A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

Unless all criminologists are wrong in their deductions, something like fifty per cent. of all crime will be got rid of when alcohol no longer exists to cause crime. There are further ameliorative influences certain to be at work which will tend to reduce the sorts of crime chiefly troublesome at present. Adopting the familiar division of crime into (a) offences against the person and (b) offences against property, it is very easy to see that what may be called private crime (as distinguished from crime against the body politic) will diminish automatically. When the extremes of wealth and poverty have become as much less marked as I have endeavoured to show that they must become, it is evident that the temptation to offences of greed will be greatly diminished. A large proportion of all these crimes arises out of poverty alone, or out of poverty coupled with stupidity. A man who has not enough intelligence to earn is very likely to steal in order to provide for himself; and one who is equipped by the knowledge of a trade is consequently not so liable to be dishonest as one who is less hopefully situated. He is also likely to be more intelligent, and consequently better qualified to perceive that the balance of comfort is on the side of the honest worker and not on the side of the burglar or thief. Anyone who has had occasion to observe the proceedings of criminal courts must have noticed the frequency with which the description “labourer” is adopted by the offenders charged. “Labourer” means an unskilled worker—a man who has learned no trade, and brings nothing to his work but thews and sinews. It is much less common to find a trade claimed: one rarely sees a thief or burglar described on the charge sheet as “John Doe, carpenter,” or “Richard Roe, gas-fitter.” They do not even profess to have a trade. Of course where a man’s business is such as to lend itself to criminal pursuits, the case is different: one finds banknote forgers described as “engravers” and “lithographers,” and makers of counterfeit money as “die sinkers.” But in the average of crime—at least crime of the more stupid sorts—it is the tradeless man who is nearly always charged. It is impossible to resist the inference that poverty is a determining cause in most crimes of greed. In a hundred years’ time the spread of technical education will have thinned the ranks of the unskilled. At the same time the inducements to honesty and steady industry will have been enormously increased through the universality of the profit-sharing system; and the position of the steady worker will have become so greatly more attractive than that of the casual thief, that only the utmost stupidity can tempt anyone to the latter’s course of life. Self-respecting labour for a share in the profits of labour, instead of mechanical toil for wages that do not bear any relation to profits nor to anything else except the fluctuations of the labour-market, will so elevate the average of industrial character that it will be rare for workmen to drift into crime. At the same time, and similarly, the restraint placed upon undue accumulation of wealth will diminish temptation to crimes of greed at the other extremity of social life. It will no longer be worth anyone’s while to organise colossal schemes of dishonest company-promoting. Thus, crimes against property are certain to become relatively infrequent, because the greatest temptations to them will have been removed.

Apart from the largely preponderating number of cases in which offences against the person—assaults and the like—arise now out of intoxication, the tendency to crimes of violence will also diminish as the temper of society grows milder. An age so much advanced in sentimentality as to revolt against the cruelty of breeding horses for traction and cattle for food is not likely to be fruitful in offences of violence. These offences, where associated neither with drink nor robbery, probably arise more often from jealousy between the sexes than anything else. It is unfortunately impossible to suggest that sexual jealousy can be wholly eliminated from human nature. But no doubt its violent exhibition will have been educated out of us to a large measure. Other personal offences, as rape, criminal assault and various criminal vices will doubtless diminish in frequency as a consequence of general moral improvement. In short, the work of the policeman will be greatly eased in the course of this century, and no doubt many functions at present relegated to the police, such as the direction of street traffic, the care of vagrant dogs, and the like, will be performed by officials of a different character. Even these duties will be far less onerous than they now are, when we have become intelligent enough to see that the best way for every man to secure his own freedom and comfort is to respect the freedom and the rights of others.

It remains an open question whether at some time during this century it may not be temporarily needful for the State to undertake the restraint of offences against the intellect, such as the publication of false or grossly exaggerated news, and of matter calculated to encourage vice, as betting. No doubt the balance of advantage is in favour of the entire freedom of the Press; but it cannot be denied that this freedom is at present greatly abused. It would be easy to name a dozen types of periodicals whose forcible suppression would be an enormous gain to the public; and in an age so increasingly prone to look to the governing body for assistance in every conceivable matter no one can deny the probability of some legislative steps being taken, when the public first begins to concern itself seriously with public morals. But this possibility is much nearer at hand than the end of this century; at the latter period public opinion will probably be well able to take care of itself, and any laws of the kind I have suggested will, like numerous other forms of legislation, including many now operative, have fallen into desuetude because there will be no temptation to the misdemeanours they are, or may be, framed to repress.

