provide
for its expeditious use, without undue interference with the course
of ordinary business. But obviously this device is only capable of
limited application, and it could not be employed at all, without
producing dangerous confusions and incongruities, except in a community
whose political education had made strides almost inconceivable in
the light of our present limited experience. It is difficult to see
how the general legislative business of a considerable nation could
be carried on unless by committees of a parliamentary character;
and limited as we are by the history of political institutions
arising out of states of public intelligence which will have become
contemptible in comparison with the intelligence of the next century,
there is a difficulty in conceiving how such committees or parliaments
could work out otherwise than on some sort of party system. But the
analogy of progress in general may help us to a conjecture, which is
here offered only for what it is worth. All progress, as we know it,
is a development from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. One form
of progress consists of the development of specialism. At one time,
and not so very long ago, every housewife made her own jams, pickles,
perfumes, essences and condiments, which are now purchased ready
made. A man of science, in Davy's time, often embraced a number of
different branches as his province; whereas now even a single science
is seldom completely handled by any individual professor, entomologists
differentiating themselves from general biologists, and coleopterists
from general entomologists. Does it not appear likely, then, that
the functions of the politician and of the legislator will presently
be differentiated, with great advantage to nations? In a legislature
of the present time professional law-makers are numerically few, and
not very highly regarded. While in a matter relatively unimportant,
like coach-building, civilisation has made specialism necessary; in
a matter of the highest importance, the making of a nation's laws,
we continue to trust the general practitioner, and the suggestion
that specialists alone should be employed in it would probably awaken
a torrent of objection not unmingled with execration. But specialism
of all sorts will have extended its sway to such an extent a hundred
years hence that the likeliest solution of the difficulties at present
envisaged is that the business of law-making will be relegated to a
specially qualified and specially educated class, and that parliaments,
if they exist at all, will have nothing to do with it, but will concern
themselves with what they are often rather contumeliously told now is
not their business (though it ought to be); namely, the management of
international policy. The way in which this evolution will come about
is, moreover, fairly easy to imagine. At some time during the century
the manifold confusions, inconsistencies and evident inconveniences
of the existing corpus of the law are pretty sure to require drastic
and laborious treatment, which can only be administered by professional
experts. At the same time, the public, having awakened to the ludicrous
fact that laws are passed in every session of every Parliament in the
world, which, when they come to be administered, break down because
they have either been so stupidly and unimaginatively conceived,
or so clumsily expressed in the statutes which embody them, that
practical working immediately reveals their fatal defects. A clever
young lawyer once said to the present writer that he knew of no
intellectual pleasure so delightful as that of discovering how to
circumvent the provisions of an Act of Parliament. This diverting,
if immoral, remark illustrates the faults of a social system in
which laws are made chiefly by persons having little experience in
the working of laws, and elected to that duty by persons having no
such experience at all. Having in mind the fact that international
law is already relegated practically to specialists, it requires no
great effort of imagination to foresee that the Hercules that will
cleanse the Augean stable of the Statute Book will be a committee
of professors of law. And once the public has become familiarised
with the idea, what more natural than that a similar body should
be formed to provide against such legislative blunders as we were
all recently laughing at, when, having provided for the restraint of
habitual drunkards by placing them on what was called the black list,
Parliament presently learned that it had so framed the law that no
one could be black-listed except by his own consent? The development
from this to a system by which laws would not merely be amended,
but devised ab ovo, by professional legislators, is easy to foresee;
and with properly-devised precautions to ensure that the laws created
shall express the will of a sovereign people sufficiently educated
in political duty to possess a will worthy of consideration, probably
no better solution of the legislative difficulty can be imagined.
