The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 07/Discourse 3
III.
"If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and aseketh that which is gone astray?"—Matthew xviii. 12.
We are first babies, then children, then youths, then men. It is so with the nation; so with mankind. The human race started with no culture, no religion, no morals, even no manners, having only desires and faculties within, and the world without. Now we have attained much more. But it has taken many centuries for mankind to pass from primeval barbarism to the present stage of comfort, science, civilization, and refinement. It has been the work of two hundred generations; perhaps of more. But each new child is born at the foot of the ladder, as much as the first child; with only desires and faculties. He may have a better physical organization than the first child—he certainly has better teachers: but he, in like manner, is born with no culture, no religion, no morals, even with no manners; born into them," not with them; born bare of these things and naked as the first child. He must himself toil up the ladder which mankind have been so long in constructing and climbing up. To attain the present civilization he must pass over every point which the race passed through. The child of the civilized man, born with a good organization and under favourable circumstances, can do this rapidly, and in thirty or forty years attains the height of development which it took the whole human race sixty centuries or more to arrive at. He has the aid of past experience and the examples of noble men; he travels a read already smooth and beaten. The world's cultivation, so slowly and painfully achieved, helps civilize him. He may then go further on, and cultivate himself; may transcend the development of mankind, adding new rounds to tho ladder. So doing he aids future children, who will one day climb above his head, he possibly crying against them,—that they climb only to fall, and thereby sweep off him and all below : that no new rounds can be added to the old ladder.
Still, after all the helps which our fathers have provided, every future child must go through the same points which we and our predecessors passed through, only more swiftly. Every boy has his animal period, when he can only eat and sleep, intelligence slowly dawning on his mind. Then comes his savage period, when he knows nothing of rights, when all thine is mine to him, if he can get it. Then comes his barbarous period, when he is ignorant and dislikes to learn ; study and restraint are irksome. He hates the school, disobeys his mother ; has reverence for nobody. Nothing is sacred to him—no time, nor place, nor person. He would grow up wild. The greater part of children travel beyond this stage. The unbearable boy becomes a tolerable youth; then a powerful man. He loves his duty; outstrips the men that once led him so unwilling and reluctant, and will set hard lessons for his grandsire, which that grandsire, perhaps, will not learn. The young learns of the old, mounts the ladder they mounted and the ladder they made. The reverse is seldom true, that the old climbs the ladder which the young have made, and over that storms new heights. Now and then you see it, but such are extraordinary and marvellous men. In the old story, Saturn did not take pains to understand his children, nor learn thereof; he only devoured them up, till some outgrew and overmastered him. Did the generation that is passing from the stage-ever comprehend and fairly judge the new generation coming on? In the world, the barbarian passes on and becomes the civilized, then the enlightened.
In the physical process of growth from the baby to the max;, there is no direct intervention of the will. Therefore the process goes on regularly, and we do not see abortive men who have advanced in years, but stopped growth in their babyhood, or boyhood. But as the will is the soul of personality, so to say, the heart of intellect, morals, and religion, so the force thereof may promote, retard, disturb, and perhaps for a time completely arrest the progress of intellectual, moral, and religious growth. Still more, this spiritual development of men is hindered or promoted by subtle causes hitherto little appreciated. Hence, by reason of those outward or internal hinderances, you find persons and classes of men who do not attain the average culture of mankind) but stop at some lower stage of this spiritual development, or else loiter behind the rest. You even find whole nations whose progress is be slow, that thay need the continual aid of the more civilized to quicken their growth* Outward circumstances have a powerful influence on this development. If a single class in a nation lingers behind the rest, the cause thereof will commonly be found in some outward hinderance. They move in a resisting medium, and therefore with abated speed. No one expects the same progress from a Russian serf and a free man of New England. I do not deny that in the case of some men personal will is doubtless the disturbing force. I am not now to go beyond that fact, and inquire how the will became as it is. Mere is a man who, from whatever cause, is bodily ill-born, with defective organs. He stops in the animal period; is incapable of any considerable degree of development, intellectual, moral, or religious. Tho defect is in his body. Others disturbed by more occult causes do not attain their proper growth. This man wishes to stop in his savage period, he would be a freebooter, a privateer against society, having universal letters of marque and reprisal; a perpetual Arab, his rule is to get what he can, as he will and where he pleases, to keep What he gets. Another stops at the barbarous age. He is lazy and will not work, others must bear his share of the general burden of mankind. He claims letters patent to make all men servo him. He is hot only indolent, constitutionally lazy, but lazy, consciously and wilfully idle. He will not work, but in one form or another will beg or steal. Yet a fourth stops in the half-civilized period. He will work with his hands, but no more. He cannot discover; he will not study to learn; he will not even be taught what has been invented and taught before. None can teach him. The horse is led to the water, or the water brought to the house, but the beast will not drink. "The idle fool is whipped at school," but to no purpose. He is always an oaf. No college or tutor mends him. The wild ass will go out free, wild, and an ass.
These four, the idiot, the pirate, the thief, and the clown, are exceptional men. They remain stationary. Meanwhile, mankind advances, continually, but not with an even front. The human race moves not by column or line, but by echelon as it were. We go up by stairs, not by slopes. Now comes a great man, of far-reaching and prospective sight, a Moses, and he tells men that there is a land of promise, which they have a right to who have skill to win it. Then lesser men, the Calebs and Joshuas, go and search it out, bringing back therefrom new wine in the cluster and alluring tales. Next troops of pioneers advance, yet lesser men; then a few bold men who love adventure. Then comes the army, the people with their flocks and herds, the priesthood with their ark of the covenant and the tabernacle, the title-deeds of the new lands which they have heard of but not seen. At last there comes the mixed multitude, following in no order, but not without shouting and tumult, men treading one another under foot, cowards looking back and refusing to march, old men dying without seeing their consolation. If you will lie down on the ground and take the profile of a great city, and see how hill, steeple, dome, tower, the roof of the tall house, gain, on the sky, and then come whole streets of warehouses and shops, then common dwellings, then cheap, low tenements, you will have a good profile of man's march to gain new conquests in science, art, morals, religion, and general development. It is so in the family, a bright boy shooting before all the rest, and taking the thunder out of the adverse cloud for his brothers and sisters, who follow and grow rich with unscathed forehead. It is so in the nation, a few great men bearing the brunt of the storm, and wading through the surges to set their weaker brothers, screaming and struggling, with dry feet, in safety, on the firm land of science or religion. It is so in the world, a tall nation achieving art, science, law, morals, religion, and by the fact revealing their beauty to the barbarian race.
In all departments of human concern there are such pioneers for the family, the nation, or mankind. It is instructive to study this law of human progress, to see the De Gamas and Columbuses, aspiring men who dream of worlds to come and lead the perilous van; to see the Vespuccis, the Cortezes, the Pizarros, who get rank and fame by following in their track; to see next the merchant adventurers, soldiers, sutlers, and the like, who make money out of the new conquest, while the great discoverers had for meet reward the joy of their genius, the nobleness of their work, a sight of the world's future welfare from the prophet's mountain—a hard life, a bad name, and a grave unknown.
