The Travellers in State
The other day,
to my great astonishment, I caught a train; it was a train going into the
Eastern Counties, and I only just caught it. And while I was running along the
train (amid general admiration) I noticed that there were a quite peculiar and
unusual number of carriages marked ‘Engaged’. On five, six, seven,
eight, nine carriages was pasted the little notice: at five, six, seven, eight,
nine windows were big bland men staring out in the conscious pride of possession. Their bodies seemed more than usually
impenetrable, their faces more than usually placid. It could not be the Derby,
if only for the minor reasons that it was the opposite direction and the wrong
day. It could hardly be the King. It could hardly be the French President. For,
though these distinguished persons naturally like to be private for three
hours, they are at least public for three minutes. A crowd can gather to see
them step into the train; and there was no crowd here, or any police ceremonial.
Who were those
awful persons, who occupied more of the train than a bricklayer’s bean-feast,
and yet were more fastidious and delicate than the King’s own suite? Who were
these that were larger than a mob, yet more mysterious than a monarch? Was it
possible that instead of our Royal House visiting the Tsar, he was really
visiting us? Or does the House of Lords have a break-fast? I waited and
wondered until the train slowed down at some Station in the direction of
Cambridge. Then the large, impenetrable men got out, and after them got out the
distinguished holders of the engaged seats. They were all dressed decorously in
one colour, they had neatly cropped hair, and they were chained together.
I looked across the carriage at its only other occupant, and our eyes met. He was a small, tired-looking man, and, as I afterwards learnt, a native of Cambridge; by the look of him, some working tradesman there, such as a journeyman tailor or a small clock-mender. In order to make conversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going. His mouth twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said; “I don’t s’pose they’re goin’ on an ‘oliday at the seaside with little spades and pails.” I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein of literary convention, I suggested that perhaps Dons were taken down to Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, and had seen several Dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when we had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak, grey eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea. I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same, because all modern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind. Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune one is trying to remember) he said: “Well, I s’pose we ‘ave to do it.” And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of the English democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense of pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness.
It cannot be too
often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly
hostess) to bring the shy people out.
For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical
purpose of a tea-party, he that abases himself must be exalted. At a tea-party
it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible
without bodily violence. Now people talk
of democracy as being coarse and turbulent:
it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse
and turbulent: for it means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy
means appealing to the diffident people. Democracy means getting those people
to vote who would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian
ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the cheek
to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in my friend in the
train. The only two types we hear of in
this argument about crime and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types.
We hear of the
stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no problem at all; as if
physical kindness would cure everything; as if one need only pat Nero and
stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not
sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the
comfortable classes ought to be virtuous – which is absurd. Then, again we do
hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalist. I mean the
sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, “Flog the brutes!” or who
tells you with innocent obscenity “what he would do” with a certain man –
always supposing the man’s hands were tied.
This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them on a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually doubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be “done” to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better it would be if nothing need be done. But something must be done. “ I s’pose we ‘ave to do it.” In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
Now the real
difficulty of discussing decently this problem of the proper treatment of
criminals is that both parties discuss the matter without any direct human
feeling. The denouncers of wrong are as cold as the organisers of wrong.
Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity.
Let me take one
practical instance. I think the flogging arranged in our modern prisons is a
filthy torture; all its scientific paraphernalia, the photographing, the
medical attendance, prove that it goes to the last foul limit of the boot and
rack. The cat is simply the rack without any of its intellectual reasons.
Holding this view strongly, I open the ordinary humanitarian books or papers
and I find a phrase like this, “the lash is a relic of barbarism”. So is the
plough. So is the fishing net. So is the horn or the staff or the fire lit in
winter. What an inexpressively feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack –
a relic of barbarism! It is as if a man walked naked down the street tomorrow,
and we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion. There is
nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Dancing is a relic
of barbarism. Man is a relic of barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism.
But torture is
not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is simply a relic of sin; but
in comparative history it may well be called a relic of civilisation. It has
always been most artistic and elaborate when everything else was most artistic
and elaborate. Thus it was detailed and exquisite in the late Roman Empire, in
the complex and gorgeous sixteenth century, in the centralised French monarchy
a hundred years before the Revolution, and in the great Chinese civilisation to
this day. This is, first and last, the frightful thing we must remember. In so
far as we grow instructed and refined, we are not (in any sense whatever)
naturally moving away from torture. We may be moving towards torture. We must
know what we are doing, if we are to avoid the enormous secret cruelty which
has crowned every historic civilisation.
The train moves
more swiftly through the sunny English fields. They have taken the prisoners
away, and I do not know what they have done with them.
G.K.Chesterton.
(‘Tremendous Trifles’- published 1909)
It is interesting
that Chesterton wrote this short story more than one hundred years ago. His
prescience is startling when one considers the warning for our civilisation
today, a civilisation which has progressed enormously in many fields,
particularly technology and medicine, but in the process has become
unbelievably cruel to its own kind. The legitimisation of abortion throughout
the world, with millions of unborn babies denied their God-given right to life,
and cruelly murdered in their mother’s womb, will surely rank as the most
destructive cruelty, by far, of all ‘civilisations’.
May God forgive
us, we must work and pray for an end to this evil.
“Lord
have mercy on us”
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The Dog
Grief for her
absent master in her wrought,
So I in pity
took her out with me,
Though I would
fain have walked alone, to be
Less hindered in
the current of my thought:
And then I threw
her sticks for which she ran:-
Who would not
cheer a sorrow when he can?
After some miles
we met at twilight pale
A neighbour of
her master’s passing by,
And, with blythe
demonstration in her eye,
She turned and
followed him along the vale.
So I walked on,
companioned by the moon,
Well pleased
that even a casual form or feature
Of the old times
was dearer to the creature
Than the new friend of one bright afternoon.
Rev. William
Faber D.D. (Poems)