The conduct of foreign affairs is a matter much less easy to reform. If
despotisms were not such desperately untrustworthy things, a good
sound autocracy would probably be the best form of government for the
function of conducting the affairs of one nation with another. The
extraordinary diplomatic success of Russia is an evidence of
this. But Russia also illustrates the drawbacks of despotism. In its
management of foreign affairs Russia has (despite the habit which
its departments occasionally display of acting in conflict with one
another) beaten all the civilised nations. Russia has a "continuous"
foreign policy. There are no changes of ministers to nullify each
other's work and to encourage the diplomatists of other nations to
procrastinate and shilly-shally over negotiations in the hope that
a general election will bring in a new set of statesmen, easier to
deal with. And Russia can herself procrastinate, prevaricate and play
all sorts of tricks, neglect her promises, ignore her pledges, and
prosecute her cryptic aims, without the smallest fear of a question
in Parliament to spoil her game by letting all the world into her
dark and devious secrets. The more a nation becomes democratised,
the less competent it is to manage its foreign policy against less
democratic nations, and a truly popular Government is, in the present
state of the world, about the worst conceivable instrument for that
purpose. With an ever-increasing democratisation of all governments
such as we are sure to witness during this century, foreign offices
of the present kind will become more and more incompetent until some
sort of machinery is invented in their place.
Nor will the disappearance of the ultimate resort to arms, as a
possibility always threatening in the background, tend to improve
matters. It will, on the contrary, make them worse. There can be
no doubt that the awful fear of war, which must haunt the pillow
of every statesman in our day with dreams of pitiable horror,
does exercise an influence in settling controversies which, without
this terror, would drag their slow length along from generation to
exasperated generation. And if we try to imagine that the increased
conscientiousness of a better time will help nations to deal more
honourably with each other, it is to be feared that even the vast
progress of the quick-moving century on which we have entered will not
suffice to bind the princes to its pleasure and teach their senators
wisdom. It is unfortunately in regard to honour between nation and
nation that conscience develops most slowly, and many a man who would
scorn to trick a fellow-citizen, or even defraud a railway company,
and who would quite possibly hesitate before smuggling a box of cigars
through the custom-house, will calmly advocate acts of international
dishonesty and oppression abhorrent to any conscientious mind.
There can be no doubt that the most deleterious influence of our times,
which encourages nations to delay and deny to each other justice and
the fulfilment of solemn obligations, is the habit of waiting upon
the chances of a minister's fall, and a resulting change of policy. So
long as almost any day may bring a new set of statesmen, predisposed
against anything which their predecessors may have approved, diplomacy
will be disfigured by ways that are dark and tricks that are vain:
and the logical twentieth of the centuries may be trusted to perceive
this. Consequently some method will have to be devised by which a
continuous foreign policy may be made compatible with the performance
of a nation's will. And here the wiser nature of the new age will
assist the constructive genius of the reformer. No doubt the habit of
changing our minds on the basic principles of government about once
every six years will have been eradicated. Peoples will deliberate
more intelligently upon the important questions which they decide by
their votes: and it will no longer be thought--or rather, we shall no
longer act as if we thought--that a modification of general opinion
in regard (say) to Home Rule for Ireland must necessarily carry with
it a change of opinion as to whether it is desirable to extend our
influence in Afghanistan. When this error is abandoned, probably
foreign affairs will no longer be made part and parcel of the work
of the same set of men that is elected to manage domestic policy. It
will then be possible for the people to express--as they rarely have
any opportunity to express under the present system--their sovereign
will in regard to international matters. And here, as everywhere,
responsibility will certainly exercise an educative influence. When men
intelligently realise that by their votes they are deciding the fate
of their country, they will deliberate long before yielding a decision
so momentous. Inasmuch as the foreign affairs of any nation are truly
understood only by a very limited class, because very few people are
willing to give up enough of their leisure to the studies necessary for
such an understanding, it seems reasonable to think that one feature
of the polity of the year 2000 may be the limitation of the right to
vote on foreign affairs to men and women who have demonstrated in some
sufficient manner their competence to assist in directing the action
of their representatives in matters so intricate. The increased leisure
with which other reforms already foreseen will endow the people will of
course facilitate the acquirement of this competence, and the right to
vote on foreign affairs will doubtless be a coveted social distinction,
subserving the perennial love of titles and the childlike pleasure of
having letters after one's name. Nor need we be too much daunted in
this conjecture by the whispered word "oligarchy." When oligarchy
really means government by those best qualified to govern--the
nature of this "bestness" being intelligently determined--oligarchy
will be recognised as the most satisfactory form of government:
and in order to exclude objectionable one-sidedness in the method of
selecting voters for the high duty of guarding the nation's honour,
no doubt some method of selection by vote can be discovered, free
from liability to reintroduce the baleful evil of party.
