In every civilization there will always be found, sheltering under its wall, evil things not yet brought to book—not yet revealed in their true nature, but still dragging back the wheel of true progress and the betterment of humanity. Yet though they come "in such a questionable shape," it is often not until someone ahead of his or her age, pulls them into the open glare of another point of view, and thus shows up all their hidden moral leprosy, that the arrow of condemnation is driven full-tilt at them from the stretched bow of a Higher Criticism.

In Francis Newman's Miscellanies, Vol. III, four of these evil things are dragged by him into the open daylight of a mind far ahead of its age, and these four are: Cruelty to Animals; Degradation of Man, as brought about by the drink traffic; War, as the great throw-back to Civilization; Punishment as understood in England, and our own methods of reform as regards the treatment of misdemeanants.

To take the first of these—Cruelty to Animals. Of course there are three kinds: Legalized cruelty, cruelty caused by thoughtlessness, and cruelty caused in order to give pleasure to men and women. Of the first—well, of course this has to do with vivisection, said to be carried on for the advancement of science and for the sake of alleviating the sufferings of humanity.

As regards the first reason, men who know what they are talking about are pretty generally agreed that science has not largely benefited by vivisection. As regards the second, it is by no means sure that anything can be proved of direct use to mankind from discoveries made by doctors and scientists after operating on animals. "What sort of tenderness for man can we expect from surgeons who can thus teach by torture, or from students who can endure to listen?" Here Francis Newman puts his finger on a very significant factor in the case—that of the barbarizing, the deteriorating of the mind that cannot touch the black pitch of torture and not be defiled.

Everyone will remember the words of Lord Shaftesbury, one of the greatest men of his day: "I would rather be, before God, the poor victim in the torture-trough than the vivisector beside him." And it is this point also which is of importance in the vivisection question—not the point of view alone of the animal tortured, but as well the inevitable effect on the vivisector. For there are some things undeniably which, when done, do not leave the man who does them where he was before in the moral scale.

As Archdeacon Wilberforce says: "If all that is claimed by vivisectors were true—and I absolutely disbelieve it—the noblest attitude would be to refuse physical benefit obtained at the cost of secrets stolen from other lives by hideous torture." These words exactly express the attitude of all thoughtful men and women who feel the impossibility of accepting help at the cost of such torture to the lower creation by what the Archdeacon very aptly calls the "barbarities of science."

Well may Francis Newman say: "When we ask by what right a man tortures these innocent creatures, the only reply that can be given is, because we are more intelligent. If in the eye of God this is justifiable, then a just God might permit a devil to torture us in the cause of diabolic science…. To cut up a living horse day after day in order to practise students in dissection is a crime and abomination hardly less monstrous from his not having an immortal soul. An inevitable logic would in a couple of generations unteach all tenderness towards human suffering if such horrors are endured, and carry us back into greater heartlessness than that of the worst barbarians." The bill in 1876, of which the chief aim was to amend the law, to regulate better the doings of vivisectors, insisted on the fact that a licence from the Home Secretary was to be a sine qu non in the case of all who practised these experiments upon animals. But experience of the way in which this law works shows quite clearly that very inadequate inspection takes place, because in so many cases inspectors and vivisectors play into each other's hands.

Of the other kinds of cruelty, those caused by thoughtlessness and in order to minister to the pleasure of men and women are very many and very present to us. I use the word "thoughtlessness," but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say lack of power to realize, for thoughtlessness can no longer be pleaded by those women who persist in wearing aigrettes, and other plumage of birds. The barbarous method has been too often described to them by which these aigrettes are procured: how the plumes are torn from the males of the small white heron; how, this appalling cruelty perpetrated, the birds are left to die on the shore. Women of fashion cannot but be aware how wholesale this savage slaughter of the innocents is; that each bird only contributes one-sixth of an ounce of aigrette plumes; that we are told that thousands of ounces of plumes are sold by one firm during the course of one season alone. It is not too much to say that each woman's bonnet in which these plumes (so barbarously procured) figure, is a veritable juggernaut car. It is not alone for fashion's sake that we perpetrate these barbarisms, however, for what can be said in defence of cruelties practised upon animals for the sake of man's stomach? Of the method in vogue now of stuffing capons by means of an instrument which forces food down their throats relentlessly in order to make them of great size and of tender flesh? or of calves being slowly bled to death that their flesh may be white? What of the horrors which precede the making of pÂtÉ de foie gras? The name of these atrocities is legion, however, and it is useless to enumerate them here. Fashion loves to have it so, and the ordinary diner does not trouble his head about the terrible ordeal of the animal which has preceded the delicacy for himself. But, putting his dinner aside, the Englishman's sport is often not far removed from barbaric.