Now, while there are those men in the van of society, who aspire at more, chiding and taxing mankind with idleness, cowardice, and even sin, there are yet those others who loiter on the way, from weakness or wilfulness, refusing to advance—idlers, cowards, sinners. If born in the rear, afar from civilization, they are left to die—the savages, the inferior races, the perishing classes of the world. If born in the centre or civilization, for a while they impede the march by actively hindering others, by standing in their way, or by plundering the rest—the dangerous classes of society. They too are slain and trodden under foot of men, and likewise perish.
In most large families there is a bad boy, a black sheep in the flock, an Ishmael whom Abraham will drive out into the wilderness, to meet an angel if he can find one. That story of Hagar and her son is very old, but verified anew each year in families and nations. So in society there are criminals who do not keep up with the moral advance of the mass, stragglers from the march, whom society treats as Abraham his base-born boy, but sending them off with no loaf or skin of water, not even a blessing, but a curse; sending them off as Cain went, with a bad name and a mark on their forehead! So in the world there are inferior nations, savage, barbarous, half-civilized some are inferior in nature, some perhaps only behind us in development; on a lower form in the great school of Providence—Negroes, Indians, Mexicans, Irish, and the like, whom the world treats as Ishmael and the Gibeonites got treated: now their land is stolon from them in war; their children, or their persons, are annexed to the strong as slaves. The civilized continually preys on the savage, re-annexing their territory and stealing their persons-owning them or claiming their work. Esau is rough and hungry, Jacob smooth and well fed. The smooth man overreaches the rough; buys his birthright for a mess of pottage; takes the ground from underneath his feet, thereby supplanting his brother. So the elder serves the younger, and the fresh civilization, strong, and sometimes it may be wicked also, overmasters the ruder ago that is contented to stop. The young man now a barbarian will come up one day and take all our places, making us seem ridiculous, nothing but timid conservatives!
All these three, the reputed pests of the family, society, and the world, are but loiterers from the march, bad boys, or dull ones. Criminals are a class of such; savages are nations thereof—classes or nations that for some cause do not keep up with the movement of mankind. The same human nature is in us all, only there it is not so highly developed. Yet the bad boy, wno to-day is a curse to the mother that bore him, would perhaps have been accounted brave and good in the days of the Conqueror; the dangerous class might have fought in the Crusades, and been reckoned soldiers of the Lord whose chance for heaven was most auspicious. The savage nations would have been thought civilized in the days when "there was no smith in Israel."
David would make a sorry figure among the present kings of Europe, and Abraham would be judged of by a standard not known in his time. There have been many centuries in which the pirate, the land-robber, and the murderer were thought the greatest of men.
Now it becomes a serious question, What shall be done for these stragglers, or even with them P It is sometimes a terrible question to the father and mother what they shall do for their reprobate son who is an offence to the neighbourhood, a shame, a reproach, and a heart-burning to them. It is a sad question to society, What shall be done with the criminals—thieves, housebreakers, pirates, murderers? It is a serious question to the world, What is to become of tho humbler nations—Irish, Mexicans, Malays, Indians, Negroes?
In tho world and in society tho question is answered in about the same way. In a low civilization, tho instinct of self-preservation is the strongest of all. They are done with, not for; are done away with. It is the Old Testament answer:—The inferior nation is hewn to pieces, the strong possess their lands, their cities, their cattle, their persons, also, if they will; the class of criminals gets the prophet's curse: the two bears, tho gaol and tho gallows, eat them up. In the family alone is the Christian answer given; the good shepherd goes forth to seek tho one sheep that has strayed and gone, lost upon the mountains; the father goes out after tho poor prodigal, whom the swine's meal could not feed nor fill.[1] The world, which is the society of nations, and society, which is tho family of classes, still belong mainly to the "old dispensation," heathen or Hebrew, tho period of force. In the family there is a certain instinctive love binding the parent to the child, and therefore a certain unity of action, growing out of that love. So the father feels his kinship to his boy, though a reprobate; looks for the causes of his son's folly or sin, and strives to cure him; at least to do something for him, not merely with him. The spirit of Christianity comes into the family, but the recognition of human brotherhood stops mainly there. It does not reach throughout society; it has little influence on national politics or international law—on the affairs of the world taken as a whole. I know the idea of human brotherhood has more influence now than hitherto; I think in New England it has a wider scope, a higher range, and works with more power than elsewhere. Our hearts bleed for the starving thousands of Ireland, whom we only read of ; for the down- trodden slave, though of another race, and dyed by heaven with another hue; yes, for the savage and the suffering everywhere. The hand of our charity goes through every land. If there is one quality for which the men of New England may be proud, it is this,—their sympathy with suffering man. Still we are far from the Christian ideal. We still drive out of society the Ishmaels and Esaus. This we do not so much from ill-will as want of thought, but thereby we lose the strength of these outcasts. So much water runs over the dam—wasted and wasting!
In all these melancholy cases what is it best to do? what shall tho parents do to mend their dull boy, or their wicked one? There are two methods which may be tried. One is the method of force, sometimes referred to Solomon, and recommended by the maxim "Spare not the rod and spoil the child." That is the Old Testament way, "Stripes are prepared for the fool's back." The mischief is, they leave it no wiser than they found it. By the law of the Hebrews, a man brought his stubborn and rebellious son stubborn and rebellious: he will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard." Thereupon, tho men of the city stoned him with stones, and so "put away the evil from amongst them!" That was the method of force. It may bruise the body; it may fill men with fear; it may kill. I think it never did any other good. It belonged to a rude and bloody age. I may ask intelligent men who have tried it, and I think they will confess it was a mistake. I think I may ask intelligent men on whom it has been tried, and they will say, "It was a mistake on my father's part, but a curse to me!" I know there are exceptions to that reply; still I think it will be general. A man is seldom elevated by an appeal to low motives; always by addressing what is high and manly within him. Is fear of physical pain the highest element you can appeal to in a child; the most effectual? I do not see how Satan can bo cast out by Satan. I think a Saviour never tries it. Yet this method of force is brief and compact. It requires no patience, no thought, no wisdom for its application, and but a moment's time. For this reason, I think, it is still retained in some families and many schools, to the injury alike of all concerned. Blows and violent words are not correction, often but an adjournment of correction: sometimes only an actual confession of inability to correct.
The other is the method of love, and of wisdom not the less. Force may hide, and even silence effects for a time; it removes not the real causes of evil. By the method of love and wisdom the parents remove the causes; they do not kill the demoniac, they cast out the demon, not by letting in Beelzebub, the chief devil, but by the finger of God. They redress the child's folly and evil birth by their own wisdom and good breeding. Tho day drives out and off the night.
Sometimes you see that worthy parents have a weak and sickly child, feeble in body. No pains are too great for them to take in behalf of the faint and feeble one. What self-denial of the father; what sacrifice on the mother's part! The best of medical skill is procured; the tenderest watching is not spared. No outlay of monoy, time, or sacrifice, is thought too much to save the child's life; to insure a firm constitution and make that life a blessing. The able-bodied children can take care of themselves, but not the weak. So the affection of father and mother centres on this sickly child. By extraordinary attention the feeble becomes strong; the deformed is transformed, and the grown man, strong and active, blesses his mother for health not less than life.
