Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1

by Thomas De Quincey

Any reader, who is not deeply read in the economy of English life, will have a most inadequate notion of the vast extent to which this case occurs. We are well assured, (for our information comes from quarters judicially conversant with the question,) that in no other channel of human life does there flow one-hundredth part of the forbearance and the lenity which are called into action by the relation between injured masters and their servants. We are informed that, were every third charge pursued effectually, half the courts in Europe would not suffice for the cases of criminality which emerge in London alone under this head. All England would, in the course of five revolving years, have passed under the torture of subpoena, as witnesses for the prosecution or the defence. This multiplication of cases arises from the coincidence of hourly opportunity with hourly temptation, both carried to the extreme verge of possibility, and generally falling in with youth in the offenders. These aggravations of the danger are three several palliations of the crime, and they have weight allowed to them by the indulgent feelings of masters in a corresponding degree; not one case out of six score that are discovered (while, perhaps, another six score go undiscovered) being ever prosecuted with rigor and effect.

In this universal laxity of temper lies an injury too serious to public morals; and the crime reproduces itself abundantly under an indulgence so Christian in its motive, but unfortunately operating with the full effect of genial culture. Masters, who have made themselves notorious by indiscriminate forgiveness, might be represented symbolically as gardeners watering and tending luxuriant crops of crime in hot-beds or forcing-houses. In London, many are the tradesmen, who, being reflective as well as benevolent, perceive that something is amiss in the whole system. In part the law has been to blame, stimulating false mercy by punishment disproportioned to the offence. But many a judicious master has seen cause to suspect his own lenity as more mischievously operative even than the law's hardness, and as an effeminate surrender to luxurious sensibilities. Those have not been the severest masters whose names are attached to fatal prosecutions: on the contrary, three out of four have been persons who looked forward to general consequences—having, therefore, been more than usually thoughtful, were, for that reason, likely to be more than usually humane. They did not suffer the less acutely, because their feelings ran counter to the course of what they believed to be their duty. Prosecutors often sleep with less tranquillity during the progress of a judicial proceeding than the objects of the prosecution. An English judge of the last century, celebrated for his uprightness, used to balance against that pity so much vaunted for the criminal, the duty of 'a pity to the country.' But private prosecutors of their own servants, often feel both modes of pity at the same moment.

For this difficulty a book of Casuistry might suggest a variety of resources, not so much adapted to a case of that nature already existing, as to the prevention of future cases. Every mode of trust or delegated duty would suggest its own separate improvements; but all improvements must fall under two genuine heads—first, the diminution of temptation, either by abridging the amount of trust reposed; or, where that is difficult, by shortening its duration, and multiplying the counterchecks: secondly, by the moderation of the punishment in the event of detection, as the sole means of reconciling the public conscience to the law, and diminishing the chances of impunity. There is a memorable proof of the rash extent to which the London tradesmen, at one time, carried their confidence in servants. So many clerks, or apprentices, were allowed to hold large balances of money in their hands through the intervals of their periodical settlings, that during the Parliamentary war multitudes were tempted, by that single cause, into absconding. They had always a refuge in the camps. And the loss sustained in this way was so heavy, when all payments were made in gold, that to this one evil suddenly assuming a shape of excess, is ascribed, by some writers, the first establishment of goldsmiths as bankers.[Footnote: Goldsmiths certainly acted in that capacity from an earlier period. But from this era, until the formation of the Bank of England in 1696, they entered more fully upon the functions of bankers, issuing notes which passed current in London.]

Two other weighty considerations attach to this head—1. The known fact that large breaches of trust, and embezzlements, are greatly on the increase, and have been since the memorable case of Mr. Fauntleroy. America is, and will be for ages, a city of refuge for this form of guilt. 2. That the great training of the conscience in all which regards pecuniary justice and fidelity to engagements, lies through the discipline and tyrocinium of the humbler ministerial offices—those of clerks, book-keepers, apprentices. The law acts through these offices, for the unconfirmed conscience, as leading-strings to an infant in its earliest efforts at walking. It forces to go right, until the choice may be supposed trained and fully developed. That is the great function of the law; a function which it will perform with more or less success, as it is more or less fitted to win the cordial support of masters.

CASE V.

VERACITY.

