Part 3 (1/2)
”Really, one of the most difficult questions this we have in these times, What to do with our criminals?” blandly observed a certain Law-dignitary, in my hearing once, taking the cigar from his mouth, and pensively smiling over a group of us under the summer beech-tree, as Favonius carried off the tobacco-smoke; and the group said nothing, only smiled and nodded, answering by new tobacco-clouds. ”What to do with our criminals?” asked the official Law-dignitary again, as if entirely at a loss.--”I suppose,” said one ancient figure not engaged in smoking, ”the plan would be to treat them according to the real law of the case; to make the Law of England, in respect of them, correspond to the Law of the Universe. Criminals, I suppose, would prove manageable in that way: if we could do approximately as G.o.d Almighty does towards them; in a word, if we could try to do Justice towards them.”--”I'll thank you for a definition of Justice?” sneered the official person in a cheerily scornful and triumphant manner, backed by a slight laugh from the honorable company; which irritated the other speaker.--”Well, I have no pocket definition of Justice,” said he, ”to give your Lords.h.i.+p. It has not quite been my trade to look for such a definition; I could rather fancy it had been your Lords.h.i.+p's trade, sitting on your high place this long while. But one thing I can tell you: Justice always is, whether we define it or not. Everything done, suffered or proposed, in Parliament or out of it, is either just or else unjust; either is accepted by the G.o.ds and eternal facts, or is rejected by them. Your Lords.h.i.+p and I, with or without definition, do a little know Justice, I will hope; if we don't both know it and do it, we are hourly travelling down towards--Heavens, must I name such a place! That is the place we are bound to, with all our trading-pack, and the small or extensive budgets of human business laid on us; and there, if we _don't know_ Justice, we, and all our budgets and Acts of Parliament, shall find lodging when the day is done!”--The official person, a polite man otherwise, grinned as he best could some semblance of a laugh, mirthful as that of the a.s.s eating thistles, and ended in ”Hah, oh, ah!”--
Indeed, it is wonderful to hear what account we at present give ourselves of the punishment of criminals. No ”revenge”--O Heavens, no; all preachers on Sunday strictly forbid that; and even (at least on Sundays) prescribe the contrary of that. It is for the sake of ”example,” that you punish; to ”protect society” and its purse and skin; to deter the innocent from falling into crime; and especially withal, for the purpose of improving the poor criminal himself,--or at lowest, of hanging and ending him, that he may not grow worse. For the poor criminal is, to be ”improved” if possible: against him no ”revenge” even on week-days; nothing but love for him, and pity and help; poor fellow, is he not miserable enough? Very miserable,--though much less so than the Master of him, called Satan, is understood (on Sundays) to have long deservedly been!
My friends, will you permit me to say that all this, to one poor judgment among your number, is the mournfulest twaddle that human tongues could shake from them; that it has no solid foundation in the nature of things; and to a healthy human heart no credibility whatever.
Permit me to say, only to hearts long drowned in dead Tradition, and for themselves neither believing nor disbelieving, could this seem credible.
Think, and ask yourselves, in spite of all this preaching and perorating from the teeth outward! Hearts that are quite strangers to eternal Fact, and acquainted only at all hours with temporary Semblances parading about in a prosperous and persuasive condition; hearts that from their first appearance in this world have breathed since birth, in all spiritual matters, which means in all matters not pecuniary, the poisonous atmosphere of universal Cant, could believe such a thing. Cant moral, Cant religious, Cant political; an atmosphere which envelops all things for us unfortunates, and has long done; which goes beyond the Zenith and below the Nadir for us, and has as good as choked the spiritual life out of all of us,--G.o.d pity such wretches, with little or nothing _real_ about them but their purse and their abdominal department! Hearts, alas, which everywhere except in the metallurgic and cotton-spinning provinces, have communed with no Reality, or awful Presence of a Fact, G.o.dlike or diabolic, in this Universe or this unfathomable Life at all. Hunger-stricken asphyxied hearts, which have nourished themselves on what they call religions, Christian religions.
