LEGISLATIVE REFORM.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Progress is a general law of Nature, and the comparative study of
Evolution proves that the tendency to improvement increases with the
advance to higher planes of development. Among the lowest organisms the
rate of progress is hardly appreciable. The sea shells of the Devonian
period can scarcely be distinguished from the shells of our present
seas. The balls of amber found on the shores of the Baltic often
contain the mummies of insects closely resembling certain species of
latter-day flies and beetles, while the horse, the zebra, and other
modern varieties of the equine genus, have developed from a creature
not much larger than a fox. The Neanderthal skull proves that the heads
of our early ancestors were almost ape-like in their protruding jaws
and flatness of cranium. The lower animals adhere to inherited habits
with a persistency that has often proved their ruin by diminishing
their ability of adapting themselves to change of circumstances, as in
the case of that sea-lizard of the South sea islands, where its
ancestors had for ages managed to escape their only enemies by leaving
the water and crawling up the beach, and where their modern descendants
persist in crawling landward in the hope of escaping from dogs and
hunters.
The higher animals, on the other hand, rarely fail to profit by lessons
of experience. Trappers know that the contrivances for capturing wild
animals have to be changed from time to time, the older methods being
apt to lose their efficacy after the fate of a certain number of
victims has warned their relatives. Old rats have been seen driving
their young from a dish of arsenic-poisoned gruel. Deer, foxes, and
wild turkeys learn to avoid the favorite trails of the hunter; monkeys,
on their first arrival in a cold climate, impatiently tear off the
jackets or shawls furnished by the kindness of their keeper, but soon
learn to appreciate the advantage of artificial teguments, and even try
to increase their stock of wardrobe by appropriating every stray piece
of cloth they can lay their hands on.
The instinct of adaptation to the conditions of progress has asserted
itself both among modern and very ancient nations, though during the
mental bondage of the Middle Ages its manifestations were
systematically suppressed by the conservatism of religious bigots.
Savages show an almost apish eagerness in adopting the habits,
fashions, and foibles of civilization. The political institutions of
primitive nations are very elastic. The Grecian republics were not only
willing but anxious to improve their laws by abolishing abuses and
testing amendments. In ancient Rome every general assembly of freemen
exercised the functions of a legislative council; legislative reforms
were proposed by private citizens and were often carried by
acclamation, like the edict for the expulsion of the Tarquins, and the
resolution revoking the exile of Cicero.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Legislative reform, the manful renunciation of entangling alliances
with the ghosts of the past, is a sword that has more than once cut a
Gordian knot of fatal complications. The suppression of monasteries
saved four of our Spanish American sister republics from a brood of
vampires that had drained the life-blood of Spain for a series of
centuries. In England the timely repeal of the corn-laws averted an
explosion that might have rent the coherence of the entire British
empire. The abolition of slavery with one blow destroyed a hydra that
had menaced the safety of the American Union by an endless series of
political disputes. By the abolition of serfdom Czar Alexander elevated
the Russian empire to the rank of a progressive nation. The very
possibility of national progress depends, indeed, on the hope of
legislative reform, for the rigor of unalterable laws prevents social
development as the clasp of an iron ring prevents the growth of a tree.
C.—PERVERSION.
All the intelligent nations of antiquity were distinguished by a
tendency to legislative progress, till the freedom of that progress was
checked by the claims of religious infallibility. The founder of the
Zendavesta advanced that claim for a pandect of pretended revelations
which became the religious code of Central Asia, and as a consequence
the intellectual and industrial development of two valiant nations was
stunted by legislative conservatism—the proverbially “unalterable laws
of the Medes and Persians.” The claims of an infallible revelation
preclude the necessity of reform. “Should mortals presume to improve
the ordinances of a God?”
But the blind hatred of progress which has for so many centuries
degraded the Christian hierarchy below the priesthood of all other
intolerant creeds, is the earth-renouncing antinaturalism of their
founder. The priests of Zoroaster, Moses, and Mohammed claimed the
sufficiency of their dogmas for the purposes of national prosperity.
