From the day of Sir Thomas More to the present hour, it has been claimed
by wise and experienced men that punishment is not only unjust, but
worse than useless. And the statistics of crime have always supported
the claim.
There was more crime in the fifteenth century, when penalties were so
severe, than there is to-day. There were worse crimes. There was more
brutality.
The abolition of cruel punishments has diminished crime. The abolition
of flogging in the army and navy has not injured either service. The
improvement in school discipline has not lowered the moral standard of
boys and girls.
But, it may be urged, the decrease in crime, and the improvement in
morals are not due only to the increased leniency of punishments. They
are due also to the spread of education, and to the improved conditions
of life.
Exactly. That is my case. Decrease of punishment, and increase of
education, have diminished crime and improved morals.
Punish less, and teach more; blame less, and encourage more; hate less,
and love more; and you will get not a lowering, but a raising of the
moral standard; not an increase in crime, but a decrease. And the
improvement will be due to alteration for the better of--environment.
Chance has placed me very often in positions of authority. I have been
in charge of rough and reckless men: soldiers, militiamen, navvies,
workers of all sorts. I have never found it necessary to be harsh, nor
to threaten, nor to drive. I have always found that to respect men as
men, to treat them fairly and quietly, and to show a little kindness now
and again, has sufficed to get the best out of them.
I have gone into the midst of a crowd of Irish soldiers, all drunk, and
all fighting in true Donnybrook fashion, and have got order without a
hard word, without making a single prisoner. Directly they recognised me
they calmed down. Had I been a sergeant disliked by them they would have
thrown me downstairs.
I have found the wildest and the lowest amenable to reason and to
kindness. One of the greatest ruffians in the regiment once spoke rudely
to me in camp, and even threatened me. I was then a lance-corporal,
and a mere boy. I sat down and talked to the bruiser quietly for a few
minutes, and from that day he would have done anything for me.
There was a blackguard in my company who once threatened to murder me.
A few months later he was taken ill in the night and I attended to him,
and probably saved his life. He never forgot it. It was but a small
kindness, and he was what is generally called a scoundrel, but he showed
his gratitude to me all the rest of the time I was in the army.
As a child I was brought up under strict discipline. I felt that it was
a wrong method. I have "spoilt" my children; and they are better than I
ever was.
Parents beat their children for their own errors. If a father cannot
gain the respect and obedience of his children, it is because he is
foolish, or violent, or ignorant. Children, soldiers, and animals are
alike in one respect: they know and respect strength and reason. The
quiet manager, officer, sergeant, parent, who knows his own mind, who
keeps his temper, who is not afraid, can always get discipline and
order. If I thought any one under my control or care was afraid of me, I
should feel ashamed. If a master rules only by fear of punishment he is
not fit to rule at all. When those over whom we happen to be placed in
authority feel that we deserve their respect, we get it If you want
to know whether a man is fit for command, put him with men who are not
bound to obey him. Put him with his equals, where he has no power to
punish nor to harm. Thus you will find the real leader of men: the man
who leads with his brains.
I knew a young lieutenant once, a boy of twenty. He met a boy private in
town, and saw that he had been drinking. Had he made a prisoner of the
boy, the private would have got punished for drunkenness, and would have
got drunk again. But the young officer sent for the boy the next day and
said, "If I were you, Thomas, I wouldn't drink. It is a poor game, and
your people would not like it" That boy was cured.
That same officer, if the men were unsteady on parade, would stand quite
still and _look_ at them. He had clear blue eyes, and his look was
not stern, it was calm and confident. It brought the whole company to
attention without a word. The officer was a _man_, and the men knew it,
and they knew it because _he_ knew it The boss who begins to bully is
not sure of himself. Children, soldiers, workers, and animals know by
instinct when the boss is not sure of himself.
Those who put so much trust in blame and punishment do not understand
human nature. I said in a previous chapter that a man could not believe
a thing unless his reason told him that it was true. I now say that a
man cannot help believing a thing when his reason tells him it is true.
The secret of reform is to make men understand.
The terrors of capital punishment, the terrors of the "cat," even the
terrors of hell-fire fail to awe the criminal. That is because the
criminal is stupid or ignorant, and lacks imagination. He hears of hell,
and of death. But he cannot imagine either. He seldom thinks. He seldom
looks beyond the end of his nose.
Discipline is not preserved in the army by the dread of the "cat," nor
of the cells. It is kept by the fact that the wildest and most reckless
man knows that he _must_ obey, that the whole physical and moral force
of the army is united to insist upon obedience.