Look at coursing! What can be the nature that can take pleasure in seeing an absolutely defenceles animal let out in a confined space, with no chance of escape, no fair play at all, nothing in front of it but certain death whichever way it turns? What can be the nature which can enjoy the death-scream of the agonized hare as the dogs' fangs dig into the quivering flesh? Coursing is nothing more nor less than an absolutely degrading sport to the beholders.

There is no sport, in the right acceptation of the word, in it at all. At any rate, there is far more of the element of real sport in fox-hunting or in stag-hunting, especially in those districts where one is told that the stag practically enters into the spirit of the game, when, after a good run, it pauses, and is helped into the cart which is to take it into "home cover" again! Be that as it may, at least there is some fair play to the quarry. In coursing that is an unknown quantity.

"The accomplished Englishman shoots for sport. Sport, being a mental impulse or appetite, is insatiable, and therefore far more deadly than hunger…. A boast is made that ninety millions of rabbits are reared for the consumption of our nation. Ninety million rabbits sent out at large to nibble the young shoots of the growing crops—each of whom destroys and wastes ten times what a tame rabbit would eat in a hutch—are boasted of as an increase of our supplies! If twenty million of these reach the town markets, it is much; how many beside are cruelly massacred with no profit to man! and how many beside, with unhappy hares, foxes, rats, stoats, and weasels, are held for days and nights in lingering torture by horrible steel traps? All this goes on in the midst of refinement, without prohibition from men or remonstrance from women. It is a fruit of the modern English system of game preserving;… and the artificial love of sport which cruel Norman tradition has fostered in the stolid Anglo-Saxon race." [Footnote: "On Cruelty" (Miscellanies, III, by Francis W. Newman).] It is an unassailable truth that if you look for the last remains of barbarity in a civilized nation you will find them in their sports. But I confess that to me it is difficult to justify a woman's love of sport when it is combined—before her very eyes—with the suffering of an animal. Yet I heard only the other day of a woman who boasted that she had been among the few "in at the death" one day in fox- hunting, and that when the brush was given to her, her face was spattered with the blood of the fox.

To turn to another "barbarism of civilization"—the subject of the Drink
Traffic.

Newman's words about this come with startling appositeness to-day, when we are all eager as regards the pros and cons of the new Licensing Act, and when all the publicans in the country are watching anxiously in fear of the ruin it may spell for themselves. Thirty years ago Francis Newman flung these words broadcast into the country:—

"Parliament ignominiously sits on the beer barrel. The thirty-three millions a year" (which was the revenue in 1877 derived from "complicity with distillers and brewers"), "are to every Ministry like the proverbial wolf which the woodsman holds by the ears. To keep him is difficult, to let him go is dangerous. Their position is becoming worse than embarrassing when the best men of every class, and all the women who see the public miseries, condemn the deadly policy of bartering national morality for payments to the exchequer…. The mode in which those in power fight to retain the public immoralities proclaims the quality of their motives. As one example out of several, see with what tenacity the Sunday sale of intoxicating drink in Ireland is kept up, after it is visible that Ireland disapproves, and after the English Parliament has voted with Ireland. Trickery is here the only right word; but trickery cannot in the long run support any cause. In this matter, as in several others, national indignation is ripening. Many old ways will have to be reversed, among which the treatment of the drink traffic has quite a leading place."

He then goes on to treat in detail of the pros and cons of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's Bill, and its principle of Popular Local Control; also of those of Mr. Joseph Cowen's Bill on the same subject, both belonging to the year in which he wrote his article on "Local Control of the Drink Traffic." And he proceeds to consider the two alternatives: the Permissive Popular Veto, and the Popular Control by an unfettered Licensing Board.

Later on Newman propounds his own opinion as to where the true remedy lies for the shocking state of public morality in connection with the drink traffic. Almost invariably his remedies for social evils are based on specialization. In this case he advises Licensing Boards in large towns. He urges that each Board should have full power to frame its own restrictions, that "no Board should be numerous: five or seven persons may be a full maximum"; that each Board should be elective, "without power to bind their successors in the next year." "What shadow of reason," he asks, "is there for doubting that such sales as are necessary and inevitable will be far more sagaciously managed by a Local Board, which the ratepayers elect for this sole purpose, than either by magistrates who are irresponsible and do not suffer sensibly from the public vice, or by an irresponsible or multitudinous Committee of Parliament? Finally, a Board elected for this one duty is immeasurably better than the Town Councils, who are distracted by an immensity of other business."

