Chapter VII: The Moral Progress of the Race as Shown by History (2)

Caesar and Tacitus both mention human sacrifices as taking place in England before the Roman conquest; but little is known certainly on the subject. The Romans, of course, introduced their own laws and customs, which existed side by side with many ancient ones not wholly abolished. The torture and burning of slaves for various offences was customary. These penalties were gradually mitigated. But the invasion of the Teutonic tribes seems to have introduced many new barbarities. In the first half of the tenth century, for instance, appears a law which condemned to the stake female slaves who had stolen from any but their masters, the wood to be piled about them by eighty other slaves of their own sex; this last office being designed, doubtless, to impress the lesson upon the minds of the eighty attendants. Later, many heretics were burned, and the writ for the burning of heretics was not abolished until the reign of Charles II., though it was practically annulled by the laws of 1648. However, in 1649, a number of women were burned for witchcraft in Berwickshire, and burning continued to be practised, much later, in cases of heresy and witchcraft; still later in cases of high and petty treason, and up to the time of George III., for murder. In the thirtieth year of the latter's reign, a statute was passed substituting hanging for burning. In 1784, a woman was burnt at Portsmouth for the murder of her husband. During the last years, however, in which the sentence was carried out, it seems to have been customary for the executioner to wring the malefactor's neck before the burning. But comparatively trivial offences, among these false coining, were classed as treason, and it is noticeable also that the stake seems to have been a favorite punishment in the case of women-offenders, even in later days.[230] In the year 1530, two persons of the household of the Bishop of Rochester having died from poison thrown into some porridge by the cook, an "Act of Poisoning" was passed, according to which offenders coming under its definition were to be boiled to death. The statute was shortly afterwards repealed, but the bishop's cook was publicly executed in accordance with its provision.[231]

But simple burning or hanging was, for the most part, considered much too good for the man who had committed high treason; he was given the mere mockery of a trial, and, if convicted, was hanged, was taken down while yet alive, disembowelled, and his entrails burnt, was beheaded, and quartered. Law modifying this penalty first comes into prominence in the reign of William III.[232] When Richard I. sailed with his army for the Holy Land, it was ordained that whoever killed a man on board ship was to be tied to the corpse and thrown into the sea, whosoever killed a man on shore was to be burnt alive with the corpse, while simply drawing blood with a knife was to be punished with the loss of a hand, and a thief was to be shaved, treated to a head-bath of boiling pitch and feathers, and put ashore at the first place the vessel touched at.[233]

The payment of blood-money was a common custom among the Teutons, and so little distinction was made between greater and lesser crime that, while a murderer could commonly buy off the relatives of his victim, the petty thief often suffered death or mutilation for his offence. Pike says of these punishments in the early history of Britain: "It was for the free man of low estate, for the slave, and for women, that the greatest atrocities were reserved. Men branded on the forehead, without hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a churl. The horrors of the Danish invasions had no tendency to mitigate these severities; and those who were chastised with whips before were chastised with scorpions afterwards. New ingenuity was brought to bear upon the art of mutilation, which was practised in every form. The eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper lip were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive."[234] The law of the tenth century, according to which a female slave who had committed theft was burnt alive by eighty women-executioners, has already been mentioned; parallel to this law was the law that a male slave who was a thief was to be stoned to death by eighty slaves, any one of whom, who missed the mark three times, was to be whipped three times. "If a thief was a free woman, she was to be thrown down a precipice or drowned."[235] The law did not favor women.

