Part 9
Reformation does not come from beating on the prisoner’s fibre with the dull mallet of suffering. To reform one must inspire. There is a spark of good in every man’s breast; the only chance lies in fanning that spark. But if we are not reforming men in our prisons, how can we be said to be protecting society, by sending them there? We are surely endangering society; and nurturing the spirit of crime.
The fact of the matter is this: Revenge is still at the back of our minds. Let a man argue on the subject with whomsoever he will, ten minutes will not have passed before he makes that discovery. The State still feels that because a man has hurt it, it must hurt him. And this feeling destroys all the economy and science of our laws. When a crime is committed, all we should be concerned with, in our own interests, is the application of the best possible means to minimize the results of that crime, to ensure that society shall run the least possible risk of a repetition of the crime, and the offender the least possible risk of remaining a criminal.
In doing this we cannot, in very many cases, avoid the detention of our criminals; but we can, and should, avoid inflicting suffering on those whom we detain, beyond the already great suffering and deprivation inseparable from disciplinary detention, and all that disciplinary detention implies; for by deliberately superadding such sufferings as solitude, or perpetual unrelieved silence, we do not to any appreciable degree deter others from committing offences, and we do foster in those whom we imprison the disposition to commit fresh offences when they are released.
That diminution of crime, depends _not_ on deterrent punishment, but on wide and impalpable influences—growth of social feeling, spread of education, betterment of manners, decrease of intemperance, improvement in housing, a hundred other causes—is plain from the official statement lately issued. “The members of the predatory classes are appreciably fewer than in 1857, in spite of the fact that in the interim population has almost doubled.” _And this in the face of admittedly milder penal measures!_ For further evidence that mere severity of treatment does not deter we need only look at the comparative success of the Elmira Reformatory in the United States, and the Borstal institutions here. Under these systems, which allow the offender some kind of natural life, the percentage of those who return to crime is most notably smaller.
Crime is disease—if not in the medical, in the moral sense of the word. It is either the disease of weakness, or of unbalanced self-will, or the disease of inherited taint. We have fought against this conclusion because we still harbour the spirit of revenge; but as knowledge advances we shall, we must, accept it. And the sooner we do accept it the less money we shall waste, the less harmful and unnecessary suffering shall we inflict.
The difficulties of judicial and prison administration are enormous, the force of prejudice encountered by reforming administrators terrific—all the more terrific because these prejudices, in the main conscientious, are wholly reinforced by the fact that change means trouble and expense, by fears of making things worse, by all the accumulated momentum of “things as they are.” For a man with any understanding in his composition it is impossible not to sympathize with those who, administering justice, earnestly desire to do their best, and are often, one is sure, sick at heart from the feeling that what they are doing is _not_ the best.
It rests with public opinion in this country to re-animate our attitude towards crime; to shake itself free of our muddled conceptions of the object of punishment; to scotch once for all the spirit of revenge; to rise to a higher, more scientific and incidentally more economic, conception of our duty towards criminals. Let us get rid of the idea that we are protecting society and reforming offenders by inflicting suffering that we falsely call deterrent. Let us change our prisons into Borstal Institutions, and let us do it as soon as is humanly possible. Loss of liberty is, next to loss of life, the most dreaded of all fates; it has, in and by itself, almost all the deterrent force that is needful. There may be here and there men who prefer to be detained under strict discipline to being at liberty; but if there be, it can only be said that the conditions of their lives outside prison must constitute a disgrace to our civilization, and that our penal system cannot safely or justly be allowed to rest on any acquiescence in that disgrace. In the last annual report of the Borstal Association occur the following words:
“It is not a namby-pamby method. . . . The panic-monger who prophesies that the ambitious youth of the working classes will still clamour for admission through the gateway of crime to the advantages of Borstal, would be regarded as a humorist by those who have been there and ‘have had enough and learnt sense.’”
Let us, then, take discipline and loss of liberty as our sole deterrents, and on those whom we deprive of liberty let us use all the resources of a common sense that shall refuse to apply to criminals methods which would be scouted in the reform of human beings outside prisons.
All evidence shows that mere, so-called deterrent, severity is useless. Let us no longer fly in the face of evidence. Let us conform to facts. If we seriously desire to reduce crime to its irreducible minimum we must go to work like doctors.
III
AN UNPUBLISHED PREFACE (Written in 1910.)
It is not my habit to write prefaces, but there are certain things I want to say concerning the play “Justice,” as to its subject-matter, not its artistic qualities, bad, good, or indifferent.