Coming now to other functions of a State, the most obvious subject
for conjecture is that suggested by the tendency in recent times of
governments (and following their example of municipalities) to engage
in trade. The comment which gained currency over a decade ago, that
we were all socialists then, is still more justified now. Will States
continue their increasing practice of usurping the place of private
adventurers? Will railways, canals, telephonic and teleautographic
systems, street conveyances, and so forth, be owned and controlled
by various public authorities, after education, some other functions,
including the feeding and clothing of poor children during school age,
and the care of the unemployed (which States before long will certainly
have embraced) have by a more enlightened polity been returned to the
proper hands? The whole question of whether socialism is a probable
solution of the difficulties which its advocates believe it capable of
solving is here involved. Applying our familiar principle of estimating
the tendencies of the future by the trend of events in the past, it
seems certain that there will for a good many years immediately to
come be an increase in the functions assumed by the State: but that
the whole plunge into socialism will not be undertaken. For, while
measures undisguisedly socialistic in character are more and more
advocated and adopted, the open principle of State socialism seems
to find less support every year. Whenever distress becomes prevalent,
plenty of writers, for instance, loudly denounce Governments for not
finding work for everyone who fails to find work for himself--so long
as he is a man! (No one appears to think it the Government's duty to
find work for women.) But when socialism is openly propounded, the
same authors just as vehemently denounce the socialistic system to
which this principle of regarding the State as the duty-bound employer
of the workless clearly tends. What will most likely happen is that
devices, more and more socialistic, for dealing with emergencies, and
inconveniences of various sorts, will be adopted and maintained until
their own inconvenience and injustice have made themselves felt: and
then a more reasonable age will get rid of them--better remedies having
meantime been discovered--at the same time perceiving their deleterious
effect upon private responsibility, and wondering why it has tolerated
the old methods so long. In other words, socialistic experiments will
have demonstrated their own evils before the habit of indulging in
them has gone so far as to allow States to drift the whole way into
socialism. It is even possible that the example of some single nation,
drifting thus far, and setting up a socialistic State, may serve as
a useful warning to the rest of the world, and determine the gradual
abandonment of the dangerous tendencies which will have increasingly
manifested themselves. For it is certain that, unless in exceptional
and abnormal instances--of which the Australian Commonwealth is very
likely to furnish an example--political systems will always continue
to develop by evolutionary, and not by revolutionary, steps. We shall
pass gradually, and by a process of construction and elimination,
from one condition to another, until the very greatly improved system
of government and administration whose period of existence I have
ventured to place at about the beginning of the next century, has
become general throughout the world.
We may, for instance, very easily imagine how a more intelligent
electorate will abolish some abuses, by considering the condition
of the post-office department of this and other countries. It is
hardly thinkable that, during any period of the world's history, the
business of carrying letters can be thrown open to anyone who chooses
to undertake it. If there were nothing to be dealt with except the
domestic correspondence of each nation, probably it would be a great
deal better that it should be thus thrown open to competition: it is
hardly likely that the vast business of international correspondence
can ever be satisfactorily conducted, except by administrations
acting in the name and behalf of every State. But there is not the
least reason for thinking that the abuses which deface the postal
department of this and every other nation will be perpetual. The
British post-office contributes annually a "profit" of several
millions sterling to the Exchequer. Every person who writes a letter,
therefore, is taxed for doing it. In proportion to the intelligence,
commercial enterprise, family affection, or professional diligence
by which he is prompted to use correspondence, every one of us is
compelled to contribute something more to the up-keep of the State
than his neighbour who is too lazy, too ignorant or too callous to
trouble himself with letter-writing. No doubt it is impossible,
without a loss which would amount to subsidising, in an equally
objectionable manner, the users of the post-office, to conduct that
department except at a profit of some sort: but it surely will
not be pretended that it could not be conducted without exacting
such a surplus as the post-office does annually contribute to the
Budget. The vicious manner in which we treat the postal service as a
sort of trading department, expected to yield the Chancellor of the
Exchequer a convenient sum towards his expenditure, is illustrated by
the disgraceful underpayment of the minor officials, such as postmen,
small post-masters, telegraph messengers and the like. The post-office
buys its labour in the cheapest market: there is but too much reason
for the belief that it treats with oppressive harshness attempts on
the part of its servants to better their wages by organisation: and
when reproved in the House of Commons for sweating his work-people,
a postmaster-general can always reply, amid applause, that he dare
not embarrass his right-honourable friend the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The polity of the enlightened future will assuredly desist
