It is assumed that what the offender needs is above all to be trained in habits of obedience, as though that were not what he has always been taught when in any prison; and much good our training has done him.
I know as little about military affairs as the military men who are appointed to manage prisons and prisoners know about the duties they undertake when they are appointed, but I do know something about the worship of discipline. Discipline means not knowing more than the man above you, no matter how difficult it may be to know less. There must always be twice as much wisdom and truth in anything the superior officer does or says as there is in the actions or words of his inferiors; and it is insubordination to behave in ignorance or in contempt of this great principle.
At school we were taught a story about a man named William Tell, regarding which the later critics dispute the accuracy. It seems that a high military personage called Gessler set his cap upon the top of a pole in the market-place and commanded the people to bow down to it. Tell refused to do so, and was seized and compelled to enter on a test of his skill in archery; and so on. Whether the story about Tell is true or not, there can be no doubt about the cap; in one form or other it is still a symbol of authority, to be saluted with respect by the common people. In Scotland we had a song about Rab Roryson’s Bonnet, but “It wasna the bonnet, but the heid that was in it,” that was the real subject of the ditty. Discipline pays no regard to the head that is in the cap. The cap is the thing, though it may be placed on a pole.
Everybody knows that the old cap of knowledge in fairy tales has no longer an existence, and that absence of what is called brains will not be compensated for by any covering of the skull, whatever pretence may be made to the contrary.
Of the virtue of obedience we hear a good deal, and if we look around us we will see evidences that it may be no virtue at all, but a vice. In one of the best known of his poems Tennyson describes the soldiers: “Theirs not to reason why: Theirs not to make reply”; and there are many who think it a noble thing to teach a man not to use the brains he has, and to die rather than show disrespect to his superior by questioning his competence. This may be a military virtue, but it is a civil vice. If it did not work outside so badly in practice, it might be allowed to pass unquestioned; but one has only to look around to see the result of its application. The men who come under its operation are not rendered more efficient citizens thereby, but are hindered by the training they have undergone from obtaining employment in industrial life.
Subordination there must be before there can be combined action on the part of men for any purposes, but there need not be senseless subordination. In any iron-work, for instance, where men work together, they each take their own and other men’s lives in their hands daily. When they are acting in concert a false step, a careless act, on the part of anyone, may bring injury or death on himself and others; and they know this and behave accordingly, or no work would be possible. For the inefficient person there is no room, and when serious work has to be done Gessler’s cap has no place; there is only room for William Tell.
Men discharged from the army find difficulty in obtaining employment. It is not that they are worse men than their neighbours. It is because they have received the wrong kind of training. Employers do not prefer others to them from any absence of patriotism, but from a desire for efficiency. They cannot afford in industrial occupations to have people about them who have learned that it is “theirs not to reason why.” They prefer those who have been taught to use all the sense they have in dealing with their work. In short, the person who during the most formative years of his life has been employed industrially, makes a better workman than the man who during these years has been taught to wait for the word of command before he does anything. Yet we have people going all over the country trying to convince their fellow-citizens that there is no salvation for us unless all young men are subjected to a period of military training, apparently in ignorance of the fact that those who have had that training have difficulty in competing industrially with those who have none. It may be true for other reasons, for purposes of defence, that we ought to learn to shoot, though for my part I believe that most men are more likely to be sick sometime in their lives than to be engaged in fighting with people of whom they know nothing. That would seem to be an argument for their being taught how to preserve and care for their own rather than how to destroy somebody else’s health; but Gessler’s cap is still in the market-place, and it is rude to say anything about it. Yet it is not the bonnet, but the head that is in it, that matters in the long run.