IT is among the proudest boasts of this country that torture is not permitted within its borders: “Torture,” wrote Macaulay, “was inflicted for the last time in the month of May, 1640.” But pleasant though it is to think that it was in the beautiful springtime that the barbarous practice came to an end, this is unfortunately one of the cases in which our people allow themselves to be beguiled and fooled by very transparent quibbles; for a few minutes’ thought would suffice to convince the most complacent of Britons that while some specialized forms of judicial torture have been abandoned, other tortures, some of them not less painful and fully as repulsive, are being inflicted to this day—nearly three hundred years after the glorious date of abolition. For if “torture,” as etymology and the dictionaries and common usage tell us, means nothing more or less than the forcible infliction of extreme pain, it is not a technicality but an absurdity to pretend that it finds no place among twentieth-century institutions.

Flogging is torture in a most literal sense, and in one of its grossest shapes: the “cat,” as Mr. G. K. Chesterton has well said, is “the rack without any of its intellectual reasons.”[28] The horror of the old naval and military lashings is within the memory of many officers who were compelled to witness them: how is the punishment any less savage in its nature because it is now administered in a less severe degree, and on men convicted of robbery with violence or some breach of prison discipline? In one of the Parliamentary debates of November, 1912, a Member who had been invited by the Home Secretary to examine the “cat,” gave it as his opinion that “if that is not torture, then I do not know what torture is.”

In the gloomiest but most impressive of his stories, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mr. H. G. Wells has represented his savage “beast-folk” as monotonously chanting a certain “idiotic formula” about the infallibility of “the Law.” With nothing more fitly than with this can be compared the undying legend, now over half a century old, that “garrotting was put down by the lash.” It is not often that a popular fallacy, however erroneous it may be, can be actually disproved; but in this particular case such refutation was possible, in the certified fact that the garrotting “epidemic” of 1862 had been suppressed by the ordinary law before flogging for that offence was legalized. For many years the Humanitarian League issued a public challenge on the subject, and made the facts known in thousands of press letters; the challenge was quietly ignored, and the false statement repeated, till it was plain that, as De Quincey remarked, “rarer than the phoenix is that virtuous man who will consent to lose a prosperous story on the consideration that it happens to be a lie.” One such virtuous man, however, and one only, was found, namely, Mr. Montague Crackanthorpe, who actually recanted the statement which he could not substantiate.[29] In view of his unique candour, it was suggested after his death that a statue should be erected to his memory.

Very different from the course taken by Mr. Crackanthorpe was the action of Sir Alexander Wood Renton, of the Supreme Court of Ceylon, who, in an article on “Corporal Punishment,” introduced into the EncyclopÆdia Britannica of 1910 that very garrotting legend from which it had previously been kept free, and made the further mistake of giving the date of the Flogging Act of 1863 as 1861, thus lending to his blunder a misleading appearance of plausibility. When called to account, he was content to maintain a masterly silence—more eloquent than words—and to allow his misstatement, unacknowledged and uncorrected, to continue to keep alive a prevalent superstition. Can it be wondered that such fallacies persist, when a Chief Justice will thus lie low rather than admit himself at fault?

It is an amusing fact, and far too little known, that the text which has long lent a sanctity to the use of corporal punishment, is not taken, as supposed, from the Proverbs of Solomon, but from a passage, and a rather unseemly one, in Butler’s Hudibras (1663):[30] this, however, is as it should be, for it is fitting that an indecent practice should claim authority from an indecent source. Thus encouraged, and with this divine precept in their thoughts, parents and schoolmasters, and magistrates, and judges, and all governors and rulers, have felt that in wielding the rod they were discharging a religious obligation, and not, as might otherwise have been suspected, gratifying some very primitive instincts of their own. For “the Wisdom of Solomon” has been quoted as our guide, in the correction of the old as well as of the young; indeed, as a writer in the People sagely remarked, “the older the evildoer, the more his need of the birch.” On this principle, aged vagrants have on various occasions been sentenced to be corrected with the rod; but it is to the young that the blessings of the birch more properly belong.

In its campaign against flogging in the Royal Navy, the Humanitarian League gained not only a considerable success, but an amount of entertainment which of itself would have more than repaid the labour expended on the work. To begin with, there was the technical quibble, very characteristic of officialdom, that though the backs of boys, or rather of young men, might be cut into ribbons with the birch, there was no “flogging” in the Navy, for “flogging” meant the infliction not of the birch but of the “cat.” With Mr. Swift MacNeill conducting the attack in the House of Commons, it may be imagined that such prevarications—and there were many similar instances—fared but badly; and it was no surprise when “these degrading practices,” as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman described them, were brought to an end in 1906, though the use of the cane, to the discredit of the Admiralty, is still permitted and defended.