The dividing line between mutilation and torture is a difficult one to draw. One of the earlier forms of "trial" was by ordeal. The accused, with his hand bound in cloth, was compelled to snatch a stone from elbow or wrist-depth in a caldron of boiling water, or to lift a weight of heated metal. If, at the end of three days, when the cloth which bound the arm was removed, no scald or burn was visible, the accused was pronounced innocent. These ordeals took place in the church with much sprinkling of holy water and other ceremony. The clergy themselves seem to have had less trying substitutes for these ordeals, often being compelled only to take oath on the sacrament, or to partake of consecrated bread or cheese which was supposed to produce evil results in case of guilt. As Pike suggests, it is quite possible that, as priests had the preparing of this bread or cheese, it may sometimes have come up to expectations in this respect; as it is also possible that the cloths bound on the arm of the layman who was to undergo the ordeal of fire or water may have been differently arranged in different cases.[236] As late as the reign of King John, trial was made by ordeal, and mention is also made of it in the reign of Henry II. It was not formally abolished until the year 1219.[237] For remaining mute before accusers in court, the dire penalty of imprisonment with starvation was inflicted, in the reign of Edward I., and to this punishment was added, about the time of Henry IV., torture by the press.[238] In 1570, a man found guilty of forging warrants for the arrest of two persons was sentenced to the pillory for two days, on the first of which one ear, on the second the other, was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that he must "by his own proper motion" tear it away.[239] The rack is supposed to have been introduced into England in the reign of Henry VI., and in the reign of Henry VIII. was added "Skevington's Daughter," an instrument by which offenders were compressed rather than extended until "the miserable human being lost all form but that of a globe." Blood was forced from fingers, toes, nostrils, and mouth, and ribs and breast-bone were commonly broken in. The thumb-screw was also in use, and there was a "Dungeon among Rats," and a chamber in the Tower called "Little Ease," in which it was impossible either to stand upright or to lie at full length.[240] The press was not abolished until the reign of George III.[241] It is recorded of the case of Burnworth, tried for murder in 1726, that he bore pressure of nearly four hundred weight, for an hour and three-quarters, before begging for mercy and pleading Not Guilty. He was, however, found guilty and hanged.[242] In 1630, Alexander Leighton was punished for "framing, publishing, and dispensing a scandalous book against kings, peers, and prelates," in the following manner: he was whipped, put in the pillory, had one of his ears cut off and one side of his nose slit, was branded on one cheek with a red-hot iron, was afterwards returned to the Fleet to be kept in close custody, and seven days later was whipped again at the pillory, had the other ear cut off, his other nostril slit, and his other cheek branded.[243] As late as 1734, John Durant, who "either was, or pretended to be, deaf and unable to read," had his thumbs tied and the knot drawn hard because he did not answer the accusation of the court; he was also threatened with the press.[244] Excepting in cases where the press was used, torture was not, according to Pike, practised in England after the first part of the seventeenth century; but the case just cited is a contradiction of so broad an assertion.

The introductions of customs of penance did much towards rendering the differences in the punishment and general treatment of the poor and rich, the humble and noble, more conspicuous. As for the clergy, they had special benefits given them, and were accustomed, in the early days of Britain, to murder, rob, and indulge their passions very nearly as they chose, without interference from the state.[245] But the Benefit of Clergy, which rendered any one subject to it, "practically exempt from the ordinary punishments for most of the greater crimes," was applicable, in later centuries, not only to clergymen proper, but also to all clerks, the term including every one who had been married and could read.[246] The position of the slave after the Teutonic invasion has been noticed. The position of the churl was nearly as bad. "The infliction of a penalty which he could not pay, and which none would pay for him, rendered him utterly bankrupt in freedom.... If he left the place assigned to him it was held that he had stolen his own body. He could be summarily hanged when caught, and his life was worth nothing to his lord, or even to his kindred, unless they redeemed him. This was the fate which was continually impending over the free man of low estate if he had the misfortune to make enemies among those who had the power to save or condemn him."[247] In the reign of Edward I., "a statute was passed which made it a grave offence to devise or tell any false news of prelates, dukes, earls, barons, or nobles of the realm. Others, too, were enumerated as being within the meaning of the act--the Chancellor, the Justices of either Bench, and all the great officers of state." Under Richard II., the statute was reenacted and made more stringent.[248]