If he disobey an order he will be punished. He does not care a snap of
his fingers for the punishment. But he knows that after he has done his
punishment drill the order will be repeated, and that he will be obliged
to obey. He knows that the sentiment of the army is against him until he
does obey.
I have seen an officer get a battalion into a mess on parade, and then
lose his temper and bully the men.. And I have seen another officer
on the same day drill the men and get them to work like a machine. The
first officer did not know how to give the orders. The second knew his
business, was sure that he did know it, and so let the men feel that he
knew it.
It is with parents as with those two officers. The one who knows his
duty, and does it properly, never has any occasion to lose his temper.
It is time Solomon's rod followed the witches' broom. It is time the
"cat," and the chain, and the cell, and the convict's dress, and
the oakum and the skilly, and the gallows followed the rack and the
thumbscrew and the faggot and the wheel. It is time the leaders of the
people were taught to lead. It is time the educated and the uneducated
were given some real education. It is time that tyranny, cruelty,
self-righteousness, superstition, and the bad old conventions of an
ignorant past, gave place to reason, to science, to manhood.
"But," the penal moralist will demand, "if you propose to abolish blame
and punishment, what do you propose to put in their place?"
And I answer, "Justice, knowledge, and reason--in fact, an improved
environment."
The cause of most of our social and moral troubles is ignorance.
By ignorance I do not mean illiteracy only: there are many classical
scholars who are really ignorant men. No: I mean ignorance of human
nature and of the essentials to a happy and wholesome human life. It is
this kind of ignorance which divides the people into two classes: rich
and poor--masters and slaves. It is this kind of ignorance which causes
men to sacrifice health, happiness, and virtue for the sake of vanity,
and idleness, and wealth. It is the kind of ignorance which keeps twelve
millions of people in a rich and fertile country always on the verge of
destitution. It is this kind of ignorance which saddles mankind with the
cost of armies, and fleets, and prisons, and police. It is this kind
of ignorance which breeds millions of criminals, and educates them in
crime. It is this kind of ignorance which splits a great nation into
castes, and sects, and makes the realisation of the glorious ideal of
human brotherhood impossible. It is this kind of ignorance which drives
professing Christians to neglect the teachings of Christ. It is this
kind of ignorance which makes possible the millionaire, the aristocrat,
the sweater, the tramp, the thief, the degenerate, and the slave. It is
this kind of ignorance which keeps the children hungry, drives the men
to drunkenness, and the women to shame. It is this kind of ignorance
which is answerable for all evil environments from which hate, and
greed, and poverty, and immorality spring, like weeds from a rank and
neglected soil.
We cannot get rid of this most deadly form of ignorance by means of
blame and punishment. There is only one way to drive out ignorance, and
that is by spreading knowledge.
What knowledge? Knowledge of human nature and of the essentials to a
happy and wholesome life.
It is bad for men to be rich and idle; it is bad for men to be ill-fed,
ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-taught, unhonoured, and unloved.
Whilst life is a sordid scramble, in which the prizes are pernicious
wealth, and luxury, and idleness, and in which the blanks are hunger,
ignorance, vice, unhappiness, the prison, and the gallows; immorality
and crime must flourish as pestilence flourishes in a filthy, pent, and
insanitary city. It is sad to see the custodians of the public morality
bewailing the wickedness of men, and fostering the evil surroundings
from which evil springs. It is as foolish as to bewail the presence of
malarial fever, to punish the victims for spreading the disease, and at
the same time to refuse to drain the marsh from which the malaria comes,
because it is the property of a grand duke, who wishes to shoot wildfowl
there.
What do I propose should be done. Why that, my friends, is another
story. What I propose at present to do is to prove that crime and
immorality are _caused_: to show what the causes are; and to point out
that the recognised remedies are ineffectual.
While we have an idle rich, and a hungry and ignorant poor, we cannot
get rid of vice and crime. To punish the criminals we have made, is
unjust and useless; to pray for deliverance from plague: we must look to
the drains--we must improve the environment.
No man should be idle. No man should be rich. No man should be ignorant,
no man destitute. Every man should have a chance to earn the essentials
to a wholesome, happy, temperate, and useful life. Every child should be
nourished, and taught, and trained.
Crime, vice, disease, poverty, idleness: all these are preventable
evils.
But we cannot drain our marshes, because, little as we heed the misery
of the people, the ignorance and hunger of the children, the despair of
the men and the degradation of the women, we are marvellously tender of
Grand Ducal sport.
It is Mammon we worship, not God; it is property we prize, not life;
it is vanity we love, and not our fellow-creatures. We are an ignorant,
atavistic people; and our priests are wondrous moral.