In this long controversy the League was brought into conflict with all sorts of opponents, among them several Admirals, of whom the “breeziest” were the Hon. V. A. Montagu and Sir William Kennedy. With the latter especially we had great fun, as we found in him an antagonist of the utmost heartiness and good humour. “Of what use is it,” he wrote to me, “sending me all this rubbish, except to fill the waste-paper basket? I don’t care a damn for Admiral——’s opinion.” On another occasion he sent me a formal challenge to meet him “at any time and place, when pistols and coffee will be provided.” At a later date we had his support, equally emphatic, in our protest against the practice of feeding snakes on live prey at the “Zoo.”

Other friends, too, helped to lend gaiety to a rather dismal subject. Among those who actively co-operated with the League was a commercial traveller, who was deeply versed in the various laws relating to corporal punishment, and who, as he once confided to me, had been in the habit of working locally as a sort of freelance and Bashi-Bazouk. He had made a practice, for example, of writing “How about the Birch?” on the Admiralty’s printed notices in which boys were invited to reap the benefits of joining the Navy; and this had touched so sore a point that the advertisements in question had at length been put within glass frames. Another of his little jokes was to write to private schoolmasters, saying that he had a son whom he was about to send to school (which was true), and asking whether they could guarantee that there would be no corporal punishment. Several masters responded favourably, but as the boy could not be sent to more than one place of education, these worthy folk were deprived of their quid pro quo; in the end, however, a nemesis fell upon their betrayer, for once, when he had just returned home after a long journey, tired, and wanting above everything his tea, who should be announced but one of those very pedagogues with whom he had been in communication. He too had travelled some distance, rather than miss the chance of a pupil, and, having “ideas” on the subject of corporal punishment, had come, as he said, for “a good talk.” “I could have eaten him,” was our friend’s remark.

In the ’nineties of last century, the state of the Criminal Law, as Mr. Justice Mathew pointed out, was a hundred years behind the times, and a special department of the Humanitarian League was established in order to advocate certain much-needed reforms. It was felt that in view of the severity of the penal laws, the inequality of sentences, and the hard and indiscriminating character of prison discipline, an organized attempt ought to be made to humanize both the spirit of the law and the conditions of prison life, and to show that the true purpose of imprisonment was the reformation, not the mere punishment, of the offender. In this campaign the League was able to avail itself of a mass of expert information. It published, in 1893, a very effective pamphlet, “I was in Prison,” written by Mr. Robert Johnson, director of the Colonial College at Hollesley Bay; and this was followed, a year later, by “A Plea for Mercy to Offenders,” an address given before the League by Mr. C. H. Hopwood, the Recorder of Liverpool, who, with his friend Mr. Johnson, did great service in showing the futility of long sentences of imprisonment. I had several talks about that time with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hopwood; and they would have thrown in their lot altogether with the Humanitarian League but for their fear that the inclusion within its programme of many other questions, such as sport and vivisection, would alienate sympathy in some quarters from their special subject of prison reform: it was for this reason that Mr. Hopwood afterwards founded the Romilly Society.

Two other names stood out conspicuously in the same sphere of work—that of Dr. W. Douglas Morrison, the well-known criminologist, now Rector of Marylebone, under whose guidance the League took a prominent part in the agitation which led to the Prisons Act of 1898, and that of “Lex,” one of the keenest intellects of his time, whose pen was placed unreservedly at the League’s disposal. Mr. W. H. S. Monck—for it was he who adopted that nom de plume—was Chief Registrar in Bankruptcy in the King’s Bench Division, Dublin, a post which he filled with distinction, while his extraordinarily active and versatile mind found interest in many other studies: he was a mathematician, an astronomer, a writer on logic, political economy, and moral philosophy, and withal a chess-player of note, among which pursuits he never failed to find time to help the humanitarian cause. His official position made it desirable that his name should not appear; but many were the press letters that he wrote, and many the resolutions, memorials, and letters to governmental departments that he drafted on the League’s behalf. To “ask ‘Lex’ to draft it” was often the course taken by the Committee when dealing with some technical matter that needed exceptional care. The two subjects in which Mr. Monck was specially concerned, besides that of flogging, were the establishment of a Court of Criminal Appeal and a revision of the law relating to Imprisonment for Debt; and it was largely his unacknowledged labours that brought about the one reform and prepared the way for the other. In his press letters on corporal punishment he would sometimes adopt the ironic manner; that is, he would write as one who in part believed in the value of flogging, yet in such a way as to suggest rather the flaws and failures of the practice, and so to impair any faith in it which might linger in the minds of his readers.

