So he gets his witnesses and takes them to the clerk. The clerk takes down their statements. The last scene is in Court, and the client's advocate appears to plead for him. He does so with a tongue two feet in length. But still he loses his case, for the advocate on the other side has a tongue three feet long. That this play was the success it proved to be shows clearly that the audience saw nothing unnatural in it. In fact, they relished it immensely.
The magistrate was a stuffed figure.
CHAPTER VI
PENAL LAW
There is a further difference in their view of crime, between Englishmen as they are made by education and Orientals who in some ways remain the natural man, which greatly affects the Courts, that is the punishment due for crime.
In England we have had the most cruel penal laws ever known. It is not a hundred years ago that there were two hundred and twenty-three different offences for which the capital punishment was awarded. I wonder if people nowadays ever realise their horrors. I have an account of how a poor little servant girl convicted of having stolen some few clothes was dragged out half-dead with fear to a gibbet without the village and there slowly done to death before a crowd of people. It was no unusual thing, for theft of over five shillings was punishable with death. The record of our Courts in England is the most brutal and most bloody in history. They have been reformed but very partially. There is still amongst Englishmen a vindictiveness towards the criminal that is unknown elsewhere. Despite frequent denunciation of the uselessness and the wickedness of vindictive punishment, the idea continually recurs. It is not merely excused—it is even counted as righteousness by those who maintain it.
Now it would be impossible here to give a full analysis of the cause of this vindictiveness. It has many causes. It is not natural, but caused by education. But a principal one lies in our theology. A theology that predicates a God who devotes poor mortals He made to torture by fire for ever, simply for the fun of watching them suffer, has elevated cruelty, uselessness, and vindictiveness into a divine attribute. Therefore men may be excused and even praised for imitating their God as far as in them lies.
The East is free from any such theology. I am not an admirer of any of the theories at the base of its religions, but, at all events, none of them have sunk to such a depth as this. Therefore the Oriental thought is free in this matter to discern the truth.
And further, even the ordinary villagers are deeper psychologists than we are. How this comes about I am not sure; by the free life of the children I think mainly. But however it comes there is no doubt of the fact, for it has been widely noticed. They are very quick at gauging character, in weighing virtues and defects, at seeing in effects the causes. Thus, all throughout the East the fatality that runs through life has been seen; it has even passed into a saying. By fatality, of course, is not meant that God fore-ordains all events, but that every act has its antecedent, that it never stands alone but is the outcome of the past. There has been endless discussion in Europe on this question, but to the East the matter presents itself in very simple guise. No man has the choice of when he is born, into what sort of a physique, of what parents or country. Neither has he any control over how he is brought up, whether educated or not. Thus he himself is to a very great extent a creature not of his own will but of what we may call Fate. He has, moreover, no control over his environment; he did not make the laws, the customs, nor the religion, which surround him. Many of his acts are done under the authority of others—parents, teachers, masters, government; others are the inevitable result of the environment (which he did not make) acting on his personality (which he did not make). There is also chance—as we call it; sudden temptation for instance. Therefore his ability to exercise freewill in act is small, and to hold him personally responsible for all his acts is absurd. Especially is this the case with crime. No one originally wants to commit crime; if he fall into it, his "will" is not usually to blame. A famine will cause a great deal of crime; the criminals did not make the famine. An unusual strain was put on them, and they were not able to stand the strain. Everyone is a potential criminal—given the circumstances. It is more than probable that everyone has at one time or another committed some offence. This is well known in the East, for they think there a great deal more than is supposed. They have not been educated not to think yet. I have myself discussed this point with many Orientals, and I have found that this clear view of the causation of crime is not unusual. Even if the matter has not been thought out there is an instinctive differentiation between a criminal and his crime. They, as I have said before, hate crime, but that shrinking from the criminal so common with us is not so marked with them.
Thus they have long ago seen the futility of attributing crime to a defect of the individual will; they know it is due to much deeper, wider causes. They have also seen the very narrow limits within which punishment avails. Therefore our punishments shock them by their cruelty. Ordinary cattle are worth from twenty to fifty shillings a head, and they roam about the forest on the outskirts of the fields almost unguarded. Yet the theft of one is punishable always with two years' rigorous imprisonment; that is to say, the man is vindictively and uselessly punished, is turned into a confirmed criminal and ruined for life for failing at a momentary temptation. I have known cases where a man was sentenced to ten years' penal servitude for stealing a few rupees—a piece of savagery that the Court sought to justify by the fact that the man had committed several previous petty thefts. Of course, the reason of his repeated crime was the man's inability to earn a livelihood and exercise self-control. He should have been taught and helped—not sent to penal servitude. So are the instincts of the people outraged.