Did you ever see a robin attend to her immature and callow child which some heedless or wicked boy had stolen from the nest, wounded, and left on the ground, half living; left to perish? Patiently she brings food and water, gives it kind nursing. Tenderly she broods over it all night upon the ground, sheltering its tortured body from the cold air of night and morning's penetrating dew. She perils herself; never leaves it—not till Life is gone. That is nature; the strong protecting the feeble. Human nature may pause and consider the fowls of the air, whence the Greatest once drew His lessons. Human history, spite of all its tears and blood, is full of beauty and majestic worth. But it shows few things so fair as the mother watching thus over her sickly and deformed child, feeding them with her own life. What if she forewent her native instinct, and the mother said, "My boy is deformed, a cripple—let him die?" Where would be the more hideous deformity?
If his child be dull, slow-witted, what pains will a good father take to instruct him; still more if he is vicious, born with a low organization, with bad propensities—what admonitions will he administer; what teachers will he consult; what expedients will he try; what prayers will ho not pray for his stubborn and rebellious son! Though one experiment foil, ho tries another, and then again, reluctant to give ever. Did it never happen to one of you to be such a child, to have outgrown that rebellion and wickedness? Remember the pains taken with you; remember the agony your mother felt; the shame that, bowed your father's head so oft, and brought such bitter tears adown those venerable cheeks. You cannot pay for that agony, that shame, not pay the hearts which burst with both—yet uttering only a prayer for you. Pay it back, then, if you can, to others like yourself, stubborn and rebellious sons.
Have none of you ever been such a father or mother? You know, then, the sad yearnings of heart which tried you. The world condemned you and your wicked child, and said, "Lot the elders stone him with stones. The gallows waiteth for its own! "Not so you! You said: "Nay, now, wait a little. Perchance the boy will mend. Come, I will try again. Crush him not utterly and a father's heart besides!" The more he was wicked, the more assiduous were you for his recovery, for his elevation. You saw that ho would not keep up with the moral march of men; that ho was a barbarian, a savage,—yes, almost a beast amongst men. You saw this; yes, felt it too as none others felt. Yet you could not condemn him wholly and without hope. You saw some good mixed with his evil; some causes for the evil and excuses for it which others were blind to. Because you mourned most you pitied most—all from the abundance of your love. Though even in your highest hour of prayer, the sad conviction came that work or prayer was all in vain—you never gave him over to the world's reproach, but interposed your fortune, character, yes, your own person, to take the blows which the severe and tyrannous world kept laying on. At last, if he would not repent, you hid him away, the best you could, from the mocking sight of other men, but never shut him from your heart; never from remembrance in your deepest prayers. How the whole family suffers for the prodigal till he returns. "When he comes back, you rejoice over one recovered olive-plant more than, over all the trees of your field which no storm has ever bspoke or bowed. How you went forth to meet him; with what joy rejoiced! "For this my son was lost and is found," says the old man; "he was dead and is alive once more. Let us pray and be glad!" With what a serene and hallowed countenance you met your friends and neighbours, as their glad hearts smiled up in their faces when the prodigal came home from riot and swine's-bread, a now man safe and sound! Many such things have I soon, and hearts long cold grow bright and warm again. Towards evening the clouds broke asunder; Simeon saw his consolation, and went home in sunlight and in peace. The general result of this treatment in the family is, that the dull boy learns by degrees, learns what he is fit for; the straggler joins the troop, and keeps step with the rest—nay, sometimes becomes the leader of the march; the vicious boy is corrected; even the faults of his organization get overcome, not suddenly, but at length. The rejected stone finds its place on the wall, and its use. Such is not always the result. Some will not bo mended. I stop not now to ask tho cause. Some will not return, though you go out to meet them a great way off. What then? Will you refuse to go? Can you wholly abandon a friend or a child who thus deserts himself? Is ho so bad that he cannot be made better? Perhaps it is so. Can you not hinder him from being worse? Are you so good that you must forsake him? Did not God send His greatest, noblest, purest Son to seek and save the lost? send Him to call sinners to repent? When sinners slew Him, did God forsake mankind? Not one of those sinners did His love forget.
Does the good physician spend the night in feasting with the sound, or in watching with the sick P Nay, though tho sick man be past all hope, he will look in to soothe affliction which he cannot cure; at least to speak a word of friendly cheer. The wise teacher spends most pains with backward boys, and is most bountiful himself where Nature seems most niggard in her gifts. What would you say if a teacher refused to help a boy because the boy was slow to learn; because he now and then broke through the rules? What if the mother said, "My boy is a sickly dunce, not worth the pains of rearing. Let him die!" What if the father said, "He is a born villain, to be bred only for the gallows; what use to toil or pray for him! Let the hangman take my son!" What shall be done for criminals, the backward children of society, who refuse to keep up with the moral or legal advance of mankind? They are a dangerous class. There are three things which are sometimes confounded: there is error, an unintentional violation of a natural law. Sometimes this comes from abundance of life and energy; sometimes from ignorance, general or special; sometimes from heedlessness, which is ignorance for the time. Next there is crime, the violation of a human statute. Suppose the statute also represents a law of God; the violation thereof may be the result of ignorance, or of design, it may come from a bad heart. Then it becomes sin—the wilful violation of a known law of God. There are many errors which are not crimes; and the best men often commit them innocently, but not without harm, violating laws of the body or tho soul, which they have not grown up to understand. There have been many crimes: yes, conscious violations of man's law which were not sins, but rather a keeping of God's law. There are still a great many sins not forbidden by any human statute, not considered as crimes. It is no crime to go and fight in a wicked war; nay, it is thought a virtue. It was a crime in the heroes o± the American Revolution to demand the unalienable rights of man—they were "traitors" who did it; a crime in Jesus to sum up the "Law and the Prophets" in one word, love; He was reckoned an "infidel," guilty of blasphemy against Moses! Now, to punish an error as a crime, a crime as a sin, leads to confusion at the first, and to much worse than confusion in the end.
But there are crimes which are a violation of the eternal principles of justice. It is of such, and the men who commit them, that I am now to speak. What shall be done for the dangerous classes, the criminals?
The first question is, "What end shall we aim at in dealing with them? The means must be suited to accomplish that end. We may desire vengeance; then the hurt inflicted on the criminal will be proportioned to the loss or hurt sustained by society. A man has stolen my goods, injured my person, traduced my good name, sought to take my life. I will not ask for the motive of his deeds, or the cause of that motive. I will only consider my own damage, and will make him smart for that. I will use violence—having an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I will deliver him over to the tormentors till my vengeance is satisfied. If he slew my friend, or sought to slay, but lacked the power, as I have the ability, I will kill him! This desire of vengeance, of paying a hurt with a hurt, has still very much influence on our treatment of criminals. I fear it is still the chief aim of our penal jurisprudence. When vengeance is the aim, violence is the most suitable method; gaols and the gallows most appropriate instruments! But is it right to take vengeance; for me to hurt a man to-day solely because he hurt me yesterday? If so, the proof of that right must be found in my nature, in the law of God; a man can make a statute, God only a right. As I study my nature, I find no such right; reason gives me none; confidence none; religion quite as little. Doubtless I have a right to defend myself by all manly means; to protect myself for the future no less than for the present. In doing that, it may be needful that I should restrain, and in restraining, seize and hold, and in holding incidentally hurt my opponent. But I cannot see what right I have in cold blood wilfully to hurt a man because he once hurt me, and does not intend to repeat the wrong. Do I look to the authority of the greatest Son of man? I find no allusion to such a right. I find no law of God which allows vengeance. In His providence I find justice everywhere as beautiful as certain; but vengeance nowhere. I know this is not the common notion entertained of God and His providence. I shudder to think at the barbarism which yet prevails under the guise of Christianity; the vengeance which is sought for in the name of God!
