The tramp has murdered a child for her money. What is his defence?
I appear for the prisoner, and claim that he is not responsible for his
act.
(Cries of shame! bosh! lynch him!)
I will first of all remind the court of the reasons upon which I base my
claim.
(Gentleman in white tie rises and declaims vehemently against the
immorality of the defence. Talks excitedly about the flood gates of
anarchy, and the bulwarks of society, and is with difficulty persuaded
to resume his seat.)
Clerical environment does not make for toleration and sweet
reasonableness. I proceed to open my case.
Every quality of body or mind possessed by a child at birth has been
handed down to the child by its ancestors.
The child could not select its ancestors; could not select its own
qualities of body and mind.
Therefore the child is not to blame for any evil quality of body or mind
with which it is born.
Therefore this tramp was not to blame if, at the moment of birth, his
nature was prone to violence or to vice.
The prisoner is a criminal. He is either a criminal born, or a criminal
made.
If he is a "born criminal" he is a victim of atavism, and ought not to
be blamed, but pitied. For it is not a fault, but a misfortune, to be
born an atavist.
Had a tiger killed the child, we should have to admit that such is the
tiger's nature; as it is the nature of a lark to sing.
But, if the prisoner is an atavist it is _his_ nature to be furious and
cruel.
We cannot, however, be sure that a man is a "born criminal" because he
commits a murder. So great is the power of environment for evil, as well
as for good, that perhaps the most innocent and humane man in this court
might, by the influence of an evil environment, have been made capable
of an act as horrible.
If the prosecution adopt the course I expect them to adopt, and claim
that the unfortunate prisoner "knew better": if they succeed in proving
that the prisoner was well-educated, carefully brought up, and never in
all his life was once exposed to any evil influence, then I shall claim
that such evidence proves the prisoner to be atavist, and entitles him
to a verdict of unsound mind.
Because no man whose whole environment had been good, would be capable
of murdering a child for a few coppers, unless he were an atavist or
insane.
On the other hand, if it should appear, in the course of evidence, that
the prisoner was born of criminal and ignorant parents, was brought
up in an atmosphere of violence and crime, was sent out, untaught, or
evilly taught, and undisciplined, to scramble for a living; if it should
be proved that he fell into bad company, that he turned thief, that he
was sent to prison and branded as a felon: if it should be proved that
he has been hunted by the police, flogged with the "cat" by warders,
bullied by counsel, denounced by magistrates and judges; if it should be
proved that he has been treated at every turn of his wretched career
as a wild beast or a pariah; if it should be proved that he has been
allowed to degenerate into an ignorant, a savage, a bestial and a
drunken loafer; then, I shall plead that this miserable man has
been reduced to his present morose, cruel, and immoral state by evil
environment; and I shall ask for a verdict in his favour. (Cries of
Monster! Hang him! Lynch him!)
It is said the prisoner is an inhuman monster. He has been made a
monster by a monstrous heredity; or he has been made a monster by a
monstrous environment.
No man of sound heredity ever becomes a monster save by the action of an
evil environment.
Say the prisoner is an atavist; a man bred back to the beasts. Then he
is entitled to be judged by the standard we apply to beasts.
Some of you will remember Poe's story of the murder in the Rue Morgue,
in which a terrible murder is done by an ape. In such a case our horror
and our anger would probably cause us to shoot the ape. But that would
be the uprising within us of our own atavistic and brutish passions; it
would not be the result of our promptings of our human reason. Reason
might prompt us to kill the ape as a precaution against a repetition of
violence. But anger and hate are not reasonable, not human: all anger
and all hate are bestial--like the hate and the anger of the tramp. But
if the prisoner is not an atavist, or brute-man, if he has been reduced
to his present moral state of environment, ask for some measure of
compensation from the society; unjust laws, and dishonest social
conditions, and immoral neglect are responsible for the fact that a
brother man has been allowed, or rather compelled, by society, to grow
up an ignorant and desperate savage.
Be that as it may, the prisoner is a creature of heredity and
environment; and, as he is bad, the heredity, or the environment, or
both, must be bad. And I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour.
Will any man on the jury say me nay? The prisoner has defied the law,
he has injured society, has outraged morality. Have law and morality not
injured him? Has society not injured him?
He has committed a terrible crime, for which it is claimed that he
should be punished. Who shall be punished for the crimes of the law and
of society against him?
There is much proper and natural sympathy expressed by the prosecution
with the parents of the murdered child. Is there no sympathy with this
unhappy victim of atavism, or of society? This prisoner has been bred
as a beast, or treated as a savage, until he has become a savage and a
beast.
Here stands a human being, poisoned, battered, and degraded beyond all
human semblance. Here stands a brother man, whose soul has been murdered
by inches, has been murdered by the society that now hales him here to
be denounced, and execrated, and hanged.