Good Heaven, once more fancy the Christian religion of Oliver Cromwell; or of some n.o.ble Christian man, whom you yourself may have been blessed enough, once, long since, in your life, to know! These are not _untrue_ religions; they are the putrescences and foul residues of religions that are extinct, that have plainly to every honest nostril been dead some time, and the remains of which--O ye eternal Heavens, will the nostril never be delivered from them!--Such hearts, when they get upon platforms, and into questions not involving money, can ”believe” many things!--
I take the liberty of a.s.serting that there is one valid reason, and only one, for either punis.h.i.+ng a man or rewarding him in this world; one reason, which ancient piety could well define: That you may do the will and commandment of G.o.d with regard to him; that you may do justice to him. This is your one true aim in respect of him; aim thitherward, with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul, thitherward, and not elsewhither at all! This aim is true, and will carry you to all earthly heights and benefits, and beyond the stars and Heavens. All other aims are purblind, illegitimate, untrue; and will never carry you beyond the shop-counter, nay very soon will prove themselves incapable of maintaining you even there. Find out what the Law of G.o.d is with regard to a man; make that your human law, or I say it will be ill with you, and not well! If you love your thief or murderer, if Nature and eternal Fact love him, then do as you are now doing. But if Nature and Fact do _not_ love him? If they have set inexorable penalties upon him, and planted natural wrath against him in every G.o.d-created human heart,--then I advise you, cease, and change your hand.
Reward and punishment? Alas, alas, I must say you reward and punish pretty much alike! Your dignities, peerages, promotions, your kings.h.i.+ps, your brazen statues erected in capital and county towns to our select demiG.o.ds of your selecting, testify loudly enough what kind of heroes and hero-wors.h.i.+ppers you are. Woe to the People that no longer venerates, as the emblem of G.o.d himself, the aspect of Human Worth; that no longer knows what human worth and unworth is! Sure as the Decrees of the Eternal, that People cannot come to good. By a course too clear, by a necessity too evident, that People will come into the hands of the unworthy; and either turn on its bad career, or stagger downwards to ruin and abolition. Does the Hebrew People prophetically sing ”Ou'
clo'!” in all thoroughfares, these eighteen hundred years in vain?
To reward men according to their worth: alas, the perfection of this, we know, amounts to the millennium! Neither is perfect punishment, according to the like rule, to be attained,--nor even, by a legislator of these chaotic days, to be too zealously attempted. But when he does attempt it,--yes, when he summons out the Society to sit deliberative on this matter, and consult the oracles upon it, and solemnly settle it in the name of G.o.d; then, if never before, he should try to be a little in the right in settling it!--In regard to reward of merit, I do not bethink me of any attempt whatever, worth calling an attempt, on the part of modern Governments; which surely is an immense oversight on their part, and will one day be seen to have been an altogether fatal one. But as to the punishment of crime, happily this cannot be quite neglected. When men have a purse and a skin, they seek salvation at least for these; and the Four Pleas of the Crown are a thing that must and will be attended to. By punishment, capital or other, by treadmilling and blind rigor, or by whitewas.h.i.+ng and blind laxity, the extremely disagreeable offences of theft and murder must be kept down within limits.
And so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and hang them on gibbets ”for an example to deter others.” Whereupon arise friends of humanity, and object. With very great reason, as I consider, if your hypothesis be correct. What right have you to hang any poor creature ”for an example”? He can turn round upon you and say, ”Why make an 'example' of me, a merely ill-situated, pitiable man? Have you no more respect for misfortune? Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred.
And yet you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me, for your own convenience alone?”--All ”revenge” being out of the question, it seems to me the caitiff is unanswerable; and he and the philanthropic platforms have the logic all on their side.