The aim may be not to revenge a crime, but to prevent it; to deter the offender from repeating the deed, and others from the beginning thereof. In all modern legislation the vindictive spirit is slowly yielding to the design of preventing crime. The method is to inflict certain uniform and specific penalties for each offence, proportionate to the damage which the criminal has done; to make the punishment so certain, so severe, or so infamous, that the offender shall forbear for the future, and innocent men be deterred from crime. But have we a right to punish a man for the example's sake? I may give up my life to save a thousand lives, or one, if I will. But society has no right to take it, without my consent, to save the whole human race! I admit that society has tho right of eminent domain over my property, and my take my land for a street; may destroy my house to save the town; perhaps seize on my store of provisions in time of famine, can render me an equivalent for those things. I have not the same lion on any portion of tho universe as on my life, my person. To these I have rights which none can alienate except myself, which no man has given, which all men can never justly take away. For any injustice wilfully done to me, the human race can render me no equivalent.
I know society claims tho right of eminent domain over person and life not less than over house and land—to take both for the Commonwealth. I deny the right—certainly it has never been shown. Hence to me, resting on the broad ground of natural justice, the law of God, capital punishment seems wholly inadmissible, homicide with the pomp and formality of law. It is a relic of the old barbarism—paying hurt for hurt. No one will contend that it is inflicted for the offender's good. For the good of others, I contend we have no right to inflict it without the sufferer's consent. To put a criminal to death seems to me as foolish as for the child to beat the stool it has stumbled over, and as useless too. I am astonished that nations with the name of Christian ever on their lips, continue to disgrace themselves by killing men, formally and in cold blood; to do this with prayers—"Forgive us as we forgive;" doing it in the name of God! I do not wonder that in the codes of nations, Hebrew or heathen, far lower than ourselves in civilization, we should find laws enforcing this punishment; laws too, enacted in the name of God. But it fills me with amazement that worthy men in these days should go back to such sources for their wisdom; should walk dry-shod through the Gospels, and seek in records of a barbarous people to justify this atrocious act! Famine, pestilence, war, are terrible evils, but no one is so dreadful in its effects as the general prevalence of a great theological idea that is false.
It makes me shudder to recollect that out of the twenty-eight States of this Union, twenty-seven should still continue the gallows as a part of the furniture of a Christian Government. I hope our own State, dignified already by so many noble acts, will noon rid herself of the stain. Lot up try the experiment of abolishing this penalty, if we will, for twenty years, or but ten, and I am confident we shall never return to that punishment. If a man be incapable of living in society to ill-born or ill-bred that you cannot euro or mend him, why, hide him away out of society. Let him do no harm, but treat him kindly, not like a wolf, but a man. Make him work, to be useful to himself, to society, but do not kill him. Or if you do, never say again, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us." What if He should tako you at your word! "What would you think of a father who to-morrow should take tho Old Testament for his legal warrant, and bring his son before your mayor and aldermen, because he was "stubborn and rebellious, a drunkard and a glutton," and they should stone him to death in front of the City Hall? But there is quite as good a warrant in the Old Testament for that as for hanging a man. The law is referred to Jehovah as its author. How much better is it to choke the life out of a man behind the prison wall? Is not society tho father of us all, our protector and defender? Hanging is vengeance; nothing but vengeance. I can readily conceive of that great Son of man, whom the loyal world so readily adores, performing all needful human works with manly dignity. Artists once loved to paint the Saviour in the lowly toil of lowly men, His garments covered with the dust of common life; His soul, sullied by no pollution. But paint Him to your fancy as an executioner; legally lolling a man; the halter in His hands, hanging Judas for high treason! You see the relation which that punishment bears to Christianity. Yet what was un-christian in Jesus, does not become Christian in the sheriff. We call ourselves Christians ; we often repeat the name, the words of Christ,—but His prayer? oh, no—not that. There are now in this land, I think, sixteen men under sentence of death; sixteen men to be hanged till they are dead! Is there not in the nation skill to heal these men? Perhaps it is so. I have known hearts which seemed to me cold stones, so hard, so dry. No kindly steel had alchemy to win a spark from them. Yet their owners went about the streets and smiled their hollow smiles; the ghastly brother cast his shadow in tho sun, or wrapped his cloak about him in tho wintry hour, and still tho world went on though the worst of men remained unhunged. Perhaps you cannot cure those men!—is there not power enough, to keep them from doing harm; to make thorn useful? Shame on us that we know no better than, thus to pour out life upon tho dust, and then with reeking hands turn to the poor and weak, and say, "Ye shall not. kill."
But if tho prevention of crime bo tho design of the punishment, then we must not only seek to hinder the innocent from vice, but we must reform tho criminal. Do our methods of punishment effect that object? During tho past year we have committed to tho various prisons in Massachusetts five thousand six hundred and sixty-nine persons for crime. How many of them will be reformed and cured by this treatment, and so live honest and useful lives hereafter? I think very few. The facts show that a great many criminals are never reformed by their punishment. Thus in France, taking tho average of four years, it seems that twenty-two out of each hundred criminals were punished often er than once ; in Scotland, thirty-six out of the hundred. Of the seventy-eight received at your State's prison tho last year—seventeen have been sent to that very prison before. How many of them have been tenants of other institutions, I know not; but as only twenty-three of the seventy-eight are natives of this State, it is plain that many, under other names, may have been confined in gaol before. Yet of these seventy-eight, ton are less than twenty years old.[2] Of thirty-five men sent from Boston to the State's prison in one year, fourteen had been there before. More than half the inmates of the House of Correction in this city are punished oftener than once! These facts show that if we aim at the reformation of the offender, we fail most signally. Yet every criminal not reformed, lives mainly at the charge of society; and lives, too, in the most costly way, for the articles he steals have seldom the same value to him as to the lawful owner.
It seems to me that our whole method of punishing crimes is a false one; that but little good comes of it, or can come. We beat the stool winch we have stumbled over. We punish a man in proportion to tho loss or the fear of society; not in proportion to the offender's state of mind; not with a careful desire to improve that state of mind. This is wise, if vengeance be the aim; if reformation, it seems sheer folly. I know our present method is tho result of six thousand years' experience of mankind; I know how easy it is to find fault—how difficult to devise a better mode. Still, the facts are so plain, that one with half an eye cannot fail to see the falseness of tho present methods. To remove tho evil, we must remove its cause,—so let us look a littlo into this matter, and see from what quarter our criminals proceed.
Here are two classes.
I. There are the foes of society; men that are criminals in soul, born criminals, who have a bad nature. The cause of their crime therefore is to be found in their nature itself,—in their organization, if you will. All experience shows that some men are born with a depraved organization, an excess of animal passions, or a deficiency of other powers to balance them.
II. There are the victims of society; men that become criminals by circumstances, made criminals, not born; men who become criminals, not so much from strength of evil in their soul, or excess of evil propensities in their organization, as from strength of evil in their circumstances. I do not say that a man's character is wholly determined by the circumstances in which he is placed, but all experience shows that circumstances, such us exposure in youth to good men or bad men, education, intellectual, morel, and religious, or neglect thereof, entire or partial, have a vast influence in forming the character of men, especially of men net well endowed by nature.