It is not difficult to see that his suggestion for a local Licensing Board has a great deal that might be said for it. His idea as regards a Ward- Mote to settle difficulties in local self-government in the same way would deal first hand with difficulties. In both cases these local boards would obviate the necessity for the despatching of endless little Private Bills to a Parliament which really has not time to deal effectually with them. Francis Newman certainly taught a truth which only gets more insistent as year succeeds year, that specialization is indeed the word of all others which holds within its letters in great measure "the healing of the nations," the simplifying of their puzzles.

As regards the rights and wrongs of making war, Newman asks, "Why does one murder make a villain, but the murder of thousands a hero?" And again, "Why do princes and statesmen, who would scorn to steal a shilling, make no difficulty in stealing a kingdom?"

Before calling this, as many an Englishman would not hesitate to do, a topsy-turvy morality, let us realize that sayings such as these really give us the true values of things as nothing else could. For there are more sins "in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in a nation's classified immoralities. Stealing a shilling is a recognized immorality, and as such the law of the land punishes the thief. Stealing a kingdom, however, is one of those national achievements which men justify to themselves as a patriotic feat, or, it may be, a necessity of empire, and it is not classified among punishable offences at all. And then it is necessary to remember that many things that are indefensible when only a few do them, seem to become, by an extraordinary method of reasoning, regarded as allowable when so many people do them that a spurious public opinion and a decadent fashion is born, which shelters them and prevents the light of an unbiassed judgment from showing up their shortcomings in morality. One has only to read up old records of the eighteenth century to see how slavery flourished in England among otherwise honourable men, and how public opinion condoned, nay, justified it to realize that public opinion regarded as vox populi, is often many spiritual leagues away from being vox Dei.

Newman's point of view regarding war and extension of territory was not the popular one:—

"There are many who believe that the time will come when no weapons of war shall be forged, and universal peace shall reign…. We also believe that a time will come when men will look back in wonder and pity on our present barbarism; a time at which to begin a war—unless previously justified by the verdict of an impartial tribunal, bound in honour to overlook what is partially expedient to their own nation or party—will be esteemed a high and dreadful crime.

"The 'Governments' will never initiate such institutions until compelled by public opinion and by the inevitable pressure of circumstances, nor is any nation in the world yet ripe to put forth such pressure; otherwise it would not be difficult to devise a supreme court, or rather jury, which would put a totally new moral aspect on war." [Footnote: Ethics of War, Francis W. Newman.]

He goes on to say that a great many wars might have been avoided by us if we had been willing, which we are not, to submit to arbitration; and he urges that war should be "declared in the Capital… with the formal assent of Lords and Commons."

Under the present system, as he points out, when war is declared against any country, it is not a necessity, as it was in the fourteenth century, that Parliament should be applied to for consent and approval when the King of England wished to make war. Later, Henry V asked Parliament what it would advise in "matters of foreign embroilment"; and when the King of France wanted to make peace with him, he would do nothing in the matter until his Parliament had told him "what will be most profitable and honourable to do in the matter."

But to-day, in arranging to make war or to make peace, it is the Cabinet— the two or three in the inner Chamber—who take all responsibility upon themselves. As often as not their decision is largely influenced by party questions—and the questions do not depend on the morality of the war, whether the reason for it is a just one or no. "It is the singular disgrace of modern England, [Footnote: Deliberations before War, Francis Newman, 1859.] to have allowed the solemn responsibility of war to be tampered with by the arbitrary judgment of executive officers; … the nation permits war to be made, lives by the twenty thousand or fifty thousand to be sacrificed, provinces to be confiscated, and permanent empire over foreign subjects established, at the secret advice of a Cabinet, all of one party, acting collectively for party objects, no one outside knowing how each has voted." Yet "the whole nation is implicated in a war, when once it is undertaken, inasmuch as we all have the same national disgrace, if it is unjust; the same suffering, if it is tedious; the same loss, if it is expensive"; and all the time, "according to the current morality of Christendom, two nations may be engaged in deadly struggle, and neither be in the wrong."