For most trivial offences of all sorts, extreme punishment was meted out. Mutilation was often inflicted merely for the killing of game belonging to the King's forests, and though the Forest Charter of Henry III. provided that no one should, in future, lose life or limb for the sake of the King's deer, the penalty does not seem to have gone out of use at this period, for other offences. In the reign of Edward III., a tailor was sentenced, for brawling in court, to imprisonment in the Tower of London for life and the loss of his right hand; "and the rolls of Gaol Delivery of this period show conclusively that the ordinary punishments were hanging, the pillory, and the tumbrel or dung-cart."[249] Late in the reign of Henry VIII., an act was passed condemning any person who struck another so that blood was drawn, within the limits of the King's house, to the loss of his right hand. The pillory was in use up to the reign of Queen Victoria; "it could be applied to perjurers and suborners of perjury until the year 1837. It was even applied to women for no greater crime than fortune-telling, late in the eighteenth century."[250] "Of the other punishments associated with the old spirit of violence, and inflicted in public, the chief was whipping. It was commonly awarded to men guilty of petty thefts.... Instances in which women were whipped were by no means uncommon at the very end of the eighteenth century." Until 1808, pocket-picking, until 1811, stealing from bleaching-grounds, were punished with death. In 1813, 1816, and 1818, a bill was introduced to abolish capital punishment for a theft of five shillings from shops; but it was defeated in the House of Lords. In 1820, the amount necessary to the death-sentence was raised to L15. Until 1832, horse, cattle, and sheep stealing, theft from a dwelling-house, and forgery, were capital offences. In 1833, house-breaking; in 1834, returning from transportation before expiration of the sentence; and, in 1835, sacrilege and letter-stealing ceased to be punished with death. But it was not until 1861 that hanging was limited by law to cases of murder and treason.[251]

The worst element of the punishment by pillory or in any manner in public did not lie so much in the punishment itself, as in the violence of the mob, which appears to have been regarded as a legitimate part of the ceremony, and against which the criminal seldom received any protection. Sometimes, the man or woman sentenced to the pillory for a petty offence died of stoning at the hands of the onlookers; and Pike writes of the burning of a woman in 1721, for coining: "Her last wish was that she might say a prayer in peace. But the mob which had come out to take its ease and its pleasure had no mind to sacrifice its rights for the comfort of a criminal. A woman at the stake was a good butt for filthy missiles and ribald jests; the yelling rabble would not permit the poor wretch to collect her thoughts, or to hear her own words, and instead of sympathy they gave her stones. When the fire was kindled, even the consuming flames must have seemed less cruel than the men and women standing around."[252]

We all know the condition in which Howard found the prisons of his day; and if we possess strong powers of imagination, we may perchance be able partly to conceive what must have been their state in days when the people knew but very little of what passed within prison-walls, and the keepers wielded an almost absolute power over the prisoners. If the abuses which were common even two centuries ago were to occur in only a few instances to-day, the whole English nation would flame with indignation. In the fourteenth century, jail-breaking was frequent in cases where the prisoner could afford to pay for his escape; judges were often bribed; a "clerk" who was delivered over to the bishop before or after sentence, according to the Benefit of Clergy, could still be acquitted by the bishop in case the requisite number of compurgators were found to swear to belief in his innocence; and, moreover, clerks who had been convicted could not afterwards be tried for any offence committed before their conviction. On the other hand, if a woman attempted to obtain sentence against the murderer of a relative, she had not only to fear the revenge of the man's allies, who seem to have had things very much their own way; but in case courage deserted her at the last, and she failed to appear against the accused, she was "waived" or outlawed; again it may be remarked that the laws of England did not favor women.[253] Writs were forged, juries were packed, judges, justices, and sheriffs bribed. In the reign of James I., the young countess of Essex, who, having fallen in love with Lord Rochester during the absence of her husband, had obtained a divorce to marry him, became angry with a friend of her lover who counselled him against the marriage, caused him to be imprisoned in the Tower, had the Lieutenant and under-keeper of the Tower replaced by friends of hers, and through the aid of these administered poison to him. The countess and her husband were arrested on charge of causing the death, and the former pleaded, the latter was proved, guilty. Yet the two were pardoned, _though some of their accomplices were executed_.[254]