Holding perhaps a more intimate knowledge of its author’s mind than can elsewhere be obtained, I would remark that the play is no indictment or attack, but a picture of the whole process of Justice as seen by this painter’s eye. There are thickenings of line here, and thinnings there, occasioned by lack of technical knowledge, or demanded by the exigencies of dramatic craft, but the spiritual essence of the matter is set down honestly, as best it could be perceived by him.
Justice was known by the ancients to be blind; by ourselves is admitted blind; will be acclaimed blind by the tongues of our descendants. It is blind because it is depart- or rather compart-mental.
The prosecutor, be he ancient Roman or Englishman of to-day, cannot gauge or control the _whole_ effect on the offender and on society of the process which he initiates. The Judge, be he Solon or Judge of the High Court, cannot know enough of the temperament and antecedents of a prisoner to adequately apportion a sentence which he cannot see being carried out. The prison official is tied to the terms of the sentence and the conditions of the system, for some system there must be. The Public, on the prisoner’s release, acts mechanically in its own defence against a marked man. All see only their own bits of the game.
From this general blindness, it follows that punishment is almost always out of proportion. This is why it seemed to me worth while to make a picture of Blind Justice, and to hang it on the wall. There are some who believe that this picture will rapidly become out of date. I am not so sanguine. Short of our all becoming not only eager, but able, to see that which does not lie underneath our noses, I much fear that this picture will remain valid for some considerable time The conditions will change, but the spirit will remain—Justice is too naturally and inevitably blind. Is that any reason why we should not occasionally be reminded of the evil—one of the enduring, but perhaps diminishable, evils of human life? Even the administrators of this Justice might like now and then to glance at a picture of its blindness.
One word about the cell scene. It has been called false and exaggerated. . . . Two brothers went to see this play. At the end of the cell scene the younger, who stammers, turned to his elder and said: “It’s n-not so—j-j—olly as all that!”
Precisely! Prisoners do not commonly enjoy the relief of beating on their cell doors, though the incident is not unknown. But he who can project himself into the minds of others knows that prisoners, in closed cells, moping and brooding week after week, month after month, shut off from all real distraction, from all touch with the outer world and everything they care for, with the knowledge of years of imprisonment before them and of broken lives when they come out—knows that such prisoners, thousands of them, unseen by any eye, _reach a state of mind_ which would make them constantly fling themselves for relief on their cell doors, if it were not for fear. No, it is not so jolly as all that!
The characteristics of all prison life, at all events in England, are silence and solitude, physical or spiritual; and this cell scene was selected to convey as nearly as the limitations of the stage permitted, these commonest characteristics of detention.
For the truth of this picture of Blind Justice as a whole I rely on the testimonial of that theatre attendant, employed out of charity, who, having been prosecuted, sentenced, imprisoned, and released, knew, let us hope, more of the matter spiritually, than those who criticize. After the play on the first night, to the question of his manager, “Well, is it true?” he looked up from his sweeping, and said: “Every word of it, sir.”
I have only this to add. If each scene is taken separately and looked on with a departmentally professional eye, it must needs seem out of drawing, for it was visualized by an eye looking on each department only in relation to the whole. When the professional reader or spectator of the Court or Prison scene, says “Oh! this or that is not true!” he is criticizing from the departmental, and not from the bird’s-eye point of view, which an author must needs assume. Even if the sentence be more than typically severe, though I doubt that, or the judgment not typically worded, they serve well enough as illustrations of that blindness which has accompanied the wisest judgments of one human being on another since the world began.
No, the only legitimate criticism which the professional reader or spectator can pass is that the particular bird’s-eye view is wrong. To that criticism this bird can make no answer, except to say with deference and courtesy that he must believe in his own eye—for it is all he has to see with.
ON THE POSITION OF WOMEN
I
“GENTLES, LET US REST!” (A Paper in the _Nation_, 1910.)
A man asked to define the essential characteristics of a gentleman—using the term in its widest sense—would presumably reply: The will to put himself in the place of others; the horror of forcing others into positions from which he himself would recoil; the power to do what seems to him right without fear of what others may say or think.
There is need just now of aid from these principles of gentility in a question of some importance—the future position of women.
The ground facts of difference between the sexes few are likely to deny:
Women are not, and in all probability never will be, physically, as strong as men.
Men are not, nor ever will be, mothers.
Women are not, and, perhaps, never should be, warriors.
To these ground facts of difference are commonly added, in argument, many others of more debatable character. But it is beside the purpose of this paper to inquire whether women have as much political sense or aptitude as men, whether a woman has ever produced a masterpiece of music, whether the brain of a woman ever weighed as much as the brain of Cuvier or Turgenev.