The one answer to him is: ”Caitiff, we hate thee; and discern for some six thousand years now, that we are called upon by the whole Universe to do it. Not with a diabolic but with a divine hatred. G.o.d himself, we have always understood, 'hates sin,' with a most authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred. A hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and disappearance from the sum of things. The path of it as the path of a flaming sword: he that has eyes may see it, walking inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the true and life-worthy; making all Human History, and the Biography of every man, a G.o.d's Cosmos in place of a Devil's Chaos. So is it, in the end; even so, to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous beast, and has eyes to see. To thee, caitiff, these things were and are, quite incredible; to us they are too awfully certain,--the Eternal Law of this Universe, whether thou and others will believe it or disbelieve. We, not to be partakers in thy destructive adventure of defying G.o.d and all the Universe, dare not allow thee to continue longer among us. As a palpable deserter from the ranks where all men, at their eternal peril, are bound to be: palpable deserter, taken with the red band fighting thus against the whole Universe and its Laws, we--send thee back into the whole Universe, solemnly expel thee from our community; and will, in the name of G.o.d, not with joy and exultation, but with sorrow stern as thy own, hang thee on Wednesday next, and so end.”
Other ground on which to deliberately slay a disarmed fellow-man I can see none. Example, effects upon the public mind, effects upon this and upon that: all this is mere appendage and accident; of all this I make no attempt to keep account,--sensible that no arithmetic will or can keep account of it; that its ”effects,” on this hand and on that, transcend all calculation. One thing, if I can calculate it, will include all, and produce beneficial effects beyond calculation, and no ill effect at all, anywhere or at any time: What the Law of the Universe, or Law of G.o.d, is with regard to this caitiff? That, by all sacred research and consideration, I will try to find out; to that I will come as near as human means admit; that shall be my exemplar and ”example;” all men shall through me see that, and be profited _beyond_ calculation by seeing it.
What this Law of the Universe, or Law made by G.o.d, is? Men at one time read it in their Bible. In many Bibles, Books, and authentic symbols and monitions of Nature and the World (of Fact, that is, and of Human Speech, or Wise Interpretation of Fact), there are still clear indications towards it. Most important it is, for this and for some other reasons, that men do, in some way, get to see it a little! And if no man could now see it by any Bible, there is written in the heart of every man an authentic copy of it direct from Heaven itself: there, if he have learnt to decipher Heaven's writing, and can read the sacred oracles (a sad case for him if he altogether cannot), every born man may still find some copy of it.
”Revenge,” my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to _revancher_ oneself upon them, and pay them what they have merited: this is forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man. Only the excess of it is diabolic; the essence I say is manlike, and even G.o.dlike,--a monition sent to poor man by the Maker himself. Thou, poor reader, in spite of all this melancholy twaddle, and blotting out of Heaven's sunlight by mountains of horsehair and officiality, hast still a human heart. If, in returning to thy poor peaceable dwelling-place, after an honest hard day's work, thou wert to find, for example, a brutal scoundrel who for lucre or other object of his, had slaughtered the life that was dearest to thee; thy true wife, for example, thy true old mother, swimming in her blood; the human scoundrel, or two-legged wolf, standing over such a tragedy: I hope a man would have so much divine rage in his heart as to s.n.a.t.c.h the nearest weapon, and put a conclusion upon said human wolf, for one! A palpable messenger of Satan, that one; accredited by all the Devils, to be put an end to by all the children of G.o.d. The soul of every G.o.d-created man flames wholly into one divine blaze of sacred wrath at sight of such a Devil's-messenger; authentic firsthand monition from the Eternal Maker himself as to what is next to be done. Do it, or be thyself an ally of Devil's-messengers; a sheep for two-legged human wolves, well deserving to be eaten, as thou soon wilt be!
My humane friends, I perceive this same sacred glow of divine wrath, or authentic monition at first hand from G.o.d himself, to be the foundation for all Criminal Law, and Official horsehair-and-bombazine procedure against Scoundrels in this world. This first-hand gospel from the Eternities, imparted to every mortal, this is still, and will forever be, your sanction and commission for the punishment of human scoundrels.