Among other friends to whom this department of the League was much indebted were Mr. George Ives, author of A History of Penal Methods; Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner; Mr. Carl Heath; Mr. H. B. Montgomery; Mrs. L. T. Mallet; Dr. T. Baty, the distinguished authority on International Law; and Mr. Joseph Collinson, who for some years acted as its honorary secretary. Mr. Collinson was a young north-countryman, self-taught, and full of native readiness and ingenuity, who at an early age had developed a passion for humanitarian journalism, and whose press letters became as well known as those of Mr. Algernon Ashton, while he had a marked advantage over that gentleman in having an ethical purpose and something definite to write about. Any one who should glance over the files of the chief London and provincial journals, between the years 1895 and 1910, could not fail to see a number of letters signed “Joseph Collinson,” or to admire the pertinacity with which the humanitarian view of a host of controversial subjects, in particular those relating to criminal law and prisons, was brought to the notice of the public. Especially in regard to the flogging question Mr. Collinson’s services were of great value.

Thus supported, the Humanitarian League had no cause to fear any reasoned opposition: our difficulty, rather, was to meet with any; for our antagonists were mostly anonymous and often abusive correspondents of newspapers, and the real obstacle with which we had to cope was the crass weight of prejudice and the immense stability of old institutions. Two of our adversaries, however, must not go without mention. One was Mr. William Tallack, then Secretary of the Howard Association, whose hostility was dangerous because it lurked under the guise of philanthropy. He was an old gentleman of benevolent demeanour, whose method it was to sit astutely “on the fence,” making oracular utterances, now on that side, now on this, so that, like the writer of an astrological almanack, he might be able in any event to run in and cry: “I told you so.” In his Penological Principles, a work much advertised in those days, there was plenty of penology, but very little principle, much more of the Tallack than of the Howard: it was, in fact, a farrago of platitudes and pieties, which said many things without ultimately meaning anything at all. Yet, in spite of his much verbiage and many estimable sentiments, Mr. Tallack was a reactionist; he belonged to an antiquated school of thought, quite out of sympathy with the new style of prison reform; and as he lost no opportunity of disparaging the work of the League, we showed him somewhat emphatically that that was a game at which two parties could play. This he did not relish, especially as we were strongly backed up by Mr. Passmore Edwards in his paper, the Echo. A conference was accordingly proposed by Mr. Tallack, where it was agreed that in future there should be a friendly arrangement of “hands off” on either side. I remember how, at that meeting, he told me in his paternal manner, as an instance of the advantages of not advocating “extreme” measures of reform, that he enjoyed the privilege of being able, now and then, to have a personal talk with the Home Secretary. “What would humanitarians think of that?” The old gentleman was evidently unaware that if he was a persona grata at the Home Office, it was precisely because he was known to be a “tame” reformer, a parasite of the old system, not a champion of the new, and therefore useful to those who wished to let matters go on as before.

In a prison-play “The Home Secretary’s Holiday,” which was acted before the Humanitarian League at one of its social gatherings, Mr. Tallack was glanced at in the character of Mr. Prim, a Visiting Justice, who dwells on the value of “segregation,” “introspection,” “self-questioning,” and “remorse,” as heaven-sent means by which the convicted sinner may be awakened to a sense of his guilt.

Our other critic, of whom I must say a brief word, was Sir Robert Anderson, then an ex-Assistant Commissioner of Police; who, being of a choleric and over-bearing nature, was consumed with wrathful indignation at the activities of the Humanitarian League. In his book on Criminals and Crime, vengeful tirades against the professional criminal were accompanied with scarcely less violent abuse of “professional humanitarians”—a strange term this, to be applied to honorary workers in an unpopular cause, and by one who had himself been for many years a salaried official at Scotland Yard! In the same work we figured variously as “humanity-mongers,” “agitators,” “fools,” “hysterical faddists,” “doctrinaire philanthropists,” “spurious philosophers,” “maudlin sentimentalists,” and so on. Authors sometimes describe their books as “a labour of love.” Sir Robert’s was certainly a labour of hate, and among the punishments which he indicated as suitable for an impenitent thief were the gallows, crucifixion, thumb-screws, and the rack; he added that it was consideration for the community, not for the thief, that prevented the use of them. It is not pleasant to have to speak of such a man; one would rather forget him. But in estimating the savagery of the age, the fact that his most vindictive proposals met with a good deal of public support is one which cannot be left out of account.

