It began to be perceived, and was soon widely acknowledged, that the cause of the great weakness and futility of our government lay in the advanced age of those by whom the most important offices were held. Age is wont to trifle, to take things lightly, and to study life, of which it can at best hope to possess so little, from a frivolous and temporary point of view.
“Things are well enough as they are,” say they; “a little tinkering here, a little fancy legislation there, and they will last our time; meanwhile, let us hear ourselves talk.”
The only wonder now seemed that the world had been so slow to perceive this, that it had taken the human race so many thousand years to discover a truth which now seemed as simple and patent as the converse one, that it would not be wise to entrust grave affairs to children in their first decade.
And so the younger men of England, by a sudden and united effort at the general election of 19—, secured the return of a House of Commons containing no man over the age of thirty-five, and no woman: (for women had begun to come in and to make matters worse).
This House of Commons, strong, in earnest for real work, and not divided by Party, that frivolous pastime of politicians who were too old for other games, passed without difficulty a wise “superannuation law.” And the government of the country, thus at last able to govern indeed, made the almost foundering ship of our unhappy State once more answer to the helm, and steered for that haven of peaceful order and settled rule which men remembered sadly as a lost Paradise or longed for as an undiscoverable “Atlantis.”
That laws are made to be obeyed had glided in those days from the place of a truism into that of a fallacy. It was the first principle of the new Cabinet.
To two classes this principle had to be made clear—Criminals, or law-breakers; Anarchists, or law-deniers.
Of the first of these we will speak first. It will now hardly be believed that there existed at that time in England what were called “the Criminal Classes”—thousands of men, women, and children known to be living in the continual commission of crime, as other people are engaged in commerce, husbandry, and the like, spending much of their time in prison, and never doing or desiring any honest work.
This state of things the young government set themselves to bring to an end.
Instead of progressing towards that universal slipshod leniency which the philanthropists of an earlier time had set before themselves as a goal—with capital punishment evaded for awhile and eventually abolished,—these rulers, with all the ruthless severity of youth, extended the area of crimes punishable by death. To those whose lives were hurtful to the innocent community, mercy could only be shown, so they held, at the expense of those to whom mercy, that is, protection, was really due. Not only all who compassed, or even attempted the lives of others, but all who after repeated smaller punishments still lived the lives of evildoers, were counted unworthy longer to live,—and this without any attempted distinction of sane or insane,—the existence of the latter being considered even more hopelessly injurious to the State than that of the former, and, on the other hand, less valuable to themselves.