Here is a special 'title,' (to speak with the civil lawyers,) under that general claim put in for England with respect to a moral pre-eminence amongst the nations. Many are they who, in regions widely apart, have noticed with honor the English superiority in the article of veneration for truth. Not many years ago, two Englishmen, on their road overland to India, fell in with a royal cortege, and soon after with the prime minister and the crown prince of Persia. The prince honored them with an interview; both parties being on horseback, and the conversation therefore reduced to the points of nearest interest. Amongst these was the English character. Upon this the prince's remark was—that what had most impressed him with respect for England and her institutions was, the remarkable spirit of truth-speaking which distinguished her sons; as supposing her institutions to grow out of her sons, and her sons out of her institutions. And indeed well he might have this feeling by comparison with his own countrymen: Persians have no principles apparently on this point—all is impulse and accident of feeling. Thus the journal of the two Persian princes in London, as lately reported in the newspapers, is one tissue of falsehoods: not, most undoubtedly, from any purpose of deceiving, but from the overmastering habit (cherished by their whole training and experience) of repeating everything in a spirit of amplification, with a view to the wonder only of the hearer. The Persians are notoriously the Frenchmen of the East; the same gaiety, the same levity, the same want of depth both as to feeling and principle. The Turks are much nearer to the English: the same gravity of temperament, the same meditativeness, the same sternness of principle. Of all European nations, the French is that which least regards truth. The whole spirit of their private memoirs and their anecdotes illustrates this. To point an anecdote or a repartee, there is no extravagance of falsehood that the French will not endure. What nation but the French would have tolerated that monstrous fiction about La Fontaine, by way of illustrating his supposed absence of mind—viz. that, on meeting his own son in a friend's house, he expressed his admiration of the young man, and begged to know his name. The fact probably may have been that La Fontaine was not liable to any absence at all: apparently this 'distraction' was assumed as a means of making a poor sort of sport for his friends. Like many another man in such circumstances, he saw and entered into the fun which his own imaginary forgetfulness produced. But were it otherwise, who can believe so outrageous a self-forgetfulness as that which would darken his eyes to the very pictures of his own hearth? Were such a thing possible, were it even real, it would still be liable to the just objection of the critics—that, being marvelous in appearance, even as a fact it ought not to be brought forward for any purpose of wit, but only as a truth of physiology, or as a fact in the records of a surgeon. The 'incredulus odi' is too strong in such cases, and it adheres to three out of every four French anecdotes. The French taste is, indeed, anything but good in all that department of wit and humor. And the ground lies in their national want of veracity. To return to England—and having cited an Oriental witness to the English character on this point, let us now cite a most observing one in the West. Kant, in Konigsberg, was surrounded by Englishmen and by foreigners of all nations—foreign and English students, foreign and English merchants; and he pronounced the main characteristic feature of the English as a nation to lie in their severe reverence for truth. This from him was no slight praise; for such was the stress he laid upon veracity, that upon this one quality he planted the whole edifice of moral excellence. General integrity could not exist, he held, without veracity as its basis; nor that basis exist without superinducing general integrity.

This opinion, perhaps, many beside Kant will see cause to approve. For ourselves we can truly say—never did we know a human being, boy or girl, who began life as an habitual undervaluer of truth, that did not afterwards exhibit a character conformable to that beginning—such a character as, however superficially correct under the steadying hand of self-interest, was not in a lower key of moral feeling as well as of principle.

But out of this honorable regard to veracity in Immanuel Kant, branched out a principle in Casuistry which most people will pronounce monstrous. It has occasioned much disputing backwards and forwards. But as a practical principle of conduct, (for which Kant meant it,) inevitably it must be rejected—if for no other reason because it is at open war with the laws and jurisprudence of all Christian Europe. Kant's doctrine was this; and the illustrative case in which it is involved, let it be remembered, is his own:—So sacred a thing, said he, is truth—that if a murderer, pursuing another with an avowed purpose of killing him, were to ask of a third person by what road the fleeing party had fled, that person is bound to give him true information. And you are at liberty to suppose this third person a wife, a daughter, or under any conceivable obligations of love and duty to the fugitive. Now this is monstrous: and Kant himself, with all his parental fondness for the doctrine, would certainly have been recalled to sounder thoughts by these two considerations—

1_st_. That by all the codes of law received throughout Europe, he who acted upon Kant's principle would be held a particeps criminis—an accomplice before the fact.