Now the criminals in soul are the most dangerous of men, the born foes of society. I will not at this moment undertake to go behind their organization, and ask, "How comes it that they are so ill-born?" I stop now at that fact. The cause of their crime is in their bodily constitution itself. This is always a small class. There are in New England perhaps five hundred men born blind or deaf. Apart from the idiots, I think there are not half so many who by nature and bodily constitution are incapable of attaining the average morality of the race at thin day; not be many born foes of society as are born blind or deaf.
The criminals from circumstances become what they are by tho action of causes which may be ascertained, guarded against, mitigated, and at last overcome and removed. These men are born of poor parents, and find it difficult to satisfy the natural wants of food, clothing, and shelter. They get little culture, intellectual or moral. The school-house is open, but the parent does not send the children, he wants their services,—to beg for him, perhaps to steal, it may be to do little services which lie within their power. Besides, the child must be ill-clad, and so a mark is set on him. The boy of tho perishing classes, with but common endowments, cannot learn at school as one of the thrifty or abounding class. Then ho receives no stimulus at home; there everything discourages his attempts. He cannot share the pleasure and sport of his youthful fellows. His dress, his uncleanly habits, the result of misery, forbid all that. So the children of the perishing herd together, ignorant, ill-fed, and miserably clad. You do not find the sons of this class in your colleges, in your high schools, where all is free for the people; few even in the grammar-schools; few in the churches. Though born into the nineteenth century after Christ, they grow up almost in the barbarism of the nineteenth century before Him. Children that are blind and deaf, though born with a superior organization, if left to themselves, become only savages, little more than animals. What are we to expect of children, born indeed with eyes and ears, but yet shut out from the culture of the age they live in ? In the corruption of a city, in the midst of its intenser life, what wonder that they associate with crime, that the moral instinct, baffled and cheated of its due, becomes so powerless in the boy or girl; what wonder that reason never gets developed there, nor conscience, nor that blessed religious sense learns ever to assert its power? Think of tho temptations that beset the boy; those yet more revolting which address the other sex. Opportunities for crime continually offer. Want impels, desire leagues with opportunity, and the result we know. Add to all this the curse that creates so much disease, poverty, wretchedness, and so perpetually begets crime; I mean intemperance! That is almost the only pleasure of the perishing class. What recognised amusement have they but this, of drinking themselves drunk? Do you wonder at this? with no air, nor light, nor water, with scanty food and a miserable dross, with no culture, living in a cellar or a garret, crowded, stifling, and offensive even to the rudest sense, do you wonder that man or woman seeks a brief vacation of misery in tho dram-shop, and in its drunkenness? I wonder not. Under such circumstances how many of you would have done better? To suffer continually from lack of what is needful for the natural bodily wants of food, of shelter, of warmth, that suffering is misery. It is not too much to say, there are always in this city thousands of persons who smart under that misery. They are indeed a perishing class.
Almost all our criminals, victims and foes, come from this portion of society. Most of those born with an organization that is predisposed to crime are born there. The laws of nature are unavoidably violated from generation to generation. Unnatural results must follow. The misfortunes of the father are visited on his miserable child. Cows and sheep degenerate when the demands of nature are not met, and men degenerate not less. Only the low, animal instincts, those of self-defence and self-perpetuation, get developed; these with preternatural force. The animal man wakes, becomes brutish, while the spiritual element sleeps within him. Unavoidably, then, the perishing is mother of the dangerous class.
I deny not that a portion of criminals come from other sources, but at least nine-tenths thereof proceed from this quarter. Of two hundred and seventy-three thousand eight hundred and eighteen criminals punished in France, from 1825 to 1839, more than half were wholly unable even to read, and had been brought up subject to no family affections. Out of seventy criminals in one prison at Glasgow who were under eighteen, fifty were orphans having lost one or both parentc, and nearly all the rest had parents of bad character ana reputation. Taking all the criminals in England and Wales in 1841, there were not eight in a hundred that could read and write well. In our country, where everybody gets a mouthful of education, though scarce any one a full meal, the result is a little different. Thus of the seven hundred and ninety prisoners in the Mount Pleasant State's Prison in New York, one hundred, it is said, could read and understand. Yet of all our criminals only a very small proportion have been in a condition to obtain the average intellectual and moral culture of our times.
Our present mode of treating criminals does no good to this class of men, these victims of circumstances. I do not know that their improvement is even contemplated. We do not ask what causes made this man a criminal, and then set ourselves to remove those causes. We look only at the crime; so we punish practically a man because he had a wicked father; because his education was neglected, and he exposed to the baneful influence of unholy men. In the main we treat all criminals alike if guilty of the same offence, though the same act denotes very different degrees of culpability in the different men, and the same punishment is attended with quite opposite results. Two men commit similar crimes, we sentence them both to the State Prison for ten years. At the expiration of one year let us suppose that one man has thoroughly reformed, and has made strict and solemn resolutions to pursue an honest and useful life. I do not say such a result is to be expected from such, treatment; still it is possible, and I think has happened, perhaps many times. We do not discharge the man; we care nothing for his penitence; nothing for his improvement; we keep him nine years more. That is an injustice to him; we have robbed him of nine years of time which he might have converted into life. It is unjust also to society, which needs the presence and the labour of all that can serve. The man has been a burden to himself and to us. Suppose at the expiration of his ten years the other man is not reformed at all; this result, I fear, happens in the great majority of cases. He is no better for what he has suffered; we know that he will return to his career of crime, with new energy and with even malice. Still he is discharged. This is unjust to him, for he cannot bear the fresh exposure to circumstances which corrupted him at first, and he will fall lower still. It is unjust to society, for the property and the persons of all are exposed to his passions just as much as before. He feels indignant as if he had suffered a wrong. He says, "Society has taken vengeance on me, when I was to be pitied more than blamed. Wow I will have my turn. They will not allow me to live by honest toil. I will learn their lesson. I will plunder their wealth, their roof shall blaze!" He will live at the expense of society, and in the way least profitable and most costly to mankind. This idle savage will levy destructive contributions on the rich, the thrifty, and the industrious. Yes, he will help teach others the wickedness which himself once, and perhaps unavoidably learned. So in the very bosom of society there is a horde of marauders waging perpetual war against mankind.
Do not say my sympathies are with the wicked, not the industrious and good. It is not so. My sympathies are not confined to one class, honourable or despised. But it seems to me this whole method of keeping a criminal a definite time and then discharging him, whether made better or worse, is a mistake. Certainly it is so if wo aim at his reformation. What if a shepherd made it a rule to look one hour for each lost sheep, and then return with or without the wanderer? What if a smith decreed that one hour and no more should be spent in shoeing a horse, and so worked that time on each, though half that time were enough—or sent home the beast with but three shoes, or two, or one, because the hour passed by? What if the physicians decreed, that all men sick of some contagious disease should spend six weeks in the hospital, then, if the patient were found well the next day after admission; still kept him the other forty; or, if not mended at the last day, sent him out sick to the world? Such a course would be less unjust, less inhuman, only the wrong is more obvious.