Do I speak truth, or falsehood? Is logic true? Are facts true? That
which society has here planted it has here to reap. Not all the law, the
piety, and education in the wide, wide earth can make this ruined and
degraded prisoner the man he might have been. Not all the repentance we
can feel, not any compensation we can offer can buy him back the soul we
have destroyed. It is too late.
Gentlemen of the jury, is it nothing to you? You are accessories to the
fact. I appeal to your justice, to your pity--
(A voice: How much pity had he for the child?)
None. There is no pity in his soul. Either his forefathers put none
there, or society has destroyed it.
(Cries of monstrous! immoral! preposterous! shame!)
I hear cries of monstrous and immoral. But I do not hear any voice say
"false." Is there a man in court can impeach my reasoning, or disprove
my facts? Is there a man in court can deny one statement I have made?
Is there a man in court can break one link of the steel chain of logic
I have riveted upon our metaphysicians, our moralists, our kings, our
judges, and our gods?
You say my defence is unreasonable and immoral. You dread the effects
of justice and of reason upon society. You talk of crime and cruelty, of
law and order. You want the prisoner punished. You ask for justice:
but you want revenge. Give me a fair hearing, and I will speak of these
things to you.
When you cry out that to deny responsibility is immoral you are
thinking, at the back of your heads, that men can only be kept within
the law by fear; that wrong-doing can only be repressed by punishment.
It is the old and cruel conventions of society that hold you fast to
the error that blame and punishment are righteous and salutary. It is
ignorance of human nature that betrays you into the belief that men can
be made honest and benevolent by cruelty and terror.
Punishment has never been just, has never been effectual. Punishment has
always failed of its purpose: the greater its severity, the more abject
its failure.
Men cannot be made good and gentle by means of violence and wrong.
The real tamers and purifiers of human hearts are love and charity and
reason.
You seem to think it is a noble thing to be angry with a criminal, and
to be angry with me for defending him. But it is always ignoble to be
angry.
Some of you deny this blood-stained murderer for your brother; but
directly your features are distorted by passion, directly your fury
overcomes your reason, directly you begin to shriek for his blood, your
close relationship to him appears.
Reason, patience, self-control, these are lacking in the savage
criminal: I look around for them in vain amongst the crowd in this
court.
I said that I would take note of what our Christian friend said about
repentance. I will speak to that question now. There are few who so
often forget the tenets of their own religion as the clergy. I have
found it so.
The clergy are always amongst the first to raise the cry of immorality
when one speaks against punishment as unjust, or useless.
Yet the clergy preach the doctrine of repentance. It is only a few weeks
since the English papers printed a letter from a murderer under sentence
of death, in which he spoke of meeting his relatives "at the feet of
Jesus."
In a week from the date of his letter he expected to be in heaven. In
a month from the time when he murdered his wife, he expected to be with
Jesus, and to live in happiness and glory for ever.
That is what the prison chaplain had taught him. It is what the clergy
do teach. They talk of the folly and the immorality of abolishing prison
and gallows; and then they offer the perpetrators of the most inhuman
and terrible crimes a certainty of everlasting bliss in a sinless
heaven.
If it is immoral and absurd to say that all criminals are sinned against
as well as sinning; if it is immoral and absurd to say that we ought not
to hang a man, nor to flog, nor to imprison him, what kind of morality
and wisdom lie in offering all criminals an eternity of happiness and
glory?
The clergy are that which their environment has made them. What kind of
reasoning can we expect from men who have been taught that it is wicked
to think?
Before you are angry with me for defending the prisoner be sure that you
are not confounding the ideas of the criminal and the crime. I hate the
crime as much as any man here; but I do not hate the criminal. I am not
defending evil; I am defending the evil-doer.
Before you plume yourselves too much upon your superior morality and
greater love of justice, allow me to remind you that I am asking that
the world shall be moral, and not only this man: I am demanding justice
for _all_ men, and not for a few. But you--you think you have acted
righteously and honourably when you have hanged a murderer; but you have
not a thought for the inhuman social conditions that make men criminals.
This prisoner is but a type: a type of the legion victims of a selfish
and cowardly society. Every day, in every city, in every country,
innocent children are being poisoned and perverted by millions. Which of
you has spoken a word or lifted a hand to prevent this wholesale wrong?
What man of you all, who are so fierce against crime, so loud in praise
of morality, has ever tried in act or speech to combat the crime and the
immorality which society perpetuates: with your knowledge and consent?
You who are so anxious to punish crime, what are you doing to prevent
it?
When I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour you assume that I
would set him free, assuring him that he is an injured man and that fate
compelled him to the act of murder.
Do you think, then, that I would release a tiger amongst the crowd in a
circus, or that I would allow a homicidal maniac to go at large in the
streets of a city?
It would be folly to give to this brutalised and ignorant tramp a
message which hardly a man in this court is sufficiently educated and
refined to understand; it would be folly to set at liberty a besotted
savage: it would be unsafe.
But I say to _you_ that the prisoner is a victim of heredity and
environment, that he has been debased and wronged by society, and that
to punish him is unjust.