See well how you will translate this message from Heaven and the Eternities into a form suitable to this World and its Times. Let not violence, haste, blind impetuous impulse, preside in executing it; the injured man, invincibly liable to fall into these, shall not himself execute it: the whole world, in person of a Minister appointed for that end, and surrounded with the due solemnities and caveats, with bailiffs, apparitors, advocates, and the hushed expectation of all men, shall do it, as under the eye of G.o.d who made all men. How it shall be done? this is ever a vast question, involving immense considerations. Thus Edmund Burke saw, in the Two Houses of Parliament, with King, Const.i.tution, and all manner of Civil-Lists, and Chancellors' wigs and Exchequer budgets, only the ”method of getting twelve just men put into a jury-box:” that, in Burke's view, was the summary of what they were all meant for. How the judge will do it? Yes, indeed:--but let him see well that he does do it: for it is a thing that must by no means be left undone! A sacred gospel from the Highest: not to be smothered under horsehair and bombazine, or drowned in platform froth, or in any wise omitted or neglected, without the most alarming penalties to all concerned!
Neglect to treat the hero as hero, the penalties--which are inevitable too, and terrible to think of, as your Hebrew friends can tell you--may be some time in coming; they will only gradually come. Not all at once will your thirty thousand Needlewomen, your three million Paupers, your Connaught fallen into potential Cannibalism, and other fine consequences of the practice, come to light;--though come to light they will; and ”Ou' clo'!” itself may be in store for you, if you persist steadily enough. But neglect to treat even your declared scoundrel as scoundrel, this is the last consummation of the process, the drop by which the cup runs over; the penalties of this, most alarming, extensive, and such as you little dream of, will straightway very rapidly come. Dim oblivion of Right and Wrong, among the ma.s.ses of your population, will come; doubts as to Right and Wrong, indistinct notion that Right and Wrong are not eternal, but accidental, and settled by uncertain votings and talkings, will come. Prurient influenza of Platform Benevolence, and ”Paradise to All-and-sundry,” will come. In the general putrescence of your ”religions,” as you call them, a strange new religion, named of Universal Love, with Sacraments mainly of--_Divorce_, with Balzac, Sue and Company for Evangelists, and Madame Sand for Virgin, will come,--and results fast following therefrom which will astonish you very much!
”The terrible anarchies of these years,” says Crabbe, in his _Radiator_, ”are brought upon us by a necessity too visible. By the crime of Kings,--alas, yes; but by that of Peoples too. Not by the crime of one cla.s.s, but by the fatal obscuration, and all but obliteration of the sense of Right and Wrong in the minds and practices of every cla.s.s. What a scene in the drama of Universal History, this of ours! A world-wide loud bellow and bray of universal Misery; _lowing_, with crushed maddened heart, its inarticulate prayer to Heaven:--very pardonable to me, and in some of its transcendent developments, as in the grand French Revolution, most respectable and ever-memorable. For Injustice reigns everywhere; and this murderous struggle for what they call 'Fraternity,'
and so forth has a spice of eternal sense in it, though so terribly disfigured! Amalgam of sense and nonsense; eternal sense by the grain, and temporary nonsense by the square mile: as is the habit with poor sons of men. Which pardonable amalgam, however, if it be taken as the pure final sense, I must warn you and all creatures, is unpardonable, criminal, and fatal nonsense;--with which I, for one, will take care not to concern myself!
”_Dogs should not be taught to eat leather_, says the old adage: no;--and where, by general fault and error, and the inevitable nemesis of things, the universal kennel is set to diet upon _leather_; and from its keepers, its 'Liberal Premiers,' or whatever their t.i.tle is, will accept or expect nothing else, and calls it by the pleasant name of progress, reform, emanc.i.p.ation, abolition-principles, and the like,--I consider the fate of said kennel and of said keepers to be a thing settled. Red republic in Phrygian nightcap, organization of labor _a la_ Louis Blanc; street-barricades, and then murderous cannon-volleys _a la_ Cavaignac and Windischgratz, follow out of one another, as grapes, must, new wine, and sour all-splitting vinegar do: vinegar is but _vin-aigre_, or the self-same 'wine' grown _sharp_! If, moreover, I find the Wors.h.i.+p of Human n.o.bleness abolished in any country, and a _new_ astonis.h.i.+ng Phallus-Wors.h.i.+p, with universal Balzac-Sand melodies and litanies in treble and in ba.s.s, established in its stead, what can I compute but that Nature, in horrible throes, will repugn against such subst.i.tution,--that, in short, the astonis.h.i.+ng new Phallus-Wors.h.i.+p, with its finer sensibilities of the heart, and 'great satisfying loves,'
with its sacred kiss of peace for scoundrel and hero alike, with its all-embracing Brotherhood, and universal Sacrament of Divorce, will have to take itself away again!”