To aggravate the matter still more, we have made the punishment more infamous than the crime. A man may commit great crimes which indicate deep depravity; may escape the legal punishment thereof, by gold, by flight, by further crimes, and yet hold up his head unblushing and unrepentant amongst mankind. Let him commit a small crime, which shall involve no moral guilt, and be legally punished—who respects him again? What years of noble life are deemed enough to wipe the stain out of his reputation? Nay, his children after him, to the third generation, must bear tho curse! The evil does not stop with the infamy. A guilty man has served out his time. He is thoroughly resolved on industry and a moral life. Perhaps he has not learned that crime is wrong, but found it unprofitable. He will live away from the circumstances which before led him to crime. He comes out of prison, and the gaol-mark is on him. Ho now suffers the severest part of his punishment. Friends and relations shun him. He is doomed and solitary in the midst of the crowd. Honest men will seldom employ him. The thriving class look on him with shuddering pity; tho abounding loathe the convict's touch. He is driven among tho dangerous and the perishing; they open their arms and offer him their destructive sympathy. They minister to his wants; they exaggerate his wrongs; they nourish his indignation. His direction is no longer in his own hands. His good resolutions—he knows they were good, but only impossible. He looks back, and sees nothing but crime and the vengeance society takes for the crime. He looks around, and the world seems thrusting at him from all quarters. He looks forward, and what prospect is there? "Hope never comes that comes to all." He must plunge afresh into that miry pit, which at last is sure to swallow him up. He plunges anew, and the gaol awaits him; again; deeper yet; the gallows alone can swing him clear from that pestilent ditch. But he is a man and a brother, our companion in weakness. With his education, exposure, temptation, outward and from within, how much better would the best of you become?
No better result is to be looked for from such a course. Of the one thousand five Iiundred and ninety-two persons in the State's Prison of New York, four hundred have been there more than once. In five years, from 1841 to 1847, there were punished in the House of Correction in this city, five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight persons ; of these three thousand one hundred and forty-six received such a sentence oftener than once. Yes, in five years, three hundred and thirteen were sent thither, each ten times or more! How many found a place in other gaols I know not.
What if fathers treated dull or vicious boys in this manner at home—making them infamous for the first offence, or the first dulness, and then refusing to receive them back again? What, if the father sent out his son with had boys, and when he erred and fell, said, "You did mischief with bad boys once; I know they enticed you. I know you worn feeble, and could not resist their seductions, But I shall punish you. Do as well as you please, I will not forgive you. If you err again, I will punish you afresh. It you do sever so well, you shall be infamous for ever!" What if a public teacher never took back to college a boy who once had broke the academic law—but made him infamous for over? What if the physicians had kept a patient the requisite time in the hospital, and discharged him as wholly cured, hut hid men beware of him and shun him for ever? That is just what we are doing with this class of criminals; not intentionally, not consciously—but doing none the less!
Let us look a moment more carefully, though I have already touched on this subject, at tho proximate causes of crime in this class of men. The first cause is obvious—poverty. Most of tho criminals are from the lowest ranks of society. If you distribute men into three classes,—the abounding, the thriving, the perishing,—you wilt find the inmates of your prisons come almost; wholly from the latter class. The perishing fill the sink of society, and the dangerous the sink of tho perishing—for in that "lowest deep there is a lower depth." Of three thousand one hundred and eighty-eight persons confined in the House of Correction in this city, one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven were foreigners; of the five hundred and fifty sent from this city in five years to the State's Prison, one hundred and eighty-five were foreigners. Of five hundred and forty-seven females in the prison on Blackwell's Island at one time—five hundred and nineteen were committed for "vagrancy;" women with no capital but their person, with no friend, no shelter. Examine minutely, you shall find that more than nine-tenths of all criminals come from the perishing class cf men. There all cultivation,—intellectual, moral, religious,—is at the lowest ebb. They are a class of barbarians; yes, of savages, living in the midst of civilization, but not of it. The fact, that most criminals come from this class, shows that the causes of the crime lie out of them more than in them; that they are victims of society, not foes. The effect of property in elevating and moralizing a class of men in seldom appreciated. Historically the animal man comes before the spiritual Animal wants are imperious; they must be supplied. The lower you go in tho social scale, the more is man subordinated to his animal appetites and demonized by them. Nature aims to preserve tho individual and ropeat the species—so all passions relative to these two designs are pre-eminently powerful. If a man is born into tho intense life of an American city, and grows up, having no contact with tho loftier culture which naturally belongs to that intense life, why tho man becomes mainly an animal, all the more violent for the atmosphere he Wreathes in. What shall restrain him P He has not tho normal check of reason, conscience, religion, — these sleep in the man ; nor tho artificial and conventional check of honour, of manners. The public opinion which he bows to favours obscenity, drunkenness, and violence. He is doubly a savige. His wants cannot be legally satisfied. He breaks the law, the law which covers property, then goes on to higher crimes. The next cause is the result of the first—education is neglected, intellectual, moral, and religious. Now and then a boy in whom the soul of genius is covered with the beggar's rags, struggles through the terrible environment of modern poverty to die, the hero of misery, in the attempt at education! His expiring light only makes visible the darkness out of which it shone. Boys born into this condition find at home nothing to aid them, nothing to encourage a love of excellence, or a taste for even the rudiments of learning. What is unavoidably the lot of such? The land has been the schoolmaster of the human race, but the perishing class scarce sees its face. Poverty brings privations, misery, and that a deranged state of the system; then unnatural appetites goad and burn the man. The destruction of the poor is their poverty. They see wealth about them, but have none; so none of what it brings; neither the cleanliness, nor health, nor self-respect, nor cultivation of mind, and heart, and soul. I am told that no Quaker has ever been confined in any gaol in New England for any real crime. Are the Quakers better born than other men? Nay, but they are looked after in childhood. Who ever saw a Quaker in an almshouse? Not a fiftieth part of the people of New York are negroes, yet more than a sixth part of all the criminals in her four State's prisons are men of colour. These facts show plainly the causes of crime.
It hi almost impossible to exaggerate the temptation a of the perishing class in our great cities. In Boston at this moment there arc more than four hundred boys employed about the various bowling-alleys of tho city, exposed to the intemperance, tho coarseness, the general corruption of the men who mainly frequent those nlaccs. What will be their fate? Shall I speak of their sisters; of tho education they are receiving; the end that awaits them? Poverty brings misery with its family of vices.
A third cause of crime comes with tho rest—intemperance, the destroying angel that lays waste the household of the poor. In our country, misery in a healthy man is almost proof of vice ; but tho vice may belong to one alone, and the misery it brings be shared by the whole family. A large proportion of the perishing class are intemperate, and a great majority of all our criminals.
Now, our present method is wholly inadequate to reform men exposed to such circumstances. You may punish the man, but it does no good. You can seldom frighten men out of a fever. Can you frighten them from crime, when they know little of the internal distinction between right and wrong; when all the circumstances about them impel to crime? Can you frighten a starving girl into chastity? You cannot keep men from lewdness, theft, and violence, when they have no self-respect, no culture, no development of mind, heart, and soul. The gaol will not take the place of the church, of the school-house, of home. It will not remove the causes which are making new criminals. It does not reform the old ones. Shall we shut men in a gaol, and when there treat them with all manner of violence, crush out the little self-respect yet left, give them a degrading dress, and send them into the world cursed with an infamous name, and all that because they were born in the low places of society, and caught the stain thereof? The gaol does not alter the circumstances which occasioned the crime, and till these causes are removed a fresh crop will spring out of the festering soil. Some men teach dogs and horses things unnatural to these animals they use violence and blows as their instrument of instruction. But to teach man what is conformable to his nature, something more is required.