This paper designs to set forth one cardinal and overmastering consideration, in comparison with which all the other considerations affecting the question seem to this writer but as the little stars to the full moon.
In the lives of all nations there come moments when an idea, hitherto vaguely, almost unconsciously, held, assumes sculptured shape, and is manifestly felt to be of vital significance to a large, important, and steadily increasing section of the community. At such moments a spectre has begun to haunt the national house—a ghost which cannot be laid till it has received quietus.
Such a ghost now infests our home.
The full emancipation of women is an idea long vaguely held, but only in the last half-century formulated and pressed forward with real force and conviction, not only by women, but by men. Of this full emancipation of women, the political vote is assuredly not, as is rather commonly supposed in a land of party politics, the be-all and end-all; it is a symbol, whose practical importance—though considerable—is as nothing beside the fulfilment of the idea which it symbolizes.
The Will to Power and the Will to Love have been held up, in turn, as the animating principles of the Universe; but these are, rather, correlative half-truths, whose rivalry is surely stilled and reconciled in a yet higher principle, the Will to Harmony, to Balance, to Equity—a supreme adjustment, or harmonising power, present wherever a man turns; by which, in fact, he is conditioned, for he can with his mental apparatus no more conceive of a Universe without a Will to Equity holding it together than he can conceive the opposite of the axiom, “Ex nihilo nihil fit.” There is assuredly no thought so staggering as that, if a blade of grass or the energy contained within a single emotion were—not transmuted—but _withdrawn entirely_ from the Universe, the balance would tip for ever and the Universe crumble in our imaginations to thin air.
Now social and political Equity emanates slowly, with infinite labour, from our dim consciousness of this serene and overlording principle of Equity. There would seem, for example, no fundamental reason why limits should ever have been put to autocracy, the open ballot destroyed, slavery abolished, save that these things came to be regarded as inequitable. In all such cases, before reaching the point of action the society of the day puts forward practical reasons, being, so to speak, unaware of its own sense of divinity. But, underneath all the seeming matter-of-factness of political and social movements, the spirit of Equity is guiding those movements, subtly, unconsciously, a compelling hand quietly pushing humanity onward, ever unseen save in the rare minutes when the spirits of men glow and light up and things are beheld for a moment as they are. The history of a nation’s spiritual development is but the tale of its wistful groping towards the provision of a machinery of State, which shall, as nearly as may be, accord with the demand of this spirit of Equity. Society, worthy of the name, is ever secretly shaping around it a temple, within which all the natural weaknesses and limitations of the dwellers shall be, not exploited and emphasized, but to the utmost levelled away and minimized. It is ever secretly providing for itself a roof under which there shall be the fullest and fairest play for all human energies, however unequal.
The destinies of mankind are seen to be guided, very slowly, by something more coherent than political opportunity; shaped steadily in a given direction towards the completion of that temple of Justice. There is no other way of explaining the growth of man from the cave-dweller to his present case. And this slow spiritual shaping towards Equity proceeds in spite of the workings of the twin bodily agents, force and expediency. Social and political growth is, in fact, a process of evolution, controlled, directed, spiritualized by the supreme principle of Equity.
This is to state no crazy creed, that because equality is mathematically admirable, equality should at all times and in all places forthwith obtain. Equality, balance, is a dream, the greatest of all visions, the beloved star—ever to be worshipped, never quite reached. And the long road towards it travels the illimitable land of compromise. It would have been futile, as it was in fact impossible, to liberate slaves, when the consciousness of the injustice of slavery was present only in a few abnormal minds, and incommunicable by them to the mind of the surrounding society of the time. The process is slow and steady. Equity well knows that there is a time for her, as for all other things. She is like the brain, saying to the limbs and senses: You are full of queer ways. It is for me to think out gradually the best rule of life, under which you must get on as you can, the Devil taking the hindmost; and from trying to devise this scheme of perfection I may not, nor ever shall, rest.
Social and political justice, then, advances by fits and starts, through ideas—children of the one great idea of Harmony—which are suggested now by one, now by another, section or phase of national life. The process is like the construction and shaping of a work of art. For an artist is ever receiving vague impressions from people unconsciously observed, from feelings unconsciously experienced, till in good time he discovers that he has an idea. This idea is but a generalization or harmonious conception derived subconsciously from these vague impressions. Being moved to embody that idea, he at once begins groping back to, and gathering in, those very types and experiences from which he derived this general notion in order adequately to shape the vehicle—his picture, his poem, his novel—which shall carry his idea forth to the world.