A thorough-going condemnation of flogging is without doubt a very unpopular policy; the Humanitarian League lost many members and much pecuniary support by its steadfastness on this point, especially, strange to say, among zoophilists and anti-vivisectionists, many of whom were firm believers in the propriety of vivisecting the backs of criminals, and would have gone any distance, as I have heard said, “to see a vivisector flogged.” Not the least valuable part of the League’s duties was to put a check on foolish talk of that sort; and in this we had the satisfaction of being warmly supported by so distinguished an opponent of vivisection as Professor Lawson Tait. It came about in a rather strange way.

The League held a meeting in Birmingham; and a local member, who had the arrangements in hand, got Mr. Tait to preside, but by some oversight did not sufficiently apprise him beforehand of our aims and objects. When he entered the room—a formidable-looking figure, with slow gait, massive build, and heavy brows—he was seen to be in a towering rage. The storm broke at once. Instead of the usual complimentary remarks from the chair, he told us in wrathful tones that he knew nothing of the Humanitarian League, and that it was most improper that he should have been left thus uninformed. This was true, and we wished the earth would swallow us up; but there was nothing for it but to go on with the business of the meeting, and while the speeches were being made Mr. Tait sat and studied the League’s printed manifesto. As he read it, the gloom gradually left him; he began to mutter approval of point after point, then to chuckle with satisfaction, and presently he turned to me (I happened to be sitting next to him) and told me that he was in complete agreement with our programme. A great good humour now took the place of his former resentment, and presently he spoke at some length, and himself moved a resolution that the objects of the League were “worthy the support of all good citizens.” He declared that he felt almost as strongly on the question of prison punishments as on that of vivisection, and severely censured the clamour for the lash that had been raised by some woman-suffragists of Edinburgh. It was then that he used the words prefixed to this chapter: “Why not bring back at once the boot, the stake, and the thumbscrew?”

That there are numbers of persons who would be quite willing to bring back, if it were possible, the medieval forms of torture cannot for a moment be doubted by any one who, like myself, has had the experience of working for over twenty-five years for the discontinuance of flogging. There are, of course, many reasonable advocates of corporal punishment in one or another of its forms; but there are many more to whom the cry for flogging, and for more and yet more flogging, has become a veritable craze, as was seen when, in the agitation for the lashing of “white slavers” in 1912, a frenzied shriek of passion went up from a large section of the people. “We know,” said a Member of Parliament at the time, “the extraordinary hysterical emotion which this Bill has aroused throughout England. We get letters from all sorts of people, chiefly women, ‘flog them,’ ‘crucify them,’ and anything else you like. It is a cry we have had all down the ages.”[31] That there has been such a cry all down the ages is likely enough; but the age which tolerates it can hardly claim to be a civilized one.

In The Flogging Craze, a Statement of the Case against Corporal Punishment,[32] a book published for the Humanitarian League in 1916, with a preface by my friend Sir George Greenwood, I availed myself of the large amount of material amassed by the League during its long campaign against flogging, in the hope that such a work—the first of its kind, if pamphlets be excepted—might prove useful to many social reformers, who, though instinctively opposed to the use of the lash, are often silenced by confident assertions of its efficacy, and are unaware that in this, as in similar discussions, humanity and reason go hand in hand.

Let me now turn to another and still more gruesome form of torture. It is fitting, perhaps, that the twin tyrannies of Flogging and Vivisection should be linked together as Lawson Tait saw them, for they are indeed kindred expressions of one barbarous spirit. I use, for the sake of brevity and convenience, the customary term “vivisection,” though there is force in the objection raised against it by certain humanitarian writers, that the Latin word somewhat conceals the vileness of the practice, and though the phrase suggested by Mr. Howard Williams, “experimental torture,” is more strictly appropriate to the nameless thing for which a name has to be found. Here, at any rate, in the twentieth century of our barbarism, is torture in its most naked form—the rack, not indeed “without any of its intellectual reasons,” as was said of the lash, but torture as surely as the boot and the thumbscrew were torture. As for the intellectual reasons alleged in excuse of the practice, it was pointed out in Animals’ Rights that before holding vivisection justified on the strength of its utility, a wise man will take into consideration the other, the moral side of the question, “the hideous injustice of torturing a sentient animal, and the wrong thereby done to the humane sense of the community.” This contention was quoted and corroborated in an unexpected quarter, viz. in a book published in 1901 by a Russian doctor, V. Veresaeff,[33] who, though himself justifying vivisection, did not conceal his misgivings as to the ethical aspect of the practice. “The question,” he said, in reference to the passage in Animals’ Rights, “is plainly put, and there can be no room for any equivocation. I repeat that we ought not to ridicule the pretensions of the anti-vivisectionists—the sufferings of animals are truly horrible; and sympathy with them is not sentimentality.” In view of that admission, I will waste no words in discussing the pretence that anÆsthetics have relieved the vivisected animals of their “truly horrible” sufferings. It is not so, even in this country, where the legal restrictions are a farce; and if it were so here, the rest of the world would be open to experimentation unlicensed and unlimited.