The Ancient Germans, it appears, had no scruple about public executions; on the contrary, they thought the just G.o.ds themselves might fitly preside over these; that these were a solemn and highest act of wors.h.i.+p, if justly done. When a German man had done a crime deserving death, they, in solemn general a.s.sembly of the tribe, doomed him, and considered that Fate and all Nature had from the beginning doomed him, to die with ignominy. Certain crimes there were of a supreme nature; him that had perpetrated one of these, they believed to have declared himself a prince of scoundrels. Him once convicted they laid hold of, nothing doubting; bore him, after judgment, to the deepest convenient Peat-bog; plunged him in there, drove an oaken frame down over him, solemnly in the name of G.o.ds and men: ”There, prince of scoundrels, that is what we have had to think of thee, on clear acquaintance; our grim good-night to thee is that! In the name of all the G.o.ds lie there, and be our partners.h.i.+p with thee dissolved henceforth. It will be better for us, we imagine!”
My friends, after all this beautiful whitewash and humanity and prison-discipline; and such blubbering and whimpering, and soft Litany to divine and also to quite other sorts of Pity, as we have had for a century now,--give me leave to admonish you that that of the Ancient Germans too was a thing inexpressibly necessary to keep in mind. If that is not kept in mind, the universal Litany to Pity is a mere universal nuisance, and torpid blasphemy against the G.o.ds. I do not much respect it, that purblind blubbering and litanying, as it is seen at present; and the litanying over scoundrels I go the length of disrespecting, and in some cases even of detesting. Yes, my friends, scoundrel is scoundrel: that remains forever a fact; and there exists not in the earth whitewash that can make the scoundrel a friend of this Universe; he remains an enemy if you spent your life in whitewas.h.i.+ng him. He won't whitewash; this one won't. The one method clearly is, That, after fair trial, you dissolve partners.h.i.+p with him; send him, in the name of Heaven, whither _he_ is striving all this while and have done with him.
And, in a time like this, I would advise you, see likewise that you be speedy about it! For there is immense work, and of a far hopefuler sort, to be done _elsewhere_.
Alas, alas, to see once the ”prince of scoundrels,” the Supreme Scoundrel, him whom of all men the G.o.ds liked worst, solemnly laid hold of, and hung upon the gallows in sight of the people; what a lesson to all the people! Sermons might be preached; the Son of Thunder and the Mouth of Gold might turn their periods now with some hope; for here, in the most impressive way, is a divine sermon acted. Didactic as no spoken sermon could be. Didactic, devotional too;--in awed solemnity, a recognition that Eternal Justice rules the world; that at the call of this, human pity shall fall silent, and man be stern as his Master and Mandatory is!--Understand too that except upon a basis of even such rigor, sorrowful, silent, inexorable as that of Destiny and Doom, there is no true pity possible. The pity that proves so possible and plentiful without that basis, is mere _ignavia_ and cowardly effeminacy; maudlin laxity of heart, grounded on blinkard dimness of head--contemptible as a drunkard's tears.
To see our Supreme Scoundrel hung upon the gallows, alas, that is far from us just now! There is a worst man in England, too,--curious to think of,--whom it would be inexpressibly advantageous to lay hold of, and hang, the first of all. But we do not know him with the least certainty, the least approach even to a guess,--such buzzards and dullards and poor children of the Dusk are we, in spite of our Statistics, Unshackled Presses, and Torches of Knowledge;--not eagles soaring sunward, not brothers of the lightnings and the radiances we; a dim horn-eyed, owl-population, intent mainly on the catching of mice!