The priests of the nature-hating Galilean attempted to suppress the
very desire of that prosperity. “The doctrine of renunciation made
patriotism an idle dream: the saints, whose ‘kingdom was not of this
world,’ had no business with vanities of that sort; no chieftain could
trust his neighbor; cities were pitted against cities and castles
against castles; patriotic reformers would vainly have appealed to the
sympathies of men who had been taught to reserve their interest for the
politics of the New Jerusalem” (Secret of the East, p. 76).
The Rev. Spurgeon, of London, England, recently provoked the protests
of his Liberal colleagues by the confession that he “positively hated
advanced thought;” but only five centuries ago such protests were
silenced with the gag and the fagot. For nearly a thousand years every
clergyman who had the courage to lift his voice in favor of secular
reforms was fiercely attacked as a traitor to the sacred cause of
other-worldliness. To question the authority of the church was a crime
which could not in the least be palliated by such pleas as the temporal
interests of mankind, and a mere hint at the fallibility of “revealed
scriptures” could only be expiated in the blood of the offender. Nay,
thousands of scientists, historians, and philosophers who had never
expressed a direct doubt of that sort, were doomed to a death of
torture merely because the logical inference of their discoveries was
at variance with the dogmas of the Galilean miracle-mongers. From the
reign of Charlemagne to the outbreak of the Protestant revolt the
intolerance of Christian bigots interposed an insuperable dam between
the projects and the realization of social reforms.
“I cannot conceive,” says Hallam, “of any state of society more adverse
to the intellectual improvement of mankind than one which admitted no
middle line between dissoluteness and fanatical mortifications.”
If it had not been for the exotic civilization of Moorish Spain, it
would be strictly true that at the end of the thirteenth century, when
the enemies of nature had reached the zenith of their power, “the
countries of Europe, without a single exception, were worse governed,
more ignorant, more superstitious, poorer, and unhappier than the worst
governed provinces of pagan Rome.”
In China and India, too, the resistance of religious prejudice has for
ages frustrated the hopes of political development, and the
civilization of Europe dates only from the time when a more or less
complete separation of church and state was effected by the
insurrection of the Germanic nations, and where the work of that
separation has been left unfinished the march of reform halts at every
step. Every claim of dogmatic infallibility has proved a spoke in the
wheels of progress.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The pig-headed conservatism of orthodox nations has never failed to
avenge itself in its ultimate results, but its fatuity has, perhaps,
been most strikingly illustrated by the practical consequences of
legislative non-progressiveness. There was a time when the small value
of real estate made it a trifle for an Italian prince to present a
favorite prelate with a few square leagues of neglected woodlands; but
now, when those woods have been turned into vineyards and
building-lots, and over-population makes the monopoly of land a
grievous burden, hundreds of industrious peasants are obliged to starve
to swell the revenues of a bloated priest, who nevertheless succeeds in
silencing all protests by an appeal to the “necessity of respecting
time-honored institutions.” At a time when agriculture and pastoral
pursuits were the chief industries of Scotland, it was no great
grievance to sequester the seventh day for the exclusive service of
ecclesiastic purposes; but now, when thousands of poor factory children
need outdoor recreations as they need sunlight and bread, it has become
an infamous outrage on personal rights to enforce a medieval by-law for
the suppression of outdoor sports on the day when those who need it
most can find their only chance for recreation. Nevertheless, the dread
of innovations defeats the urged repeal of a law which for the last
hundred years has obliged millions of city dwellers to sacrifice the
sunshine of their lives for the benefit of a few clerical vampires. The
repeal of the witchcraft laws was preceded by a transition period of at
least two hundred years, when the mere dread of an open rupture with
the specters of the past cowed intelligent jurists into accepting the
charge of an impossible crime, and consigning the victims of
superstition to the doom of a hideous death. Their private rationalism
might revolt against the absurdity of the proceedings, but there were
the witnesses, there were the legal precedents, there were the explicit
provisions of the penal code, and with or without the consent of their
intellectual conscience they had to pronounce the sentence of death.