To return to the other class, who are born criminals. Bare confinement in the prison alters no man's constitutional tendencies; it can no more correct moral or mental weakness or obliquity, than it can correct a deficiency of the organs of sensation. You all know the former treatment of men born with defective or deranged intellectual faculties—of madmen and fools. We still pursue the same course towards men born with defective or deranged, moral faculties, idiots and madmen of a more melancholy class, and with a like result.
I know how easy it is to find fault, and how difficult to propose a better way ; how easy to misunderstand all that I have said, how easy to misrepresent it all. But it seems to me that hitherto we have set out wrong in this undertaking; have gone on wrong, and, by the present means, can never remove the causes of crime, nor much improve the criminals as a class. Let me modestly set down my thoughts on this subject, in hopes that other men, wiser and more practical, will find out a way yet better still. A gaol, as a mere house of punishment for offenders, ought to have no place in an enlightened people. It ought to be a moral hospital where the offender is kept till he is cured. That his crime is great or little, is comparatively of but small concern. It is wrong to detain a man against his will after he is cured ; wrong to send him out before he is cured, for he will rob and corrupt society, and at last miserably perish. We shall find curable cases and incurable.
I would treat the small class of born criminals, the foes of society, as maniacs. I would not kill them, more than madmen; I would not inflict needless pain on them. I would not try to shame, to whip, or to starve into virtue men morally insane. I would not torture a man because born with a defective organization. Since he could not live amongst men, I would shut him out from society; would make him work for his own good and the good of society. The thought of punishment for its own sake, or as a compensation for the evil which a man has done, I would not harbour for a moment. If a man has done me a wrong, calumniated, insulted, abused me with all his power, it renders the matter no better than turn round and make him smart for it. If he has burned my house over my head, and I kill him in return, it does not rebuild my house. I cannot leave him at large to burn other men's houses. He must be restrained. But, if I cure the man, perhaps he will rebuild it—at any rate, will be of some service to the world, and others gain much while I lose nothing.
When the victims of society violated its laws, I would not torture a man for his misfortune, because his father was poor, his mother a brute; because his education was neglected. I would shut him out from society for a time. I would make him work for his own good and the good of others. The evil he had caught from the world I would overcome by the good that I would, present to him. I would not clothe him with an infamous dress, crowd him with other men whom society had. made infamous, leaving them to ferment and rot together. I would not set him up as a show to the public, for his enemy, or his rival, or some miserable fop to come and stare at with merciless and tormenting eye. I would not load him with chains, nor tear his flesh with a whip. I would not set soldiers with loaded guns to keep watch over him, insulting their brother by mocking and threats. I would treat the man with firmness, but with justice, with pity, with love. I would teach the man; what his family could not do for him, what society and the church had failed of, the gaol should do, for the gaol should be a manual labour school, not a dungeon of torture. I would take the most gifted, the most cultivated, tho wisest and most benevolent, yes, the most Christian man in the State, and set him to train up these poor savages of civilization. The best man is the natural physician of the wicked. A violent man, angry, cruel, remorseless, should never enter the gaol except as a criminal. You have already taken one of the greatest, wisest, and best men of this Commonwealth, and set him to watch over the public education of the people.[3] True, you give him little money, and no honour; he brings the honour to you, not asking, but giving that. You begin to see the result of setting such a man to such a work, though unhonoured and ill-paid. Soon you will see it more plainly in the increase
of temperance, industry, thrift, of good morals and sound religion! I would Get such a man, if I could find such another, to look after the dangerous clashes of society. I would pay him for it; honour him for it. I would have a board of public morals to look after this matter of crime, a secretary of public morals, a Christian censor, whose business it should be to attend to this class, to look after the gaols, and make them houses of refuge, of instruction, which should do for the perishing class what the school-house and the church do for others. I. would send missionaries amongst tho most exposed portions of mankind as well as amongst the savages of New Holland, I would send wise men, good men. There are already some such engaged in this work. I would strengthen their hands. I would make crime infamous. If there are men whose Crime is to be traced not to a defective organization of body, not to the influence of circumstances, but only to voluntary and self-conscious wickedness, I would make these men infamous. It should be impossible for such a man, a voluntary foe of mankind, to live in society. I would have the gaol such a place that the friends of a criminal of either class should take him as now they take a lunatic or a sick man, and bring him to tho Court that he might be healed if curable, or if not, might be kept from harm and hid away out of sight. Crime and sin should be infamous; not its correction, least of all its cure. I would not loathe and abhor a man who had been corrected and reformed by the gaol, more than a boy who had been reformed by his teacher, or a man cured of lunacy. I would have society a father who goes out to meet the prodigal while yet a great way off; yes, goes and brings him away from his riotous living, washes him, clothes him, and restores him to a right mind. There is a prosecuting attorney for the State; I would have also a defending attorney for the accused, that justice might be done all round. Is the State only a step-mother? Then is she not e Christian Commonwealth, but a barbarous despotism, fitly represented by that uplifted, sword on her public seal, and that motto of barbarous and bloody Latin. I would have the State aid men and direct them after they have boon discharged from the gaol; not leave them to perish, not force them to perish. Society is the natural guardian of the weak. I cannot think the method here suggested would be costly as the present. It seems to me that institutions of this character might he made not only to support themselves, but be so managed us to leave a balance of income considerably beyond the expense This might be made use of for the advantage of the criminal when he returned to society; or with it ho might help make restitution of what he had once stolen. Besides being less costly, it would cure the offender, and send buck valuable men into society.
It seems to me that our whole criminal legislation is based on a false principle—force and not love; that it is eminent; well adapted to revenge, not at all to correct, to teach, to cure. The whole apparatus for tho punishment of offenders, from the gallows down to the House of Correction, seems to me wrong; wholly wrong, unchristian, and even inhuman. We teach crime while we punish it. Is it consistent for tho State to take vengeance when I may not? Is it better for the State to kill a man in cold blood, than for mo to kill my brother when in a rage? I cannot help thinking that tho gallows, and even the gaol, as now administered, are practical teachers of violence and wrong! I cannot think it will always be so. Hitherto we have looked on criminals as voluntary enemies of mankind. We have treated them as wild beasts, not as dull or loitering boys. We have sought to destroy by death, to disable by mutilation or imprisonment, to terrify and subdue, not to convince, to reform, encourage, and bless.
The history of the past is full of prophecy for the future. Not many years ago we shut up our lunatics in gaols, in dungeons, m cages ; we chained the maniac with iron; we gave him a bottle of water and a sack of straw; we left him in filth, in cold, and nakedness. We set strong and brutal men to watch him. When he cried, when he gnashed his teeth and tore his hair, we beat him all the more! They do bo yet in some places, for they think a madman is not a brother, but a devil. What was the result? Madness was found incurable. Now lunacy is a disease, to be prescribed for as fever or rheumatism; when we find an incurable case we do not kill the man, nor chain him, nor count him a devil. Yet lunacy is not curable by force, by gaols, dungeons, and cages; only by the medicine of wise men and good men. What if Christ had met one demoniac with a whip and another with chains!
