The attempt to separate one thing from another, one human being from another, is at the root of our belief in punishment. Punishment helps to separate, helps to make us feel separate; it does not unite. An English judge declared quite recently that the main object of punishment was not to reform the criminal but to protect society. And so long as that is true, the criminal is just as conscious as we are that the discipline laid on him is the expression of a divided standard of morality, knowing perfectly well that we in like circumstances should not think such punishment good for ourselves or our children.
For is it not true that wherever a local or group interest comes to be established, there the members of that group cease to believe that punishment from any outside power or authority is good for them?
Take the family—those of you who believe in punishment—those who profess to be law-abiding; one of its members commits a theft. Is he handed over to the police to be dealt with according to law? Not at all. On the contrary, everything is done to enable him to escape the punishment. We don’t believe in legal punishment when it comes to our own circle. And we only believe in legal punishment for others, because, loving and understanding them less, we are unwilling to take as much trouble about them.
And that same vicious principle of belief in punishment only for others mounts up and up through every communal interest that has established itself in our midst on a unity of feeling closer than that which obtains generally. Every class-interest, every trade-interest, every party-interest that stands combined for its own benefit does all it can to evade the punishment of its members by the larger and more impersonal authority of the State. Scandals are hushed up in the police; scandals are hushed up in the Army; scandals are hushed up in the Cabinet; everything possible is done to prevent our penal code from acting equally on the vested interests in which we specially are concerned.
And yet we say that we believe in punishment!
But if we do honestly believe in punishment, ought we not then to insist not merely that the administration of our law-courts should be impartial and judicial, but that the source and promotion of our State-prosecutions should be impartial also? Probably most unreflecting people think that they are. But again and again the Government, when it chooses or refuses to put the law into motion and prosecute, though nominally the accuser, is really the accused, using its powers for the saving of its own skin, to keep the case out of court—sometimes even in spite of the protests of the magistracy itself. Again and again the judicial scales have been fraudulently weighted—not in court but out of it by the interests of party government.
Let us take a rather notorious instance where this was done.
Within quite recent times, two men have conspired—the one to raise an army of rebellion if Home Rule were imposed on Ulster; the other to raise an army of rebellion if conscription were imposed on Ireland. The crime in each case was precisely the same; but the punishment was different. The one—the more recent—was sent to prison for it without trial. The other, equally without trial, was elevated to Cabinet rank.
Now, each of these men, in conspiring to break the law, did probably what he conscientiously thought to be right under the circumstances. That we can believe. But it is very difficult to believe that the Government (when, with the connivance of Parliament, it punished the same offence so differently) thought that it was doing right—the equal and the just thing in each case. It was only doing the convenient thing to cover its own blunders. And the question is, therefore, whether—morally—the Government was not the real criminal.