The penal statutes of medieval England made sheep stealing a capital
offense, and the mulish conservatism of British legislators refused to
abolish that relic of the Dark Ages till the common sense of the lower
classes found means to redress the abuse in a way of their own. Juries
agreed to acquit sheep-stealers altogether, rather than vote away their
lives for that of a quadruped. It was in vain that the prosecuting
attorney established the fact of the offense beyond a shadow of
reasonable doubt. It was in vain that the charge of the judge
emphatically indorsed the indictment. It was in vain that the
defendants themselves completed the evidence of their guilt by a frank
confession; they were acquitted amidst the wrathful protests of the
court and the plaudits of the audience, till sheep-owners themselves
were obliged to petition for the repeal of the time-dishonored law. The
idea that the mere antiquity of a legal custom is an argument in its
favor is a twin sister of the superstitious veneration of antiquated
dogmas.
E.—REFORM.
The superstitious dread of innovation, rather than the want of natural
intelligence, has for ages thwarted the hopes of rationalism, and the
renunciation of that prejudice promises to rival the blessing of
Secular education in promoting the advance of social reforms. Orthodox
restiveness, rather than any conceivable degree of ignorance, has, for
instance, prevented the repeal of the Religious Disability laws which
still disgrace the statutes of so many civilized nations. A chemical
inventor would be suspected of insanity for trying to demonstrate his
theories by quoting the Bible in preference to a scientific text-book,
yet on questions as open to investigation and proof as any problem of
chemistry, the courts of numerous intelligent nations still refuse to
accept the testimony of a witness who happens to prefer the philosophy
of Humboldt and Spencer to the rant of an oriental spook-monger. The
proposition to oblige a water-drinker to defray the expense of his
neighbor’s passion for intoxicating beverages would justly land the
proposer in the next lunatic asylum, yet millions upon millions of our
Caucasian fellow-men are still taxed to enable their neighbors to enjoy
the luxuries of a creed which the conscience of the unwilling
tithe-payer rejects as a degrading superstition. In Europe countless
Nonconformists have to contribute to the support of a parish-priest or
village-rector on pain of having a sheriff sell their household goods
at public auction. In America farmers and mechanics have to pay double
taxes in order to enable an association of mythology-mongers to hold
their property tax-free. Because the pantheon of the Ammonites included
a god with cannibal propensities, helpless infants were for centuries
roasted on the consecrated gridiron of that god; and because eighteen
hundred years ago the diseased imagination of a world-renouncing bigot
conceived the idea of a deity delighting in the self-affliction of his
creatures, the gloom of death still broods over the day devoted to the
special worship of that God, and the coercive penalties of the law are
weekly visited upon all who refuse to sacrifice their health and
happiness on the altar of superstition.
But legislative abuses are not confined to religious anachronisms. The
inconsistencies of our penal code still betray the influence of
medieval prejudices in the unwise leniency, as well as in the
disproportionate severity, of their dealings with purely secular
offenses. The vice of intemperance was for centuries encouraged by the
example of the clergy, while the control, or even the suppression, of
the sexual instinct was enforced by barbarous penalties. And while the
panders of the alcohol vice are still countenanced by the sanction of
legal license and admitted to official positions of honor and
influence, the mediators of sexual vice are treated as social outcasts,
and punished with a severity out of all proportion to the actual social
standards of virtue. The deserted wife, who in a moment of despair has
caused the death of an unborn child, is treated as the vilest of
criminals, while the crime of a railway shark or tenement-speculator
whose selfishness and greed have caused a fatal disaster, is condoned
in consideration of “social respectability,” i.e., a mask of orthodox
sentiments and unctuous cant. A Christian jury will thank a banker for
shooting a poor wretch whom extreme distress may have driven to enter a
house for predatory purposes, but if that same banker should be
convicted of embezzling the hard-earned savings of trusting widows and
orphans, his fellow-hypocrites will circulate an eloquent petition for
his release from a few years of light imprisonment.
There is need of other reforms, which recommend themselves by such
cogent arguments that their adoption seems only a question of time,
such as the protection of forests, the recognition of women’s rights,
the “habitual criminal” law, physical education, and the abolition of
the poison-traffic.
It is undoubtedly true that the progress from barbarism to culture is
characterized by the growth of a voluntary respect for the authority of
legal institutions, but it is equally true that the highest goals of
civilization cannot be reached till the degree of that respect shall be
measured by the utility, rather than by the antiquity, of special laws.