You know how we once treated criminals! with what scourgings and mutilations, what brandings, what tortures with fire and red-hot iron! Death was not punishment enough, it must be protracted amid the most cruel torments that quivering flesh could bear. The multitude looked on and learned a lesson of deadly wickedness. A judicial murder was a holiday! It is but little more than two hundred years since a man was put to death in the most enlightened country of Europe for eating meat on Friday; not two hundred since men and women were hanged in Massachusetts for a crime now reckoned impossible! It is not a hundred years since two negro slaves were judicially burned alive in this very city! These facts make us shudder, but hope also. In a hundred years from this day will not men look on our gallows, gaols, and penal law as we look, on the racks, the torture-chambers of the Middle Ages, and the bloody code of remorseless inquisitors?
We need only to turn our attention to this subject to find a better way. We shall soon see that punishment as such is an evil to the criminal, and so swells the sum of suffering with which society runs over; that it is an evil also to the community at large by abstracting valuable force from profitable work, and so a loss.[4] We shall one day remember that the offender is a man, and so his good also is to be consulted. He may be a bad man, voluntarily bad if you will. Still we are to be economical even of his suffering, for the least possible punishment is the best. Already a good many men think that error is better refuted by truth than by fagots and axes. How long will it be before we apply good sense and Christianity to the prevention of crime? One day we must see that a gaol, as it is now conducted, is no more likely to cure a crime than a lunacy or a fever! Hitherto we have not seen the application of the great doctrines of Christianity; not felt that all men are brothers. So our remedies for social evils have been bad almost as the disease; remedies which remedied nothing, but hid the patient out of sight. All great criminals have been thought incurable, and then killed. What if the doctors found a patient sick of a disease which he had foolishly or wickedly brought upon himself, and then, by the advice of twelve other doctors, professionally killed him for justice or example's sake? They would do what all the States in Christendom have done these thousand years. I cannot see why the Legislature has not as good right to authorize the medical college thus to kill men, as to authorize the present forms of destroying life!
We do not look the facts of crime fairly in the face. We do not see what heathens we are. Why, there is not a Christian nation in the world that has not a secretary of war, armies, soldiers, and the terrible apparatus of destruction. But there is not one that has a secretary of peace, not one that takes half the pains to improve its own criminals which it takes to build forts and fleets! Yet it seems to me that a Christian State should be a great peace society, a society for mutual advancement in the qualities of a man!
Do we not see that by our present course we are teaching men violence, fraud, deceit, and murder? What is the educational effect of our present political conduct, of our invasions, our battles, our victories; of the speeches of "our great men?" You all know that this teaches the poor, the low, and the weak that murder and robbery are good things when done on a large scale; that they give wealth, fame, power, and honours. The ignorant man, ill-born and ill-bred, asks, "Why not, when done on a small scale; why not good for me?" If it is right in the President of the United States to rob and murder, why not for the President of the United States Bank? Do famous men say, "Our country however bounded," and vote to plunder a sister State? then why shall not the poor man, hungry and cold, say, "My purse however bounded," and seize on all he can get? Give one a seat in Congress if you will, and the other a noose of hemp: there is a God before whom seats in Congress and hempen halters are of equal value, but who does justice to great and little!
To reform the dangerous classes of society, to advance those who loiter behind our civilization, we need a special work designed directly for the good of the criminals and such as stand on that perilous ground which slopes towards crime. Some good men undertook this work long ago. They found much to do; a good deal to encourage them. Some of them are well known to you, are labouring here in the midst of us. They need counsel, encouragement, and aid. We must not look coldly on their enterprise nor on them. They can tell far better than I what specific plans are best for their specific work. Already have they accomplished much in this noble enterprise. The society for aiding discharged convicts is a prophecy of yet better things. Soon I trust it will extend its kind offices to all the prisons, and its work be made the affair of the State. The plan now before your Legislature for a "State Manual Labour School," designed to reform vicious children, is also full of promise. The wise and anonymous charity which so beautifully and in silence has dropped its gold into the chest for these poor outcasts, is itself its hundred-fold reward. Institutions like that which we contemplate have been found successful in England, Germany, and France. They actually reform the juvenile delinquent, and bring up useful men, not hardened criminals.[5] We are beginning to attend to this special work of removing the causes of crime, and restoring at least tho young offenders. However, the greater portion of this work is not special and for tho criminal, but general and for society. To change tho treatment of criminals, we must change everything else. Tho dangerous class is the unavoidable result of our present civilization; of our present ideas of man and social life. To reform and elevate the class of criminals, we must reform and elevate all other classes. To do that, we must educate and refine men. Wo must learn to treat all men as brothers. This is a great work and one of slow achievement. It cannot be brought about by legislation, nor any mechanical contrivance and re-organization alone. There is no remedy for this evil and its kindred but keeping the laws of God; in one word, none but Christianity, goodness, and piety felt in the heart, applied in all the works of life, individually, socially, and politically. While educated and abounding men acknowledge no rule of conduct but self-interest, what can you expect of the ignorant and the perishing? While great men say without rebuke that we do not look at "the natural justice of a war," do you expect men in the lowest places of society, ignorant and brutish, pinched by want, to look at the natural justice of theft, of murder? It were a vain expectation. We must improve all classes to improve one; perhaps the highest first.
Different men acting in the most various directions, without concert, often jealous one of another, and all partial in their aims, are helping forward this universal result. While we are contending against slavery, war, intemperance, or party rage ; while we are building up hospitals, colleges, schools; while we are contending for freedom of conscience, or teaching abstractly the love of man and love of God, we are all working for the welfare of this neglected clans. The gallows of the barbarian and the Gospel of Christianity cannot exist together. The times are full of promise. Mankind slowly fulfils what a man of genius prophesies; God grants what a good man asks, and, when it comes, it is better than what he prayed for.
- ↑ The allusion is to the following passages of Scripture, which, were read til the lesson for the day:—Numb. xiv. ; 2 Kings, ii. 23 — 25 ; and Luke, xv.
- ↑ See other statistics, in Sermon of the Perishing Classes, pp. 46, 47.
- ↑ Mr. Horace Mann.
- ↑ The period of confinement in our State's prisons differs a good deal in the various States, as will appear from the following table.
Whole No. in prison. Average sentence. In Conn. 189 March 31, 1841 7 yrs. 3 mos. Va. 181 Sept. 30, 1839 6 yrs.„ 10mos.„ Mass. 322 Sept. 30, 1840 5 yrs.„ 9 mos.„ La. 68 Sept. 30, 1839 5 yrs.„ 1 mos.„ N. J. 152 Sept. 30, 1840 4 yrs.„ 7 mos.„ Ky. 162 Sept. 30, 1839 4 yrs.„ — D. C. 79 Nov. 30, 1840 3 yrs.„ 8 mos.„ Md. 104 3 yrs.„ — Phila. 129 Sept. 30, 1840 2 yrs.„ 5 mos.„ The difference between the average term of punishment in Connecticut and Philadelphia is 300 per cent! If the same result is effected by each, there has then been a great amount of gratuitous suffering in one case.
- ↑ I refer to the prisons at Stretton-upon-Dunmores, in Warwickshire; that at Horn, near Hamburg; and the one at Mettray, near Tours, in France. The French penal code allows the guardian or relatives of an offender under age to take him from prison on giving bonds for his good behaviour. While these pages were first passing through the press, I learned the happy effect which followed the execution of the licence laws in this city. In 1846, from the 10th of March to the 24th of April, there were sent to the House of Correction for intemperance hundred and nighty-nine persons. Daring the same period of the year 1847, only eighty-four have been thus punished! Bat, alas! in tho evil has returned, and the demon of drunkenness mows down the wretched in Boston with unrestricted scythe.