from penalising intelligence, enterprise, and the other commendable
characteristics which tend to increase a man's correspondence; and
the postmaster-general who will be praised a hundred years hence
will be that one who has succeeded in managing his department with
the smallest possible surplus. We have only to envisage the obvious
justice of this ambition to perceive the objections which attach to
the adoption of trading functions by the State. Though it is very
likely that railways will be nationalised in this, as they have been
nationalised or subsidised in many other countries, it is quite
certain that if we do nationalise them we shall be compensated by
none of the advantages which make us tolerant, and even unconscious,
of the abuses of the British post-office--itself in most respects
one of the least imperfect of bureaucracies. The faults generally
found with railways are precisely the faults of bureaucracy, and in
proportion as railways become more and more united in their policy,
through amalgamation and arrangements for mutual assistance, those
faults constantly increase. The same will presently be found true of
all governmental usurpations of private enterprise: and it cannot be
doubted that in this, as in so many other respects, the functions of
governments will be greatly reduced a hundred years hence.
One subject which cannot be neglected in any attempt to foresee the
conditions of the law in the next century is the delicate and difficult
one of marriage laws: and on no subject are differences of opinion so
numerous and so acute. All that seems to be generally agreed is that
under the present system inconveniences and immoralities occur: and
it is (of course) supposed to be a corollary that if the system were
changed these inconveniences and immoralities would disappear. This is
the usual method of considering social difficulties. Hardly anyone will
consent to base plans for the future upon experience of the past. It
is always presumed that new laws can reform abuses, without changes
in the spirit of the age, which gives rise to the abuses. One class of
thinkers, despairing of moral improvement, considers that, immorality
being irremediable, the only thing to be done is to give it sanction;
as it must exist, it must be made respectable and unscandalous. Another
set of reformers would penalise immorality by forbidding the guilty
party in a divorce suit to re-marry, just as there are people who
would prevent the physically unfit from marrying at all. Both forget
that the prohibition of legal unions is much more likely to lead to an
increase of irregular connections than to produce any other effect. No
doubt we could improve the physical standard of the legitimately born
by the prohibition last digressively mentioned: but it would be at
the expense of an increase in illegitimate births accompanied by the
additional disadvantage of bodily weakness. Similarly, so far from
the prohibition of re-marriage restraining the immorally disposed,
it is much more likely that it would encourage them: the fact that a
co-respondent could not be called upon to marry the woman divorced
in consequence of her guilty association with him would hardly act
generally as a deterrent; while, if he had been willing to face the
probable consequences of publicity, expense and inconvenience attending
a liaison with a woman under coverture, the co-respondent would not
think it necessary to abandon his confederate, if he wished, and she
were willing, to continue their connection after all the penalties had
been suffered, merely because the law prevented a regular union. It
is agreed by all jurists that the only justification for the greater
severity with which matrimonial infidelity is visited on women
as compared with men is the greater social degradation with which
society visits women who have offended. To penalise their offence
by prohibiting re-marriage would only perpetuate their degradation,
and does in fact so perpetuate and increase it in countries where
the condemned party in a divorce is forbidden the altar.
On the other hand, to recognise a sort of promiscuity, as some
writers have suggested that we shall be obliged to do, would probably
be attended by worse effects than the bold and straightforward
acceptance of polygamy as a necessary remedy for the excess of feminine
population, which a writer of letters to the shocked and astonished
newspapers of this city recently proposed. Neither expedient is capable
of being adopted: nor does there seem much likelihood that public
morality can be improved by legislation, though it is certain to be
much improved by the spontaneous amelioration of public sentiment. No
doubt in one or two particulars the marriage laws will gradually
undergo amendment. It will be realised that it is much more immoral
to compel unwilling couples to live together matrimonially, than
to set them free to remedy one of the most hideous of all possible
mistakes. The difficulty of determining what shall be done where
one party wishes for divorce, while the other does not, is greater:
but on the whole it will probably be considered more conducive to
morality to dissolve the marriage here, after a precautionary and
experimental period of provisional separation, than to insist upon its
perpetuation. That age will only be ripe for such a reform as this,
which, by moral progress, has rendered intolerable the position of
a libertine capable of entering into matrimony with the deliberate
intention of getting out of it again when it ceases to be attractive,
and in which the social estimate of a person who acted in the same
manner through instability of character would be not much better. In
any reform of the kind suggested, it would no doubt be arranged
that pecuniary liabilities, allocated to the support and education
of children, would follow the party insisting on divorce; and this
also would act as a check upon dishonest contracts of marriage.