The special application of the word “vivisection” to physiological experiments has led to a belief, in many minds, that the vivisecting scientist is the sole torturer of animals. This is unjust both to the laboratory and to its victims. The crusade against vivisection would be much strengthened if those who take part in it would remember that the cruelties of science are only part of the great sum of cruelty that in various forms disgraces the dealings of mankind with the lower animals. Granted that the worst barbarities of the vivisector exceed those of the sportsman or the slaughterman, both in duration and intensity, it is still a fact, as scientists have often pointed out, that there are other tortures than those of the laboratory, and that to some of these the name “vivisection” might as accurately be applied. For example, clumsy castration of domestic animals, as the law is beginning to recognize, is nothing less than “farmyard vivisection”; the “docking” of horses’ tails is vivisection in a very revolting form; in the seal-fishery the wretched victims of “fashion” have often been skinned alive; nor can it be pretended that the torture of the egrets, flung aside to die when their nuptial plumes have been torn off, demands a milder name than vivisection; yet some zoophilists, who look upon a vivisecting physiologist as a fiend, do not hesitate to wear an aigrette or a sealskin cloak, or to be the owners of docked horses or cropped dogs. It is impossible to draw a strict line of division between those barbarities which amount to torture and those which fall short of it, and it is convenient that the cruelties of sport and fashion should be dealt with under a separate head; nevertheless there is one other practice on which a few words must be spoken before this chapter is closed.

Under the antiquated methods of transport and butchery still permitted in England, it is impossible to doubt that something not far removed from torture is often practised in the cattle trade; for which reason, while aware that in vegetarianism lies the only full solution of the diet-question, humanitarians have long pressed for an amelioration of the worst features of cattle-ship and shambles, and, as a minimum, for the establishment of public abattoirs in place of private slaughterhouses. Even in this respect, owing to the supineness of the County Council, London has been left at the mercy of “the trade,” though in some other districts there has been a gratifying improvement. The Humanitarian League, enjoying the advantage of being advised by such experts as Sir Benjamin Richardson, Mr. H. F. Lester (whose Behind the Scenes in Slaughterhouses we published in 1892), Mr. Charles W. Forward, Mr. C. Cash, and Mr. R. S. Ayling, lost no opportunity of making known the need of this long postponed reform; but the subject being so repulsive it was always difficult to enlist the sympathies of the public, that is, of the very persons whose conscience ought to have been touched; or, if any interest was awakened, it might be among those who were traditionally or professionally opposed to the changes desired.

This danger was once curiously illustrated at a meeting held by the League in the rooms of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, when Mr. John Colam, the Secretary of that Society, took the chair, and Mr. C. W. Forward gave an address on the Jewish method of slaughtering. A mere handful of our friends attended, but the hall was packed from end to end with Jewish visitors, who had seen the announcement of the meeting in the papers, and rallied to the defence of their ritual. We had intended to move a resolution, strongly condemning the Jewish system, but we decided, after a hurried consultation with Mr. Colam, that an academic discussion would better suit the circumstances; and fortunately it did not occur to our Hebrew friends to propose and pass a resolution of the contrary kind: they talked long and volubly, and we were glad they did nothing worse. The meeting, however, was not without result, for it led, a couple of months later, to the reception by the Jewish Board of Shecheta of a deputation from the Humanitarian League, at which the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Adler, was present, and gave us a very courteous reply. The Jewish system of “casting,” he said, which had especially been criticized as barbarous, was a good deal misunderstood owing to the word by which it was described: in reality the animals were not “cast,” but “let down gently with ropes.” Mr. Forward, however, who had often witnessed the process, remained unconvinced on this point: it seemed to him that it was the public that was being let down gently with words.

The League had the satisfaction of seeing the Jewish system strongly condemned in the official report (1904) of the Committee appointed to consider the Humane Slaughtering of Animals; but nothing has yet been done to carry the recommendations of that Committee into effect, the supposed sanctity of a “religious” usage having been allowed, as usual, to outweigh the clearest dictates of humaneness.

There are not a few other current and strongly-rooted practices to which the title of this chapter might justly be applied; but enough has now been said to show that the merry month of May, in the year of grace 1640, did not witness, as has been supposed, quite the last instance of the infliction of Torture in this favoured land of the free.