It is impossible that such customs should exist, in legal relations, in connection with great justice and sympathy in other relations. Some allowance may be made for idiosyncrasy, for individual and national peculiarities; it is possible that a bloody-minded and cruel ruler may find pleasure in petting pigeons, but his pleasure will be likely to be rather of an egoistic order, and his apparent kindness easily turned to cruelty if anger comes upon him. So, too, the cruel potentate may prove a kind husband and friend, as long as his own interests coincide, and do not conflict, with those of his friends or his family. But the man who is consistently treacherous and unfeeling in any one relation will not, as a rule, show consideration and tenderness in other relations, except in so far as these other relations subserve his own ends of gain or vanity; the point where they part company with such ends is the point where he will resort to another mode of action. The same is true of nations. Accordingly, we find brigandage and open robbery common even down to the end of the last century, and not only on the part of the poorer classes, or rather not so much on their part as on that of princes, nobles, and even the clergy; we find pirating and wreckage common on the sea; we find intrigue upon intrigue at court, nobles and members of the royal family continually plotting each other's murder, but nevertheless escaping punishment and received with adulation; we find the much-praised heroes of the Crusades devasting the lands through which they passed, violating wives and daughters of their hosts, and deserting to the enemy for bribes; we find wholesale massacres of unoffending Jews; we find perjury a profession, station an excuse for nearly every crime, religion a cloak for extortion and vice, and oppression of the poor and lowly universal. And yet we weep over modern deterioration!

We forget, when we read--perhaps with an exclamation that man is as much a savage as ever--how the onlookers at the burning of the Shanghai made no effort to save lives but only to secure spoil, that it is only a short time since such scenes must have been common enough on all the shores of Europe; we forget, when we shudder with horror at an exceptional case of unjust or brutal punishment on the borders of our civilization, that it is not long since torture and mutilation, barbarities of every sort, were practised among the foremost nations of the world, and for the most trivial offences. Nor do we always remember, when we grow indignant at the hard case of our poor, that there was a time when the excess of indigent population was prevented only by famines and pestilences which killed their thousands upon thousands, and of which we very seldom see the like in modern times; we forget that there was a time when the desperate rising of the continental peasantry against the bitter oppression of the landowners drew from even the reformer Luther the exclamation that the revolters ought to be throttled collectively. I have no intention to underrate present evils or to excuse them by past ones. I see no reason for believing that the present age should rest upon its laurels; on the contrary, I believe that we are only at the beginning of civilization; but I see no need for denying past evolution in order to make this assertion. Starvation is not easier to a man to-day, because it is proved to him that many more men died of hunger in the past than die of it in the present century. But just for this reason, I fail to understand why there should be so much effort expended by certain reformers in the attempt to disprove what history and observation yet so plainly show,--namely, that the condition of the masses at present, taken for all in all, is much better than it has ever been before; that misery is not so extreme or proportionately so widely spread; that the worst sorts of crime are decreasing; that justice is more general, and that sympathy is warmer, than in any previous age. It is true that we have new methods of exploiting the poor; but we need to consider how our ancestors would have used those opportunities had they possessed them; and we need also to remember, with regard to a particular form of evil, that some time is necessary for society as a whole to grow to a comprehension of its increase and importance, and to reach unanimity of opinion as to action for its removal. As forms of evil change, some one particular form may increase for a time, swallowing up in itself, as the larger wave accumulates several small ones, various other forms, until the slowly gathered resistance of public opinion brings the reaction.

We may gather valuable evidence as to our progress, even in comparison with recent times, by reference to our artistic literature. True, the great writers have often been far ahead of their times. But if we regard the average, we shall soon perceive the signs to which I refer. The stilted mannerisms of the ancient novel mark the absence of democratic feeling, and witness to the less general diffusion of true kindness, which, wherever it appears, tends to simplicity, having no need of mannerisms. Nothing, too, is more indicative of our advancement than the change in conceptions of humor; for to know what a nation laughs about is to know what are its ideals and shortcomings. Earlier humor is often mere vulgarity or brutality, or a mixture of the two; obscenity, vice, and the heartless torture of the weak and helpless are its favorite themes, and appear in the characters of its heroes and ideals. The truthfulness of Victor Hugo's description of earlier British "fun," in his "L'Homme qui rit," is borne witness to by English literature.

