VII. THE MORAL PROGRESS OF THE RACE AS SHOWN BY HISTORY…

VII. THE MORAL PROGRESS OF THE RACE AS SHOWN BY HISTORY

The necessity of the constant assimilation of savage tribes, of the peopling of thinly inhabited areas, renders social evolution as a whole exceedingly slow. Nor can there be, even in isolated peoples, any sudden leap from savagery to civilization; in other words the term "civilization" is not of absolute but of comparative, progressive, import. Nor can we suppose the social evolution to have been only outward; we cannot suppose that our cave-dwelling, man-eating, rude ancestors, if they could have been suddenly transported, in infancy even, into the midst of modern civilization by means of a Carlylean wishing-cap, or by some method of projection in time similar to that by which men promise to "knock each other into the middle of next week," would have been able to equal modern men in mental and moral attainment. We may gain some idea of the gentle manners and moral character of our early progenitors from the customs of savage peoples of the present day; although a very large number of these stand upon a higher plane than did the ancient savages known to geology. I insert a few extracts from Lubbock:--

"Mr. Galbraith, who lived for many years, as Indian agent, among the Sioux (North America), thus describes them: 'They are bigoted, barbarous, and exceedingly superstitious. They regard most of the vices as virtues. Theft, arson, rape, and murder, are among them regarded as the means of distinction; and the young Indian from childhood is taught to regard killing as the highest of virtues. In their dances and at their feasts, the warriors recite their deeds of theft, pillage, and slaughter, as precious things; and the highest, indeed the only, ambition of a young brave is to secure "the feather," which is but a record of his having murdered or participated in the murder, of some human being--whether man, woman, or child, it is immaterial; and after he has secured his first "feather," appetite is whetted to increase the number in his cap, as an Indian brave is estimated by the number of his feathers.'"[183]

"'Conscience,' says Burton, 'does not exist in Eastern Africa, and "repentance" expresses regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime. Robbery constitutes an honorable man; murder--the more atrocious the midnight crime the better--makes the hero.'"[184]

"In Tahiti, the missionaries considered that 'not less than two-thirds of the children were murdered by their parents.' Mr. Ellis adds, 'I do not recollect having met with a female in the islands, during the whole period of my residence there, who had been a mother while idolatry prevailed, who had not imbrued her hands in the blood of her offspring.' Mr. Nott also makes the same assertion. Girls were more often killed than boys, because they were of less use in fishing and in war."[185]

"Williams tells us that 'offences, in Fijian estimation, are light or grave according to the rank of the offender. Murder by a chief is less heinous than a petty larceny committed by a man of low rank.'"[186]

"Among the Khonds of Central India, human sacrifices prevailed until quite lately. 'A stout stake is driven into the soil and to it the victim is fastened, seated, and anointed with ghee, oil, and turmeric, decorated with flowers, and worshipped during the day by the assembly. At nightfall the licentious revelry is resumed, and on the third morning the victim gets some milk to drink, when the presiding priest implores the goddess to shower her blessings on the people. After the mock ceremony, nevertheless, the victim is taken to the grove where the sacrifice is to be carried out; and to prevent resistance, the bones of the arms and legs are broken, or the victim drugged with opium or datura, when the janni wounds his victim with the axe. This act is followed up by the crowd. A number now press forward to obtain a piece of his flesh, and in a moment he is stripped to the bones.'

"An almost identical custom prevails among the Marimos, a tribe of South Africa much resembling the Bechuanas.... Schoolcraft mentions a... sacrifice to the 'Spirit of Corn' among the Pawnees. The victim was first tortured by being suspended over a fire. 'At a given signal, a hundred arrows were let fly, and her whole body was pierced. These were immediately withdrawn, and her flesh cut from her bones in small pieces which were put into baskets and carried into the cornfield, where the grain was being planted, and the blood squeezed out on each hill.'"[187] "Human sacrifices occurred in Guinea, and Burton saw 'at Benin City a young woman lashed to a scaffolding upon the summit of a tall blasted tree, and being devoured by the turkey-buzzards. The people declared it to be a "fetich" or charm for bringing rain.'...

"Captain Cook describes human sacrifices as prevalent among the islanders of the Pacific, and especially in the Sandwich group.... War captives were frequently sacrificed in Brazil."[188]

"The lowest races have no institution of marriage. True love is almost unknown among them, and marriage in its lowest phases is by no means a matter of affection and companionship.... In North America, the Tinne Indians had no word for 'dear' and 'beloved'; and the Algonquin language is stated to have contained no verb meaning 'to love,' so that when the Bible was translated by the missionaries into that language it was necessary to invent a word for the purpose."[189]

"The position of women in Australia seems, indeed, to be wretched in the extreme. They are treated with the utmost brutality, beaten and speared in the limbs on the most trivial provocation. 'Few women,' says Eyre, 'will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head or the marks of spear-wounds upon the body. I have seen a young woman who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear-wounds.'"[190]