Thus, for any radical improvement in the system of matrimonial
connections, we must look to a corresponding improvement in the
spirit of the age, and the first step in advance will have been
taken when marriage ceases to be the only legal contract which is
enforced notwithstanding the ignorance of a contracting party as to
the engagement entered into. The frequency of divorce petitions will be
greatly diminished from the time we get rid of the idiotic and almost
incredibly wicked convention by which we take every possible precaution
we can think of to ensure that a girl, when she marries, shall have
no possible means of knowing to what she is committing herself. No
more ingenious contrivance for obtaining marital infelicity could be
imagined. The next step will have been taken when it is recognised
as disgraceful for parents to put pressure upon the inclinations
of their children of either sex to induce them to marry, and when
social execration renders such pressure impossible. Concurrently
with this, or as a result of it, a third step will be some abatement
of our present entire neglect of any demand for good character in a
bridegroom who would be outraged if he thought that the least aspersion
could be suggested concerning his bride. In other words, the greatest
improvements in the status of the world with regard to matrimony will
be effected when we recognise the claim of woman to be made the equal
of man in knowledge, in discretion and in social rights. No legislative
reform as yet ever suggested could have anything like as much effect
in removing the evils under which we groan, in respect to matrimony,
as this natural and inevitable development.
Naturally the improvement in the position of women in the new age
will not arrive at a bound, nor will their rights in relation to
marriage be unaccompanied by other rights at present withheld,
and perhaps not always unreasonably withheld. On the contrary, the
recognition of one set of rights will facilitate and accelerate the
recognition of the other. It is generally agreed that the tendency
of the sexes is to become less divergent, intellectually and morally,
for reasons connected with what Spencer calls "the less early arrest
of individual evolution, and the result everywhere seen throughout
the organic world, of a self-preserving power inversely proportionate
to the race-preserving power." [33]
As it will have been realised, long before the advent of the next
century, that the surest way to improved capacity is to be found
in increased responsibility, women will not, a hundred years hence,
be allowed or compelled to shirk their political obligations. We may
see with half an eye that every year women are becoming more capable,
and also more desirous of aiding the counsels of the public: and
in some of our Colonies, as well as in some States of the American
Union, they are already voting, and voting (as it turns out) with
the most wonderful intelligence and usefulness. The influence of
the female vote in, for example, New Zealand has been for some time
perceptible in the legislation of that highly-enlightened colony:
and I never heard anyone object to the results of this influence
except persons whose conduct, or the conduct which they approved in
their associates, was likely to be inconvenienced by them. It is no
doubt true that women are a great deal more fond of demanding that
the law should do work which it would be better to leave to natural
developments of public character than could be wished: but then so are
men, and it is an unquestionable thing that the misdeeds which men more
readily condone than women are much more likely to be bad for public
morality than those which women condone more freely than men. There is
no particular reason for thinking at the present time (though there
was ample reason for thinking a few decades ago) that women will be
more prone to legislate unnecessarily, and therefore mischievously,
than men: and we are in any case bound to pass through a good many
years of parliament-worship before we awaken to the fact that the law
cannot do everything, and that any reform which is accomplished by
the spontaneous influence of public opinion is always a great deal
more complete, a great deal more conducive to public self-respect,
and a great deal better adjusted to the special requirements of every
individual circumstance that it touches, than one which is laboriously
and mechanically embodied in statutes which cannot but be imperfect,
cannot possibly fail to act oppressively and unjustly in one place or
another, and frequently prove to be unworkable from beginning to end.