Chapter XII: Malcontents
I confess that I felt rather unhappy when I got home, and thought
more closely over the trial that I had just witnessed. For the
time I was carried away by the opinion of those among whom I was.
They had no misgivings about what they were doing. There did not
seem to be a person in the whole court who had the smallest doubt
but that all was exactly as it should be. This universal
unsuspecting confidence was imparted by sympathy to myself, in
spite of all my training in opinions so widely different. So it is
with most of us: that which we observe to be taken as a matter of
course by those around us, we take as a matter of course ourselves.
And after all, it is our duty to do this, save upon grave occasion.
But when I was alone, and began to think the trial over, it
certainly did strike me as betraying a strange and untenable
position. Had the judge said that he acknowledged the probable
truth, namely, that the prisoner was born of unhealthy parents, or
had been starved in infancy, or had met with some accidents which
had developed consumption; and had he then gone on to say that
though he knew all this, and bitterly regretted that the protection
of society obliged him to inflict additional pain on one who had
suffered so much already, yet that there was no help for it, I
could have understood the position, however mistaken I might have
thought it. The judge was fully persuaded that the infliction of
pain upon the weak and sickly was the only means of preventing
weakness and sickliness from spreading, and that ten times the
suffering now inflicted upon the accused was eventually warded off
from others by the present apparent severity. I could therefore
perfectly understand his inflicting whatever pain he might consider
necessary in order to prevent so bad an example from spreading
further and lowering the Erewhonian standard; but it seemed almost
childish to tell the prisoner that he could have been in good
health, if he had been more fortunate in his constitution, and been
exposed to less hardships when he was a boy.
I write with great diffidence, but it seems to me that there is no
unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding
them for their sheer good luck: it is the normal condition of
human life that this should be done, and no right-minded person
will complain of being subjected to the common treatment. There is
no alternative open to us. It is idle to say that men are not
responsible for their misfortunes. What is responsibility? Surely
to be responsible means to be liable to have to give an answer
should it be demanded, and all things which live are responsible
for their lives and actions should society see fit to question them
through the mouth of its authorised agent.
What is the offence of a lamb that we should rear it, and tend it,
and lull it into security, for the express purpose of killing it?
Its offence is the misfortune of being something which society
wants to eat, and which cannot defend itself. This is ample. Who
shall limit the right of society except society itself? And what
consideration for the individual is tolerable unless society be the
gainer thereby? Wherefore should a man be so richly rewarded for
having been son to a millionaire, were it not clearly provable that
the common welfare is thus better furthered? We cannot seriously
detract from a man's merit in having been the son of a rich father
without imperilling our own tenure of things which we do not wish
to jeopardise; if this were otherwise we should not let him keep
his money for a single hour; we would have it ourselves at once.
For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be
robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our
thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and
our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river,
so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers
with the banks while the flood is flowing.
But to return. Even in England a man on board a ship with yellow
fever is held responsible for his mischance, no matter what his
being kept in quarantine may cost him. He may catch the fever and
die; we cannot help it; he must take his chance as other people do;
but surely it would be desperate unkindness to add contumely to our
self-protection, unless, indeed, we believe that contumely is one
of our best means of self-protection. Again, take the case of
maniacs. We say that they are irresponsible for their actions, but
we take good care, or ought to take good care, that they shall
answer to us for their insanity, and we imprison them in what we
call an asylum (that modern sanctuary!) if we do not like their
answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility. What we
ought to say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less
satisfactory answer from a lunatic than from one who is not mad,
because lunacy is less infectious than crime.
We kill a serpent if we go in danger by it, simply for being such
and such a serpent in such and such a place; but we never say that
the serpent has only itself to blame for not having been a harmless
creature. Its crime is that of being the thing which it is: but
this is a capital offence, and we are right in killing it out of
the way, unless we think it more danger to do so than to let it
escape; nevertheless we pity the creature, even though we kill it.
But in the case of him whose trial I have described above, it was
impossible that any one in the court should not have known that it
was but by an accident of birth and circumstances that he was not
himself also in a consumption; and yet none thought that it
disgraced them to hear the judge give vent to the most cruel
truisms about him. The judge himself was a kind and thoughtful
person. He was a man of magnificent and benign presence. He was
evidently of an iron constitution, and his face wore an expression
of the maturest wisdom and experience; yet for all this, old and
learned as he was, he could not see things which one would have
thought would have been apparent even to a child. He could not
emancipate himself from, nay, it did not even occur to him to feel,
the bondage of the ideas in which he had been born and bred.
So was it also with the jury and bystanders; and--most wonderful of
all--so was it even with the prisoner. Throughout he seemed fully
impressed with the notion that he was being dealt with justly: he
saw nothing wanton in his being told by the judge that he was to be
punished, not so much as a necessary protection to society
(although this was not entirely lost sight of), as because he had
not been better born and bred than he was. But this led me to hope
that he suffered less than he would have done if he had seen the
matter in the same light that I did. And, after all, justice is
relative.
I may here mention that only a few years before my arrival in the
country, the treatment of all convicted invalids had been much more
barbarous than now, for no physical remedy was provided, and
prisoners were put to the severest labour in all sorts of weather,
so that most of them soon succumbed to the extreme hardships which
they suffered; this was supposed to be beneficial in some ways,
inasmuch as it put the country to less expense for the maintenance
of its criminal class; but the growth of luxury had induced a
relaxation of the old severity, and a sensitive age would no longer
tolerate what appeared to be an excess of rigour, even towards the
most guilty; moreover, it was found that juries were less willing
to convict, and justice was often cheated because there was no
alternative between virtually condemning a man to death and letting
him go free; it was also held that the country paid in recommittals
for its over-severity; for those who had been imprisoned even for
trifling ailments were often permanently disabled by their
imprisonment; and when a man had been once convicted, it was
probable that he would seldom afterwards be off the hands of the
country.