Newman attributes this present method of deciding war or peace by means of the Cabinet, rather than the voice of the people as expressed by their representatives in assembled Parliament, to the "anomaly of the East Indian Empire." Then, when the Board of Control was formed in 1784, "the orders to make, or not to make war, went out direct from the Board of Control; that is, really, from the ministry in Downing Street. Two, or even one, resolute man had power to make war without check." The fatal war with Afghanistan in the eighteen-thirties which cost us so dear in the matter of men and fame, was settled in England by "secret orders of two or three executive officers of the Queen, without previous debate in Parliament." It is necessary to remember, when thinking of the barbarisms which war brought in its train, not a hundred years ago, that what Newman calls, very justly, "the atrocious system" of paying our soldiers and sailors head-money for the numbers killed by them, was only done away with about sixty years ago.

But it is impossible even to touch here upon the unthinkable miseries which are inevitably suffered by thousands of innocent men, women, and children whenever that Barbarism of Civilization, War, marches through a land. Apart from all the devastation that marks its advent, no one can know how indescribably far the real moral and industrial progress of civilization is retarded by even what we consider a small war. As Newman says: "No one can wonder at the rise and progress of an opinion that war is essentially an immoral state."

In connection with Punishments as understood in England, and Penal Reformation, [Footnote: Corporal Punishments and Penal Reformation, Francis Newman, 1865.] he owns that "it has hitherto been most difficult to discover what due punishment of felony will not demoralize the felon." And of course, undoubtedly, that is the crux of the whole matter. But there is no one in England to-day but will agree that some change in our prison system is imperatively needed. Only the other day a woman, thoroughly qualified to judge, declared that the inevitable effect of prison life on women was to make them lose their self-respect. It was a degradation and nothing else. Now a punishment practically loses its whole point if it is simply a lowering, without any building up; while apart from any other considerations, to herd, without due specialization, a number of criminals and misdemeanants (for that last is the true description of very many who are punished by this system of incarceration) tends, in many instances, to increase, by "evil communications," the numbers of those who are in for a first offence only, and would not, but for the enforced bad influence of others in prison, offend again. Newman's conclusion of the whole matter as regards prisons is irrefragable: "In order to prevent crime, the institutions which generate crime must be remodelled." He urges upon the nation's consideration that for a great many cases which now fill our prisons (thereby adding enormously to the national expenses) there is a very simple punishment, which has been condemned from many modern points of view as being degrading to the sufferers and brutalizing to the inflictors.

"The infliction of flogging," he argues, undeniably answers in these cases, both as a sharp and effectual punishment, and also as a deterrent from future misdoing. "To us it appears an obvious certainty, that whatever punishment is believed to be righteous—whether the whipping of a child, the shooting of a soldier, the constraint of the treadmill, or whatever else—is wholly free from the least tendency to brutalize the officers who inflict it." As to the wisdom of this statement, one would think, there could be no question. He quotes our old laws as regards the practising of public floggings, and adds, "We cannot hesitate to believe that all outrages on women ought to be punished by the severest whippings…. Dastardly offences against the weak and the weaker sex eminently call for this punishment; and in such offences may be included the seduction of a woman." That offences against the body should be visited by punishment on the body is beyond all doubt just. Had we been in the past, or were we at the present moment, as eager as we ought to be for defence, for justice, to be given to the citizeness as equally as to the citizen, there would not be so many wrongs done to the weaker sex as now is the case in England. Newman strongly condemns long sentences and transportation, not so much on account of the prisoner, (though for him the long term of "doing time" with other criminals exercises in most cases a distinct low moral tone upon himself) as on account of his wife and family, if he is married. These people are left without news of him, and without their legal means of subsistence during his absence. His wife often indeed, practically becomes a pauper.

"It is vain to talk of the evil of 'degrading' a criminal by flogging him, if we degrade him by penal labour, subjecting him to a very ignominious and tedious slavery. It is vain to say that whipping demoralizes, until we have a system of effective and severe punishment, clearly free from this danger…. A felon destined to long penal servitude cannot fulfil a father's duties, and no one is so weak as to imagine that his commands concerning his children deserve respect.

* * * * *

Legislation must deliberately study this problem, not wink at it."
[Footnote: Corporal Punishments and Penal Reformation.]

Perhaps when it does, something more stringent will be determined on concerning our regulations as regards the marriage of criminals: those with insanity or inherited disease strongly marked on their family records; and those who have shown the tendency to the latter in their own persons.