E.—REFORM.
The superstitious dread of innovation, rather than the want of natural intelligence, has for ages thwarted the hopes of rationalism, and the renunciation of that prejudice promises to rival the blessing of Secular education in promoting the advance of social reforms. Orthodox restiveness, rather than any conceivable degree of ignorance, has, for instance, prevented the repeal of the Religious Disability laws which still disgrace the statutes of so many civilized nations. A chemical inventor would be suspected of insanity for trying to demonstrate his theories by quoting the Bible in preference to a scientific text-book, yet on questions as open to investigation and proof as any problem of chemistry, the courts of numerous intelligent nations still refuse to accept the testimony of a witness who happens to prefer the philosophy of Humboldt and Spencer to the rant of an oriental spook-monger. The proposition to oblige a water-drinker to defray the expense of his neighbor’s passion for intoxicating beverages would justly land the proposer in the next lunatic asylum, yet millions upon millions of our Caucasian fellow-men are still taxed to enable their neighbors to enjoy the luxuries of a creed which the conscience of the unwilling tithe-payer rejects as a degrading superstition. In Europe countless Nonconformists have to contribute to the [[229]]support of a parish-priest or village-rector on pain of having a sheriff sell their household goods at public auction. In America farmers and mechanics have to pay double taxes in order to enable an association of mythology-mongers to hold their property tax-free. Because the pantheon of the Ammonites included a god with cannibal propensities, helpless infants were for centuries roasted on the consecrated gridiron of that god; and because eighteen hundred years ago the diseased imagination of a world-renouncing bigot conceived the idea of a deity delighting in the self-affliction of his creatures, the gloom of death still broods over the day devoted to the special worship of that God, and the coercive penalties of the law are weekly visited upon all who refuse to sacrifice their health and happiness on the altar of superstition.
But legislative abuses are not confined to religious anachronisms. The inconsistencies of our penal code still betray the influence of medieval prejudices in the unwise leniency, as well as in the disproportionate severity, of their dealings with purely secular offenses. The vice of intemperance was for centuries encouraged by the example of the clergy, while the control, or even the suppression, of the sexual instinct was enforced by barbarous penalties. And while the panders of the alcohol vice are still countenanced by the sanction of legal license and admitted to official positions of honor and influence, the mediators of sexual vice are treated as social outcasts, and punished with a severity out of all proportion to the actual social standards of virtue. The deserted wife, who in a moment of despair has caused the death of [[230]]an unborn child, is treated as the vilest of criminals, while the crime of a railway shark or tenement-speculator whose selfishness and greed have caused a fatal disaster, is condoned in consideration of “social respectability,” i.e., a mask of orthodox sentiments and unctuous cant. A Christian jury will thank a banker for shooting a poor wretch whom extreme distress may have driven to enter a house for predatory purposes, but if that same banker should be convicted of embezzling the hard-earned savings of trusting widows and orphans, his fellow-hypocrites will circulate an eloquent petition for his release from a few years of light imprisonment.
There is need of other reforms, which recommend themselves by such cogent arguments that their adoption seems only a question of time, such as the protection of forests, the recognition of women’s rights, the “habitual criminal” law, physical education, and the abolition of the poison-traffic.
It is undoubtedly true that the progress from barbarism to culture is characterized by the growth of a voluntary respect for the authority of legal institutions, but it is equally true that the highest goals of civilization cannot be reached till the degree of that respect shall be measured by the utility, rather than by the antiquity, of special laws. [[231]]