(A woman's voice: "The monster! Kill him.")
Madam, there is not a woman here can be sure that any child she bears
may not be driven by society to stand some day in the dock.
But still. You are not satisfied. Some of you, at any rate, still frown
and set your teeth hard. Logic or no logic, he has murdered a baby.
There stands my clerical friend, with knitted brows, and fire in his
eyes. But that his calling checks his fierce old Saxon heredity
this parson would echo the stern speech of Carlyle to the criminal:
"Scoundrel! Know that we for ever hate thee!"
Ah! I thought so. The cloud begins to clear from the face of my clerical
friend: the crowd look hopeful. Grim old Thomas appeals to you. The
prisoner _is_ a scoundrel, and you _do_ hate him. Nothing I have said,
so far, has shaken that feeling. He is a scoundrel, and you hate him.
What is more, you cannot forgive me for not hating him. You cannot
believe that I am a natural man. I _ought_ to hate him. Well, my
friends, how do we feel about a shark? I think you will find that men
hate a shark. And I think you will find that they hate him more bitterly
than they hate a tiger. And I think you will find that they believe they
hate the shark because he is cruel. But that seems to me a mistake. The
shark is not so cruel as a cat; it is not so cruel as a shrike; it is
nothing like so cruel as a European lady. For though the shark will
devour any animals it can reach, it does not deliberately torture them.
Now the cat tortures the mouse, the shrike impales flies or beetles upon
a thorn, and leaves them to die, and the European lady eats lobster,
which has, to her knowledge, been boiled, alive.
But the shark kills human beings. So do tigers, so do lions, and so do
men.
But the shark is horrible. Yes; now we are getting nearer the real root
of our hatred. The shark is horrible. And so is the murderer.
But there is a difference between horror and hate. The murderer is
horrible to me, far more horrible than the shark, just as a mad man is
more horrible than a mad dog; just as a human corpse is more awful than
the carcase of a deer.
The criminal makes me shudder, he makes my flesh creep; my whole nature
recoils from him. But I do not hate him, and I do not blame him.
Which of us does not admire and honour an innocent, graceful, and
charming girl? To all of us, men and women, her presence is more
delightful than a garden of sweet flowers.
Think of some such amiable and gentle creature. Then imagine that we
meet her ten years hence, and find her a drunken harlot, wallowing in
the gutter. Think of her then so hideous, filthy, and obscene; think of
her debased, indecent, treacherous; think of her incapable of honesty,
of gratitude, of truth; think of her sullied and broken and so vile that
she would betray her only friend for a glass of gin: think of her well,
and ask yourselves how should we feel towards her.
Some of us would blame her: some of us would pity her: some of us would
try to befriend her: but hardly one of us could endure her touch, her
speech, her gaze. She has become a horror in the light of the day.
My clerical friend and I would stand before her sick and sorry and
ashamed. We should be alike dismayed and shocked: we should be alike
touched and repelled. But there in that tragic moment would appear the
likeness and the difference between us. He would not _understand_.
The unfortunate woman has been rendered physically and morally loathsome
to us. So has this murderer. But that should cause us to pity, and not
to hate them; it should inspire us not to destroy them; but to destroy
the evil conditions that have brought them, and millions as unfortunate
as they, to this terrible and shameful pass. The bitterest wrong of all
is the fact that these fellow-creatures of ours have been degraded below
the reach of our help and our affection.
Looking into my own heart, and recalling my experience of men and women,
I must own that there is not one in a thousand of us who might not have
become a shame and a horror to our fellows had our environment been
as cruel and as hard as the environment of these from whom we shrink
appalled.
And when I read of a murder, when I see some human wreck, so repulsive
and unsightly that my soul is sick within me, and my flesh shudders away
from the contact, I crush the anger out of my heart, and remember what
I am and might have been, and that this man, this woman, now so dreadful
or so vile, is a victim of a state of society which most of us believe
in and uphold.
I cannot hate these miserables, but I cannot love them. I could not
sleep in a dirty bed, nor eat a rotten peach, nor listen to a piano
out of tune, nor drink after a leper or a slut, nor make a friend of
a sweater, nor shake the hand of an assassin, nor sit at table with a
filthy sot.
But to drive our fellow-creatures into disgrace and crime beyond
redemption, and then to hate them or to hang them; is that just?
To loathe and punish the victims of society, and never lift a hand
against the wrongs that are their ruin, is that reasonable?
I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour; but I cannot ask that
he be set at liberty. We could not liberate a smallpox patient nor a
lunatic.
Although the prisoner ought not to be punished, it is imperative that he
be restrained.
Being what he is: being what society has made him, he is not fit to be
at large.
We must defend ourselves against him. We must protect our children from
him, even although we have failed to protect other children against
society.
I ask the jury for a verdict in the prisoner's favour. I leave the
prisoner to their justice and to their reason. That is my case.