All modern literature marks the progress of the democratic idea. Our history and our art are full of the people. The very unrest and dissatisfaction of the time are signs of a more general and a better education, an increase of sympathy in degree and extent, and, I believe, of better nourishment and a more energetic physique. The higher ideals which were once the property of the few are become the property of the many. Our institutions are grown more democratic and humane. We have our free hospitals and dispensaries, our soup-kitchens and cheap lodging-houses, our asylums for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, old people and orphans, the weak and afflicted of all kinds, our guilds, "Settlements," and "Open-air" charities, our creches, our refuges and reformatories, our societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and to Animals, our "Open Doors," and "Midnight Missions," our trade and industrial schools, and our free schools and scholarships and free libraries. In times of famine, disease, and disaster, we band together to aid, and funds for the distressed pour in from every side, and not only from people of the nation to which the sufferers belong, but often also from those of distant parts of the world. Fancy the Greeks subscribing to a fund in aid of cholera-stricken barbarians; imagine the Romans, even, clubbing together, in every part of the world to which they had wandered, to succour the sufferers by a Johnstown flood; or conceive of the wealthy classes of the Middle Ages furnishing fires and food as did the Parisians during the unusual winter cold of 1890-91!

Not only has sympathy become more wildly diffused within the state; it has spread outside it also. National narrowness is slowly disappearing. The federation of the states of Europe and of the civilized world is no longer looked upon as a mad-man's fancy but as a sober possibility or even a probability. It is now agreed that war between the English-speaking nations of the earth,--between England and her colonies, or England and the United States, is very nearly, if not quite, an impossibility. The union of three of the most powerful nations of Europe, not for war but for peace, is assuredly of great political importance in itself; but of even more importance in the influence insensibly exerted by its continuance upon the opinions of the world. The masses of the people themselves are becoming more and more cosmopolitan, and we have an ever-increasing number of international unions and congresses, political, scientific, artistic, and ethical.

On the whole, it is, perhaps, as much a lack of imagination as anything which makes us fall into the mistake of underestimating our own age and overestimating all others. The crimes and abuses far away in times different from our own are difficult to conceive, and stir our blood even less than those distant in space; the sufferings of the Middle Ages, or even of one or two centuries ago, are more difficult to realize and move us less than a famine or flood in China or a murder in the heart of Africa. The things immediately before our eyes affect us most; and it is well, for many reasons, that this is so. Nevertheless, idealization of the past is evil in its consequences. For, if present progress is to some men an excuse for easy-going inactivity, the extent of existing evil is even more often an excuse for the same selfish course.

Man has had, in all periods, the tendency, in his discontent with the present, to invest with ideal attributes of every sort some past period in which the special evils he deplores did not, perhaps, exist; the dissatisfied of all times have imagined a golden age somewhere in the past. The old, who look on the innovations of a younger generation with distrust, and are likely to mistake, in remembrance, the gold of their own life's morning for an outer radiance independent of their youth, add to our delusion; while the young confuse their increasing knowledge of the evil of the world with an increase of the evil itself. But the more science progresses, and the greater our acquaintance with the facts of history becomes, the more these delusions tend to disappear. The much-praised simplicity of our ancestors was, in truth, a half-savagery, where the higher forms of justice were not practised, that finer tact and consideration which makes life best worth living was unknown, and many of the faults which we most deplore in our own day were considered rather virtues than otherwise. It is a moral pity that poets and philosophers have lent the beauty of their verse and the dignity of their eloquence to the idealization of the past. Indeed,

"I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
To sing--oh, not of lizard or of toad
Alive i' the ditch there,--'twere excusable,
But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones."[255]

It is an especial pity that the reformer should ever devote his effort to the upholding of the old idea of the inferiority of the present to the past. Not in the past, but in the future, lies the Golden Age of man.

FOOTNOTES:

[183] "The Origin of Civilization," pp. 397, 398.

[184] Ibid. pp. 402, 403.

[185] Ibid. p. 398.

[186] Ibid. p. 407.

[187] See, as above, pp. 368, 369.

[188] Ibid. p. 371.

