CHAPTER VII
PUNISHMENT
The universal cure-all—The public and the advertising healer—The essence of all quackery—The quackery of punishment—Rational treatment—Justice not bad temper—Retribution—Our fathers and ourselves—Their methods not necessarily suitable to our time—Capital punishment—The incurable and the incorrigible—Objections to capital punishment apply in degree to all punishment—The “cat”—The executioner and the surgeon—Whipping and its effect—The flogged offender—The act and the intention—Pain and vitality—Unequal effects of punishment—Fines and their burden—Who is punished most?—Punishment and expiation—Punishment and deterrence—Social opinion the real deterrent—Vicious social circles—Respect for the law—Prevention of crime.
Since newspapers have become great advertising mediums their readers have had information thrust upon them by picture and story regarding the need to flee from ills to come and seek refuge in the patent pill. Health is the great thing to attend to, and there is a large number of people engaged in our instruction. Some will have us see to the equal development of all our muscles, though what we are to do with them when they are developed we may not clearly apprehend. Others prescribe for us all a proper course of diet, and though the professors differ among themselves as to what is the best food for mankind, they seem to be all agreed that there is a universal food. If we find their prescriptions do not suit us, that is an evidence of degeneracy on our part which must be overcome. It is all very like what has passed itself off as education. At school, if a boy showed an aptitude for drawing and none for composition, he was taken from the thing he could do and worried into doing the thing he was not fitted for doing, with the result that in many cases children left school able to do a number of things equally badly and few things well. The attempt to make people ambidextrous is more likely to make them left-handed in both hands.
Health is the greatest of blessings, but the man who is always concerned for his health is not the healthy man; time passes, and he may lose his life while he is preparing to live. He is encouraged to examine himself, and all the possible ailments which may annoy him are described and their significance exaggerated till he gets nervous. A specific is found for every ill to which the flesh is heir, and its efficacy is trumpeted till some equally infallible cure replaces it in public estimation. The saving remedy may be called a quack preparation, and its composition proclaimed and condemned by the regular practitioner, but a sufficient number of purchasers is found to justify the expense of advertising it. It is sure to benefit somebody, however antecedently improbable that effect may be, and there is certain to be some sufferer who will be grateful enough to testify to its cure. Some of the testimonials may be spurious, but many of them are quite as genuine as any that the doctors receive. The reader sees that Mrs. Dash has suffered from pains in her back for years, and has tried the patience and the prescriptions of every doctor within her reach without obtaining any permanent relief. She has had to resign herself to a state of chronic invalidism, and is an object of pity to all who know her. She hears from a friend of the wonderful curative effects of the Rational Rheumatic Regimen and puts herself under treatment, with the result that her neighbours cannot believe she is the same woman, and she herself feels in better health than she has ever before enjoyed. Then follows a list of symptoms which is sure to appeal to some sufferer. The public, knowing all that can be urged against quack medicines, distrusts and purchases them. The buyer knows that the case of Mrs. Dash is not published for philanthropic but for business reasons, but he thinks that what cured her may help him. It may or it may not, but he risks it.
Even those who utterly condemn quack medicines fall quite readily into the error of quackery when they come to discuss social subjects; for the essence of quackery is the belief that what is good for one person must be good for every other. Diseases are not entities, but conditions that cannot exist apart from the man; and similarly crime cannot exist apart from society. We may alter conditions in such a way that the tendency to disease or crime will be lessened; but when a person has become diseased we have to know something more about him than the fact that he shows certain symptoms before he can be treated in any rational way and with a prospect of his recovery. So when he has committed a crime we must know more than that fact before there is much hope of being able to correct him. There is as much quackery in the practice of making punishment fit crime as in that of making remedies fit diseases.
When a man offends against the law he is taken in hand by the ministers of the law; and they are awakening to a sense of the futility of their treatment of him, but so far not much progress has been made towards a rational method. There are more institutions projected and a greater variety of remedies prescribed; but they depend on the nature of the crime charged, rather than on the character and condition of the culprit. Some day it may be acknowledged that the court that has to determine whether a person is guilty of the offence charged against him is not therefore the court that is able to determine his treatment, but there will first require to be a more general recognition of the fact that before a man can be treated rationally for any physical, mental, moral, or social fault in him, something more must be known about him than that the fault is there.
I do not suggest that rational treatment will invariably be successful; there is nothing absolute in this world, not even our ignorance; but I do assert that we are not entitled to act irrationally in dealing with criminals, and that that is what we generally do at present. The practice of the courts has changed much more than the law during the last sixteen years, and there is a greater disposition on the part of judges to seek information regarding those who are brought before them, as well as a more marked reluctance to send offenders to prison if there appears to be a probability that they will not repeat their offence.
The old theories of punishment have broken down, and it is now difficult to find any coherent theory behind the practice. When a crime is committed that shocks the public by its atrocity there are demands made for fierce retribution on the culprit, partly on the plea that he ought to be made to suffer, and partly for the purpose of deterring others from repeating the act. Incidentally those who are most insistent on the employment of the executioner show that they possess a fair share of the same spirit that educed the act which they condemn. They are rightly indignant, but they do not seem to see that justice and bad temper are not the same thing.