It seems, however, that the grand jury dared to take no action, notwithstanding they had been counseled to do so by the Judge. Although the Judge had quoted to them the words of George I. of blessed memory; although he had quoted to them the words of Lord Mansfield, who became a Judge simply because of his hatred of the English colonists, simply because he despised liberty in the new world; notwithstanding the fact that I could have been punished with insult, with imprisonment, and with stripes, and with every form of degradation; notwithstanding that only a few years ago I could have been branded upon the forehead, bored through the tongue, maimed and disfigured, still, such has been the advance even in the State of Delaware, owing, it may be, in great part to the one lecture delivered by me, that the grand jury absolutely refused to indict me.
The grand jury satisfied themselves and their consciences simply by making a report in which they declared that my lecture had "no parallel in the habits of respectable vagabondism" that I was "an arch-blasphemer and reviler of God and religion," and recommended that should I ever attempt to lecture again I should be taught that in Delaware blasphemy is a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment. I have no doubt that every member of the grand jury signing this report was entirely honest; that he acted in exact accord with what he understood to be the demand of the Christian religion. I must admit that for Christians, the report is exceedingly mild and gentle.
I have now in the house, letters that passed between certain bishops in the fifteenth century, in which they discussed the propriety of cutting out the tongues of heretics before they were burned. Some of the bishops were in favor of and some against it. One argument for cutting out their tongues which seemed to have settled the question was, that unless the tongues of heretics were cut out they might scandalize the gentlemen who were burning them, by blasphemous remarks during the fire. I would commend these letters to Judge Comegys and the members of the grand jury.
I want it distinctly understood that I have nothing against Judge Comegys or the grand jury. They act as 'most anybody would, raised in Delaware, in the shadow of the whipping-post and the pillory. We must remember that Delaware was a slave State; that the Bible became extremely dear to the people because it upheld that peculiar institution. We must remember that the Bible was the block on which mother and child stood for sale when they were separated by the Christians of Delaware. The Bible was regarded as the title-pages to slavery, and as the book of all books that gave the right to masters to whip mothers and to sell children.
There are many offences now for which the punishment is whipping and standing in the pillory; where persons are convicted of certain crimes and sent to the penitentiary, and upon being discharged from the penitentiary are furnished by the State with a dark jacket plainly marked on the back with a large Roman "C," the letter to be of a light color. This they are to wear for six months after being discharged, and if they are found at any time without the dark jacket and the illuminated "C" they are to be punished with twenty lashes upon the bare back. The object, I presume, of this law, is to drive from the State all the discharged convicts for the benefit of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland—that is to say, other Christian communities. A cruel people make cruel laws.
The objection I have to the whipping-post is that it is a punishment which cannot be inflicted by a gentleman. The person who administers the punishment must, of necessity, be fully as degraded as the person who receives it. I am opposed to any kind of punishment that cannot be administered by a gentleman. I am opposed to corporal punishment everywhere. It should be taken from the asylums and penitentiaries, and any man who would apply the lash to the naked back of another is beneath the contempt of honest people.
Question. Have you seen that Henry Bergh has introduced in the New York Legislature a bill providing for whipping as a punishment for wife-beating?
Answer. The objection I have mentioned is fatal to Mr. Bergh's bill. He will be able to get persons to beat wife-beaters, who, under the same circumstances, would be wife-beaters themselves. If they are not wife-beaters when they commence the business of beating others, they soon will be. I think that wife-beating in great cities could be stopped by putting all the wife-beaters at work at some government employment, the value of the work, however, to go to the wives and children. The trouble now is that most of the wife-beating is among the extremely poor, so that the wife by informing against her husband, takes the last crust out of her own mouth. If you substitute whipping or flogging for the prison here, you will in the first place prevent thousands of wives from informing, and in many cases, where the wife would inform, she would afterward be murdered by the flogged brute. This brute would naturally resort to the same means to reform his wife that the State had resorted to for the purpose of reforming him. Flogging would beget flogging. Mr. Bergh is a man of great kindness of heart. When he reads that a wife has been beaten, he says the husband deserves to be beaten himself. But if Mr. Bergh was to be the executioner, I imagine you could not prove by the back of the man that the punishment had been inflicted.
Another good remedy for wife-beating is the abolition of the Catholic Church. We should also do away with the idea that a marriage is a sacrament, and that there is any God who is rendered happy by seeing a husband and wife live together, although the husband gets most of his earthly enjoyment from whipping his wife. No woman should live with a man a moment after he has struck her. Just as the idea of liberty enlarges, confidence in the whip and fist, in the kick and blow, will diminish. Delaware occupies toward freethinkers precisely the same position that a wife-beater does toward the wife. Delaware knows that there are no reasons sufficient to uphold Christianity, consequently these reasons are supplemented with the pillory and the whipping-post. The whipping-post is considered one of God's arguments, and the pillory is a kind of moral suasion, the use of which fills heaven with a kind of holy and serene delight. I am opposed to the religion of brute force, but all these frightful things have grown principally out of a belief in eternal punishment and out of the further idea that a certain belief is necessary to avoid eternal pain.
If Christianity is right, Delaware is right. If God will damn every body forever simply for being intellectually honest, surely he ought to allow the good people of Delaware to imprison the same gentleman for two months. Of course there are thousands and thousands of good people in Delaware, people who have been in other States, people who have listened to Republican speeches, people who have read the works of scientists, who hold the laws of 1740 in utter abhorrence; people who pity Judge Comegys and who have a kind of sympathy for the grand jury.