So in social and political progress. The exigencies and inequalities of existing social life produce a crop of impressions on certain receptive minds, which suddenly burst into flower in the form of ideas. The minds in which these abstractions or ideas have flowered seek then to burgeon them forth, and their method of doing so is to bring to public notice those exigencies and inequalities which were the original fuel of their ideas. In this way is the seed of an idea spread amongst a community. But wherever the seed of an idea falls it has to struggle up through layers of prejudice, to overcome the rule of force and expediency; and if this idea, this generalization from social exigencies or inequalities, be petty, retrograde, or distorted, it withers and dies during the struggle. If, on the other hand, it be large, consonant with the future, and of true promise, it holds fast and spreads.
Now, one may very justly say that this is all a platitudinal explanation of the crude process of social and political development. In taking a given idea, such as the full emancipation of women, the fight only begins to rage round the question whether that idea is in fact holding fast and spreading, and, if so, whether the community is, or is not, yet sufficiently permeated with the idea to be safely entrusted with its fulfilment. None the less must it be borne in mind that if this idea can be proved to be surely spreading, it must be an idea emanating from the root divinity in things, from the overmastering principle of Equity, and sure of ultimate fulfilment; and the only question will then be, exactly how long the rule of expediency and force may advisably postpone its fulfilment.
Now, in order to discover whether the idea of the full emanicipation of women is in accord with the great principle of Equity, it will be necessary, first, to show the present inferiority of woman’s political and social position; secondly, to consider the essential reason of that inferiority; and, thirdly, to see whether the facts and figures of the movement towards the removal of that inferiority clearly prove that the idea has long been holding fast and spreading.
To show, however, that the present political and social position of women is not equal to that of men, it will certainly suffice to state two admitted facts. Women have not the political vote. Women, who can be divorced for one offence, must, before they obtain divorce, prove two kinds of offence against their husbands.
And to ascertain the essential reason of this present inferiority we need hardly go beyond the ground facts of difference between men and women already mentioned:
Women are not physically as strong as men.
Men are never mothers.
Women are not warriors.
From these ground facts, readily admitted by all, the reason for the present inferiority of women’s position emerges clear and unmistakable. Women are weaker than men. They are weaker because they are not in general built so strongly; because they have to bear and to rear children; because they are unarmed. There is no getting away from it, they are weaker; and one cannot doubt for a moment that their inferior position is due to this weakness. But—so runs an immemorial argument—however equal their opportunities might be, women will never be as strong as men! Why then, for sentimental reasons, disturb the present order of things, why equalize those opportunities? This is the plea which was used before married women were allowed separate property, before the decision in “Regina _versus_ Jackson,” which forbade a husband to hold his wife prisoner. The argument, in fact, of expediency and force.
Now there are no finer statements of the case for the full emancipation of women than Mill’s “Subjection of Women,” and Miss Jane Harrison’s essay entitled “Homo Sum.” The reasonings in the former work are too well-known, but to the main thesis of “Homo Sum” allusion must here be made. The most common, perhaps most telling, plea against raising the social and political status of women to a level with that of men is this: Men and women _are already equal_, but in separate spheres of activity. The difference between their physical conformation and functions underlies everything in the lives of both. The province and supremacy of women are in the home; the province and supremacy of men in the State. Why seek to alter what Nature has ordained? A plea, in fact, which glorifies sex _qua_ sex.
But the writer of “Homo Sum” is at pains to show that “the splendid and vital instinct of sex,” with all its “singular power of interpenetrating and reinforcing other energies,” is in essence egoistic, exclusive, anti-social; and that, besides and beyond being men and women, we are all human beings. “The whole women’s movement,” the writer says, “is just the learning of that lesson. It is not an attempt to arrogate man’s prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize woman’s privilege of womanhood; it is simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood—for humanity.”
In fact the splendid instinct of sex—for all its universality, for all that through and by it life is perpetuated, for all its power of bringing delight, and of revealing the heights and depths of human emotion—is still essentially an agent of the rule of force. We cannot but perceive that there is in both men and women something more exalted and impersonal, akin to the supreme principle of Equity, to the divinity in things; and that this something keeps men and women together, as strongly, as inevitably, as sex keeps them apart. What is all the effort of civilization but the gradual fortifying of that higher part of us—the exaltation of the principle of Justice, the chaining of the principle of Force? The full emancipation of women would be one more step in the march of our civilization—a sign that this nation was still serving humanity, still trying to be gentle and just. For if it has ceased to serve humanity, we must surely pray that the waters may rise over this island, and that she may go down all standing!