Why not bring back at once the boot, the stake, and the thumbscrew?—Professor Lawson Tait.
IT is among the proudest boasts of this country that torture is not permitted within its borders: “Torture,” wrote Macaulay, “was inflicted for the last time in the month of May, 1640.” But pleasant though it is to think that it was in the beautiful springtime that the barbarous practice came to an end, this is unfortunately one of the cases in which our people allow themselves to be beguiled and fooled by very transparent quibbles; for a few minutes’ thought would suffice to convince the most complacent of Britons that while some specialized forms of judicial torture have been abandoned, other tortures, some of them not less painful and fully as repulsive, are being inflicted to this day—nearly three hundred years after the glorious date of abolition. For if “torture,” as etymology and the dictionaries and common usage tell us, means nothing more or less than the forcible infliction of extreme pain, it is not a technicality but an absurdity to pretend that it finds no place among twentieth-century institutions.
Flogging is torture in a most literal sense, and in one of its grossest shapes: the “cat,” as Mr. G. K. Chesterton has well said, is “the rack without any of its intellectual reasons.”[28] The horror of the old naval and military lashings is within the memory of many officers who were compelled to witness them: how is the punishment any less savage in its nature because it is now administered in a less severe degree, and on men convicted of robbery with violence or some breach of prison discipline? In one of the Parliamentary debates of November, 1912, a Member who had been invited by the Home Secretary to examine the “cat,” gave it as his opinion that “if that is not torture, then I do not know what torture is.”
In the gloomiest but most impressive of his stories, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mr. H. G. Wells has represented his savage “beast-folk” as monotonously chanting a certain “idiotic formula” about the infallibility of “the Law.” With nothing more fitly than with this can be compared the undying legend, now over half a century old, that “garrotting was put down by the lash.” It is not often that a popular fallacy, however erroneous it may be, can be actually disproved; but in this particular case such refutation was possible, in the certified fact that the garrotting “epidemic” of 1862 had been suppressed by the ordinary law before flogging for that offence was legalized. For many years the Humanitarian League issued a public challenge on the subject, and made the facts known in thousands of press letters; the challenge was quietly ignored, and the false statement repeated, till it was plain that, as De Quincey remarked, “rarer than the phœnix is that virtuous man who will consent to lose a prosperous story on the consideration that it happens to be a lie.” One such virtuous man, however, and one only, was found, namely, Mr. Montague Crackanthorpe, who actually recanted the statement which he could not substantiate.[29] In view of his unique candour, it was suggested after his death that a statue should be erected to his memory.
Very different from the course taken by Mr. Crackanthorpe was the action of Sir Alexander Wood Renton, of the Supreme Court of Ceylon, who, in an article on “Corporal Punishment,” introduced into the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1910 that very garrotting legend from which it had previously been kept free, and made the further mistake of giving the date of the Flogging Act of 1863 as 1861, thus lending to his blunder a misleading appearance of plausibility. When called to account, he was content to maintain a masterly silence—more eloquent than words—and to allow his misstatement, unacknowledged and uncorrected, to continue to keep alive a prevalent superstition. Can it be wondered that such fallacies persist, when a Chief Justice will thus lie low rather than admit himself at fault?
It is an amusing fact, and far too little known, that the text which has long lent a sanctity to the use of corporal punishment, is not taken, as supposed, from the Proverbs of Solomon, but from a passage, and a rather unseemly one, in Butler’s Hudibras (1663):[30] this, however, is as it should be, for it is fitting that an indecent practice should claim authority from an indecent source. Thus encouraged, and with this divine precept in their thoughts, parents and schoolmasters, and magistrates, and judges, and all governors and rulers, have felt that in wielding the rod they were discharging a religious obligation, and not, as might otherwise have been suspected, gratifying some very primitive instincts of their own. For “the Wisdom of Solomon” has been quoted as our guide, in the correction of the old as well as of the young; indeed, as a writer in the People sagely remarked, “the older the evildoer, the more his need of the birch.” On this principle, aged vagrants have on various occasions been sentenced to be corrected with the rod; but it is to the young that the blessings of the birch more properly belong.
Our British boys, from shore to shore,
Two priceless boons may find:
The Flag that’s ever waved before,
The Birch that’s waved behind.
In its campaign against flogging in the Royal Navy, the Humanitarian League gained not only a considerable success, but an amount of entertainment which of itself would have more than repaid the labour expended on the work. To begin with, there was the technical quibble, very characteristic of officialdom, that though the backs of boys, or rather of young men, might be cut into ribbons with the birch, there was no “flogging” in the Navy, for “flogging” meant the infliction not of the birch but of the “cat.” With Mr. Swift MacNeill conducting the attack in the House of Commons, it may be imagined that such prevarications—and there were many similar instances—fared but badly; and it was no surprise when “these degrading practices,” as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman described them, were brought to an end in 1906, though the use of the cane, to the discredit of the Admiralty, is still permitted and defended.
In this long controversy the League was brought into conflict with all sorts of opponents, among them several Admirals, of whom the “breeziest” were the Hon. V. A. Montagu and Sir William Kennedy. With the latter especially we had great fun, as we found in him an antagonist of the utmost heartiness and good humour. “Of what use is it,” he wrote to me, “sending me all this rubbish, except to fill the waste-paper basket? I don’t care a damn for Admiral——’s opinion.” On another occasion he sent me a formal challenge to meet him “at any time and place, when pistols and coffee will be provided.” At a later date we had his support, equally emphatic, in our protest against the practice of feeding snakes on live prey at the “Zoo.”
Other friends, too, helped to lend gaiety to a rather dismal subject. Among those who actively co-operated with the League was a commercial traveller, who was deeply versed in the various laws relating to corporal punishment, and who, as he once confided to me, had been in the habit of working locally as a sort of freelance and Bashi-Bazouk. He had made a practice, for example, of writing “How about the Birch?” on the Admiralty’s printed notices in which boys were invited to reap the benefits of joining the Navy; and this had touched so sore a point that the advertisements in question had at length been put within glass frames. Another of his little jokes was to write to private schoolmasters, saying that he had a son whom he was about to send to school (which was true), and asking whether they could guarantee that there would be no corporal punishment. Several masters responded favourably, but as the boy could not be sent to more than one place of education, these worthy folk were deprived of their quid pro quo; in the end, however, a nemesis fell upon their betrayer, for once, when he had just returned home after a long journey, tired, and wanting above everything his tea, who should be announced but one of those very pedagogues with whom he had been in communication. He too had travelled some distance, rather than miss the chance of a pupil, and, having “ideas” on the subject of corporal punishment, had come, as he said, for “a good talk.” “I could have eaten him,” was our friend’s remark.