[189] Ibid. p. 69.

[190] Ibid. p. 72.

[191] Ibid. pp. 112, 113.

[192] See, as above, p. 405.

[193] See Lubbock, "Prehistoric Times," also especially Chaps. III. and IV. of "The Origin of Civilization."

[194] Cause or effect, which? Mexico is not a country poor in animal life.

[195] "The Origin of Civilization," pp. 372, 373.

[196] See "The Origin of Civilization," p. 396.

[197] Ibid. p. 398.

[198] Ibid. p. 371.

[199] "Social Life in Greece," 3d ed. p. 272.

[200] "The Science of Ethics," p. 237.

[201] "Social Life in Greece," p. 243 _et seq._

[202] "Lectures on Primitive Civilization," p. 219 _et seq._

[203] Mahaffy: "Three Epochs in the Social Development of the Ancient Greeks," pp. 31, 32.

[204] "Social Life in Greece," p. 238.

[205] "Social Life in Greece," p. 234 _et seq._

[206] Ibid. p. 239 _et seq._ The italics are mine.

[207] "Social Life in Greece," p. 272 _et seq._

[208] "Social Life in Greece," p. 97 _et seq._

[209] Ibid. p. 157.

[210] "Social Life in Greece," p. 160 _et seq._

[211] Ibid. p. 162 _et seq._

[212] "Les Institutions de la Grece," p. 47 _et seq._

[213] Lecky, "History of European Morals," I. p. 398.

[214] Ibid. p. 299 _et seq._

[215] Lecky, "History of European Morals," II. p. 31.

[216] "The Origin of Civilization," p. 372.

[217] "History of European Morals," I. p. 285.

[218] "History of European Morals," I. p. 286 _et seq._

[219] Ibid. p. 276.

[220] Ibid. p. 301.

[221] "History of European Morals," I. p. 287 _et seq._

[222] Ibid. p. 280 _et seq._

[223] "History of European Morals," I. p. 287.

[224] "History of European Morals," I. p. 302 _et seq._

[225] Ibid. p. 236.

[226] Compare, however, "History of European Morals," I. p. 263: "Ionian slaves of a surpassing beauty, Alexandrian slaves, famous for their subtle skill in stimulating the jaded senses of the confirmed and sated libertine, became the ornaments of every patrician house, the companions and instructors of the young.... The slave population was itself a hotbed of vice, and it contaminated all with which it came in contact."

[227] "History of European Morals," I. p. 303 _et seq._ The italics are mine.

[228] L. O. Pike, "Crime in England," I. p. 20.

[229] "History of European Morals," II. p. 299.

[230] L. O. Pike, "A History of Crime in England," I. pp. 51, 344 _et seq._; II. pp. 138, 176, 177, 287, 379 _et seq._

[231] Ibid. II. pp. 81, 82.

[232] Ibid. I. p. 226; II. pp. 85, 86, 174 _et seq._, 324 _et seq._

[233] Ibid. I. pp. 168, 169.

[234] "History of Crime," I. p. 50.

[235] Ibid. p. 51.

[236] "History of Crime," I. p. 52 _et seq._

[237] Ibid. I. pp. 204, 210.

[238] Ibid. I. p. 210 _et seq._

[239] Ibid. II. p. 85.

[240] Ibid. II. pp. 87-89.

[241] Ibid. II. p. 346.

[242] Ibid. II. p. 283.

[243] "History of Crime," II. pp. 162, 163.

[244] Ibid. II. p. 284.

[245] Ibid. I. p. 52 _et seq._, p. 146 _et seq._

[246] Ibid. I. p. 297 _et seq._

[247] Ibid I. p. 89 _et seq._

[248] "History of Crime," II. p. 398 _et seq._

[249] Ibid. I. p. 213.

[250] Ibid. II. pp. 82, 83, 377 _et seq._

[251] Ibid. II. p. 450 _et seq._

[252] See as above, II. p. 288.

[253] As above, I. p. 270 _et seq._

[254] Ibid. II. p. 145 _et seq._

[255] Mrs. Browning, "Aurora Leigh."