These evils had long been apparent and recognised; yet people were
too indolent, and too indifferent to suffering not their own, to
bestir themselves about putting an end to them, until at last a
benevolent reformer devoted his whole life to effecting the
necessary changes. He divided all illnesses into three classes--
those affecting the head, the trunk, and the lower limbs--and
obtained an enactment that all diseases of the head, whether
internal or external, should be treated with laudanum, those of the
body with castor-oil, and those of the lower limbs with an
embrocation of strong sulphuric acid and water.
It may be said that the classification was not sufficiently
careful, and that the remedies were ill chosen; but it is a hard
thing to initiate any reform, and it was necessary to familiarise
the public mind with the principle, by inserting the thin end of
the wedge first: it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that
among so practical a people there should still be some room for
improvement. The mass of the nation are well pleased with existing
arrangements, and believe that their treatment of criminals leaves
little or nothing to be desired; but there is an energetic minority
who hold what are considered to be extreme opinions, and who are
not at all disposed to rest contented until the principle lately
admitted has been carried further.
I was at some pains to discover the opinions of these men, and
their reasons for entertaining them. They are held in great odium
by the generality of the public, and are considered as subverters
of all morality whatever. The malcontents, on the other hand,
assert that illness is the inevitable result of certain antecedent
causes, which, in the great majority of cases, were beyond the
control of the individual, and that therefore a man is only guilty
for being in a consumption in the same way as rotten fruit is
guilty for having gone rotten. True, the fruit must be thrown on
one side as unfit for man's use, and the man in a consumption must
be put in prison for the protection of his fellow-citizens; but
these radicals would not punish him further than by loss of liberty
and a strict surveillance. So long as he was prevented from
injuring society, they would allow him to make himself useful by
supplying whatever of society's wants he could supply. If he
succeeded in thus earning money, they would have him made as
comfortable in prison as possible, and would in no way interfere
with his liberty more than was necessary to prevent him from
escaping, or from becoming more severely indisposed within the
prison walls; but they would deduct from his earnings the expenses
of his board, lodging, surveillance, and half those of his
conviction. If he was too ill to do anything for his support in
prison, they would allow him nothing but bread and water, and very
little of that.
They say that society is foolish in refusing to allow itself to be
benefited by a man merely because he has done it harm hitherto, and
that objection to the labour of the diseased classes is only
protection in another form. It is an attempt to raise the natural
price of a commodity by saying that such and such persons, who are
able and willing to produce it, shall not do so, whereby every one
has to pay more for it.
Besides, so long as a man has not been actually killed he is our
fellow-creature, though perhaps a very unpleasant one. It is in a
great degree the doing of others that he is what he is, or in other
words, the society which now condemns him is partly answerable
concerning him. They say that there is no fear of any increase of
disease under these circumstances; for the loss of liberty, the
surveillance, the considerable and compulsory deduction from the
prisoner's earnings, the very sparing use of stimulants (of which
they would allow but little to any, and none to those who did not
earn them), the enforced celibacy, and above all, the loss of
reputation among friends, are in their opinion as ample safeguards
to society against a general neglect of health as those now
resorted to. A man, therefore, (so they say) should carry his
profession or trade into prison with him if possible; if not, he
must earn his living by the nearest thing to it that he can; but if
he be a gentleman born and bred to no profession, he must pick
oakum, or write art criticisms for a newspaper.
These people say further, that the greater part of the illness
which exists in their country is brought about by the insane manner
in which it is treated.
They believe that illness is in many cases just as curable as the
moral diseases which they see daily cured around them, but that a
great reform is impossible till men learn to take a juster view of
what physical obliquity proceeds from. Men will hide their
illnesses as long as they are scouted on its becoming known that
they are ill; it is the scouting, not the physic, which produces
the concealment; and if a man felt that the news of his being in
ill-health would be received by his neighbours as a deplorable
fact, but one as much the result of necessary antecedent causes as
though he had broken into a jeweller's shop and stolen a valuable
diamond necklace--as a fact which might just as easily have
happened to themselves, only that they had the luck to be better
born or reared; and if they also felt that they would not be made
more uncomfortable in the prison than the protection of society
against infection and the proper treatment of their own disease
actually demanded, men would give themselves up to the police as
readily on perceiving that they had taken small-pox, as they go now
to the straightener when they feel that they are on the point of
forging a will, or running away with somebody else's wife.
But the main argument on which they rely is that of economy: for
they know that they will sooner gain their end by appealing to
men's pockets, in which they have generally something of their own,
than to their heads, which contain for the most part little but
borrowed or stolen property; and also, they believe it to be the
readiest test and the one which has most to show for itself. If a
course of conduct can be shown to cost a country less, and this by
no dishonourable saving and with no indirectly increased
expenditure in other ways, they hold that it requires a good deal
to upset the arguments in favour of its being adopted, and whether
rightly or wrongly I cannot pretend to say, they think that the
more medicinal and humane treatment of the diseased of which they
are the advocates would in the long run be much cheaper to the
country: but I did not gather that these reformers were opposed to
meeting some of the more violent forms of illness with the cat-of-
nine-tails, or with death; for they saw no so effectual way of
checking them; they would therefore both flog and hang, but they
would do so pitifully.
I have perhaps dwelt too long upon opinions which can have no
possible bearing upon our own, but I have not said the tenth part
of what these would-be reformers urged upon me. I feel, however,
that I have sufficiently trespassed upon the attention of the
reader.
Erewhon : Chapter XIII - The Views of the Erewhonians Concerning Death
Erewhon