The question of the form which the repression of crime will take a hundred years hence can only be answered if we first endeavour to see what the developments of penology, or the science of punishment, are likely to be during the next hundred years. Naturally, they will have the same tendencies as the society which produces them. We may safely anticipate that the more savage punishments, as death, flogging and painful labour will be eliminated, together with all punishments that are not believed to be reformatory in their character. And even the relatively mild penalty of long imprisonment may to the gentler mind of a new age appear unduly vindictive.

Punishment will be regarded as a diminishingly necessary evil; and our “object all sublime” will not be to make it fit the particular crime for which it is awarded, but to make it diminish crime as a whole. Punition as a moral force will be judged according to its effect in two different directions, namely, its force as a means of reforming the convicted individual by preventing his relapse into crime, and its force as a means of deterring other persons from committing the same crimes at all; and of these two the second will be considered greatly the more important in an age that will be logical as well as mild; because it is obviously a greater object to produce an effect upon the minds of a possibly great number than to produce it upon the mind of one culprit. Consequently, although a benevolent solicitude for the reformation of the detected offender will not be excluded from the consideration of future penologists, the deterring from crime of the tempted classes will be much more demanded. As to this, it cannot be questioned that improvements in detection and in legal procedure (eliminating the chances of escape for the guilty without endangering the freedom of the innocent) are capable of accomplishing a great deal more than could possibly be looked for from any alteration in the nature of the punishment used. Experience shows that hitherto a ferocious punishment not very certainly applied does not deter anything like so much as comparatively mild punishment with very little chance of escape. Coining, for instance, is less common now than when coiners were slowly pressed to death under weights, if detected; and the diminution of this crime has not been due to fear of the punishment now long abandoned; neither was that penalty removed from our system of criminal law because it had done its work and stamped out counterfeiting. On the contrary, improvements in the minting of real money, by rendering the detection of counterfeits easy, may be said to have almost eliminated the offence in question, and this result is all the more remarkable when we remember that, owing to the appreciation of gold, real silver shillings, half-crowns and other pieces just as good in assay as the royal mintage could be coined by counterfeiters at a handsome profit.

Our very proper anxiety to avoid every possible chance of committing and punishing the innocent doubtless enables many guilty persons to escape every year; and probably quite half the prisoners acquitted at every assize are really guilty in some degree. The jurisprudence of a hundred years hence will certainly have been so much improved that innocent persons will rarely be accused at all, and that guilty ones will not be able to escape on technical grounds: and with improved detective methods the chances of escape in any given case will be greatly diminished. What punishments are inflicted will be of a reformatory character, and no doubt provisional release, freed from the many crying scandals of the ticket-of-leave system, will play a great part in scientific penology. Recidivism will, of course, be the subject of much sharper punishment. In the meantime, the study of mental science in its relation to crime will have made great strides, and if the views of our own age in regard to heredity should be maintained, a very great source of crime will probably be got rid of altogether, because men and women with just that mental twist which leads to crime will, by one device or another, be absolutely prevented from propagating their race.[2]

It is impossible to work out here the various methods of individual reform applicable to convicts of various sorts, because the nature of these methods must necessarily depend, to a great extent, upon the conditions of a society of which only the most salient and extreme peculiarities can be foreseen even by the most imaginative. But all evidence seems to suggest that actual crime will have become much diminished in amount, while the necessity for dealing with what may be called technical crimes—misdemeanours, and offences against regulations made for the convenience of society rather than for the defence of life and morals—will probably have been reduced to a minimum, partly by the intelligence of the population, and partly through the fact that the minor offences will have ceased to be dealt with by law, and will be sufficiently repressed by natural causes. Not only, therefore, will the amount of necessary restraint become less, through the diminution of crime and of temptation to crime, but the employment of legal restraint will be less demanded, the latter being recognised as, when avoidable, dangerous to public morals. And, while criminal law will be less active, civil litigation will also probably be much less heavy. The same causes which will tend to make us more careful to avoid committing offences against the common right of others, will make us more scrupulous to perform contracts. And as a consequence of the improved morality which there seems every reason to anticipate, a hundred years hence, it will no doubt have become possible to execute a reform which many thinkers have desiderated as an element of perfected polity. It is hardly necessary here to recapitulate the arguments in favour of the contention that the cost of civil suits should be borne, as the cost of criminal prosecutions is always supposed to be borne, by the State. That the man who brings successfully an action at law, or successfully defends one, should be able to do so only at an expense to himself, is against public policy: and there are even now numerous cases every year in which even the unsuccessful party in a lawsuit is really doing the public a service. In a perfect state of public morality he would always be doing so: and in a hundred years’ time he will certainly be more often worthy of public thanks than he is now—he will be less often seeking to impose or defend a wrong. As matters stand, it is notorious that the grant of costs following the judgment in a civil suit is only a partial relief to the successful suitor. He has to pay his solicitor more than his solicitor can obtain leave from the taxing master to collect from the other side; while if (as not infrequently happens) the other side cannot pay, the costs awarded by the Court have to be borne by the winner of the suit. It is a frequent reply of dishonest defendants, when threatened with legal proceedings, that they “will meet the plaintiff in the Bankruptcy Court.” On the other hand, a man will often submit to oppression rather than be subjected to the expense of even a successful defence. Every litigant who maintains his right, whether as plaintiff or defendant, renders very much the same service to the public which we often hear applauded on the part of persons who “come forward to prosecute” in criminal or misdemeanour cases. He is assisting to make probity profitable and evasion dangerous; in other words, he is subserving public morality and helping to repress dishonesty. It would be much to the public advantage that his costs should be borne by the public purse, and borne generously, every expense legitimately incurred being allowed him. Logically, he ought also to receive a sufficient, and even a fairly liberal, solatium for his trouble and loss of time: and an honest loser ought to be able to receive a certificate from the court entitling him to the same amenities, the withholding of which would constitute a deterrent penalty against factious litigation. But it may be urged on practical grounds that to make the path of the litigant too easy would lead to too much invocation of the law, and that the full recognition of the public usefulness of litigants must be postponed to the millennium—which age of ideal perfection will not occur (it may be thought necessary to concede) a hundred years hence. And it is not difficult to imagine means by which the public can be protected against the factious and unnecessary litigation to which, in the absence of some safeguard, we should certainly be exposed. The plaintiff might be required to obtain some sort of fiat, such as is required now before a suit of criminal libel can be prosecuted: and there would be no hardship in the litigant who failed to obtain the fiat being left to bear his own expenses up to the time of failure, though, in the event of his success, he would of course have them repaid. The legal machinery for obtaining permission to sue need not be made too complicated: it must not be allowed to develop into a sort of preliminary trial. Probably some sort of arrangement as the above will be instituted a hundred years hence, and all law-costs borne by the State, except in the case of obvious dishonesty or bad faith; the trouble and loss of time necessarily incurred exercising a restraining influence upon the litigious.

In regard to the general machinery of the law it would be tedious to attempt to foresee all the reforms of which the growing complexity of human affairs will certainly impose the necessity upon us. The clumsiness of a system by which important civil cases have to be tried three times, in ways differing in detail, before a final decision is reached, needs no insisting upon: and there is a manifest inconsistency in the fact that an action about a matter worth £101 can be twice appealed, while a man tried for his life, or something even more important than life, has no appeal at all against an adverse verdict, except to a secret tribunal of Civil Service clerks—for in the “commutation” of sentences the Crown stands for the Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary is necessarily obliged to depend upon his assistants, who in their turn may very possibly have to derive their information from officials whose credit would be damaged if some fact favourable to the prisoner came out. To admit this inconsistency is not by any means equivalent to admitting the necessity for courts of criminal appeal: and anyone who knows the methods of criminal jurisprudence in the United States must recognise that such courts are capable of abuse highly dangerous to public morality, so dependent upon respect for law. But with the great increase in scrupulosity and in the mildness of public temper which the tendencies of human development clearly vaticinate for the next century, it seems impossible to doubt that some method will be adopted by which criminal trials can be reviewed, even though the class of cases in which the necessity for review is most often mentioned now will no doubt have disappeared with the abolition of capital punishment. And it does not seem likely to be beyond the ingenuity of the coming time to discover some means by which civil cases can be settled in one trial, instead of requiring three, without danger to the justice of any individual suit.

It is sometimes questioned whether trial by jury will continue a feature of modern civilisation. The remark of a legal cynic that “the man with a good case is always safe with a judge, while the man with a bad case has always a chance with a jury,” is sufficiently sound to make it a question whether juries are worth the trouble given to the members of them, and the vast amount of additional labour which their employment inflicts on the courts of which they are a feature. The conditions which make trial by jury “the blest palladium of our liberties” have passed away in civilised countries, and to a great extent in Ireland. It is no doubt characteristic of the British people that we should so long as this have retained the use of juries in civil suits, though even here there are many cases (especially in divorce and libel) where the average common sense of a jury is really helpful to the judge, and constitutes a check upon his prejudice or impatience. There was a time when the jury was a genuine safeguard against oppression in private as well as Crown cases, and it is like us, as a nation, to have retained them when their usefulness in this respect was happily obsolete. But it seems to the writer pretty certain that in civil trials juries will have been dispensed with long before the end of this century, and this dispensation will probably be the stepping-stone to a system whereby criminal causes will be tried by a bench of judges, instead of by a judge and jury. The whole tendency of modern conditions (in which must be included our growing, and highly discreditable, individual impatience of the trouble of jury-service) seems to point to this.[3]

Reforms of judicial procedure of course constitute only a relatively small part of the legislative work which will have been accomplished by the end of the century. Apart from the work of gradually remodelling the law with the idea (which nowhere seems to suggest itself to present-day legislators) of making it act beneficially upon public character, there will no doubt be a vast amount of work for the various parliaments of the world in codifying existing statute- and common-law systems, which in all communities have fallen into complexity and confusion of a degree which makes them highly unsatisfactory instruments of social protection: and there will also be a great amount of constructive legislation, particularly in regard to the tenure of land, to the simplification of conveyancing, to a more intelligent machinery of contracts, to the equitable handling of such accidental or conditional sources of wealth as we call “unearned increment” and the discovery of unexpected minerals, to the useful limitation of inheritance, and to other matters too numerous to be safely named. And in order that these great works may be accomplished, it is quite certain that, not only in England, but in all those States where really free parliaments exist, great reforms will have been found necessary, and will have become so much a part of the machinery of legislation and administration a hundred years hence, that our descendants will hardly be able to realise how Government was ever carried on without them. Indeed, it is by the difficulty of administering anything at all by parliamentary methods—every year more evidently breaking down—rather than by the desire to undertake large schemes of legislation, that statesmen will in a very short time be forced to initiate the changes whose full development will have become time-honoured by the end of this century. The organisation of political opposition in parliaments has reached a point which makes it evident that before long the minority in parliaments will have become a nonentity. The minority, in fact, has already, here and in other countries (of which the Austro-Hungarian empire is, at the moment, the most noticeable example), become so powerful for obstruction of business that, by a sort of paradox, its power is on the eve of complete destruction. At St Stephen’s the effect of obstruction working in this manner is plainly visible. Whatever party is in power will always, so long as the existing system continues, be obliged to silence the opposition by the force of parliamentary machine; and whatever party is in power will always be accused of tyranny and autocracy by the other party. In practice there is no method by which any important government measure can be passed through the House of Commons except by force. It is a mere farce to make a show of debating the details in committee. Naturally the Opposition, when it does not want the measure passed at all, will delay its passage to the last possible moment, and will make its enactment impossible unless a term is set to the deliberations of committee of the whole house. Whether the time granted by the Government be long or short makes no difference: it is impossible to pass any serious and complex bill except by the closure. In other words, the Government (which practically means the Civil Service officials and parliamentary draftsmen employed by the particular department concerned with the bill—the Home Office, the Local Government Board Office, the Exchequer, or what not) must triumph. Even the suggestions of individual supporters of the administration in power must be ignored, unless there is a cave which might turn out the ministry altogether. In detail, therefore, we are governed, not by Parliament, but by the permanent officials, so far as really important Government measures are concerned: and it is quite evident that bills introduced by private members will very soon not be considered at all. The private member is rapidly being reduced to nothingness by the force of parliamentary development. Meantime, the waste of public time by the introduction and debating of bills which the Opposition eventually succeeds in destroying, is appalling, and of course it is aggravated by the idiotic rule which destroys at the end of each session all the work which has been begun and not completed. The system, not less imbecile, in which opinion is ascertained in Parliament is another great time-waster. It is only necessary to ask for a single moment what our grandsons, or even the younger of our children, will think of a Parliament in which a vote was taken by solemnly walking through lobbies, with elaborate arrangements for counting and checking the members (when it might all be done by the simple use of an electric signal in front of each seat in the chamber) in order to perceive the miserable inadequacy of even the mechanical arrangements of all the parliaments of the world. And if even all the crass follies and mediæval stupidities of modern parliamentary arrangements were reformed, as nine-tenths of them could be by any competent board composed of a few engineers, electricians and architects, we should still be in possession of a legislative machine such as the intelligence of a hundred years hence would laugh to scorn if its restoration were suggested.