"Collins thus describes the manner in which the natives about Sydney used to procure wives: 'The poor wretch is stolen upon in the absence of her protectors. Being first stupefied with blows, inflicted with clubs or wooden swords, on the head, back, and shoulders, every one of which is followed by a stream of blood, she is then dragged through the woods by one arm, with a perseverance and violence that it might be supposed would displace it from its socket. This outrage is not resented by the relations of the female, who only retaliate by a similar outrage when they find an opportunity.'"[191]

"Indeed," says Lubbock, "I do not remember a single instance in which a savage is recorded as having shown any symptoms of remorse; and almost the only case I can call to mind, in which a man belonging to one of the lower races has accounted for an act by saying explicitly that it was right, was when Mr. Hunt asked a young Fijian why he had killed his mother."[192]

We have direct evidence, in many present or recent customs, of so-called civilized or half-civilized nations, that the barbarous customs described in "The Origin of Civilization," and in the books of many travellers, are not the original and special inventions of modern savages merely, but that similar customs prevailed among our progenitors. Lubbock notices many of these. The marriage ceremonies of many peoples are particularly suggestive of a time when violent capture was the means of obtaining a wife, and cruelty of treatment was her usual portion.[193] Human sacrifices were common among many peoples of ancient Europe; and the cancellation of responsibility for murder with fines (often nominal in the case of the murder of a man of lower rank) was a widely spread custom. "In Russia," writes Lubbock, "as in Scandinavia, human sacrifices continued down to the introduction of Christianity. In Mexico and Peru they seem to have been peculiarly numerous. Mueller has suggested that this may have partly arisen from the fact that these nations were not softened by the possession of domestic animals.[194] Various estimates have been made of the number of human victims annually sacrificed in the Mexican temples. Mueller thinks 2500 is a moderate estimate; and in one year it appears to have exceeded 100,000." "In Northern Europe, human sacrifices were not uncommon. The Yarl of the Orkneys is recorded to have sacrificed the son of the King of Norway to Odin in the year 893. In 993, Hakon Yarl sacrificed his own son to the gods. Donald, King of Sweden, was burnt by his people as a sacrifice to Odin, in consequence of a severe famine. At Upsala was a celebrated temple, round which an eye-witness assured Adam of Bremen that he had seen the corpses of seventy-two victims hanging up at one time."[195]

A peculiar confusion as to the definition of morality sometimes gives rise to such vagaries of theory as the defence of murder committed by savages, and other cruelties practised, on the ground that these things are not considered sins in the moral code of the peoples among which they are practised; murder is thus excused on the plea that wrecking is also looked upon as permissible;[196] and Wallace thinks that savages live up to their "simple moral code" as well as civilized human beings to their elaborate one, so that they are, in reality, as moral as these latter. It should not be forgotten, however, that the moral code is itself the product of the tribe and represents its moral sentiment. Lubbock remarks that if a man's simple moral code permits him to rob and murder, the code is at least an unfortunate one for the victims.[197] On the other hand, Lubbock himself defends human sacrifice as the result of "deep and earnest religious feeling."[198] But if sympathy were strong, such sacrifices would be impossible, and the religious code would be altered just as the religious code of Christians is altered to keep up with social progress. Opinion and feeling are not two separable things, one of which may advance while the other remains behind; when feeling becomes strong enough, the opinion arises that this or that custom before practised is wrong. As long as man is cruel by nature, however, conscience will not torment him for cruelty, and it is possible for him to regard it as wholly justifiable.

But I am of the opinion that moral progress has been made not only since the time of our savage ancestors, but even also since the time of the great ancients, in spite of the obstacles to such advancement presented in the necessity of the moral assimilation of immense races of savages,--the leavening of the whole of Europe. I believe that modern civilization has caught up to and surpassed the ancient. The knowledge we have of ancient peoples is necessarily most imperfect; nevertheless, we may, I believe, discover considerable evidence of general moral inferiority to the present day. Any advance that has been made will be likely to be most observable in those general virtues which lie at the foundation of all social cooeperation--truthfulness in word and honesty in act, and the gradual widening of concepts of justice from individual and class privilege and race prejudice, to the inclusion of mankind as a whole. And the growth of sympathy will be most noticeable in the treatment of those classes of beings which possess least physical means of compelling respect for their rights--animals, children, women, the poor, and ignorant, and sick, and aged.

We may begin with the children. The Lacedemonian custom of giving over the weak and defective children to destruction is familiar to us all. Before Solon, children were often sold by Athenian parents for debt; and even during the ages of greatest culture, the exposure of children seems to have been a common Athenian practice, regarded with little or no disapproval by the general public. Mahaffy writes: "The cool way in which Plato in his Republic speaks of exposing children, shows that, as we should expect, with the increase of luxury, and the decay of the means of satisfying it, the destruction of infants came more and more into the fashion. What can be more painfully affecting than the practice implied by Socrates, when he is comparing himself to a midwife (Theaet. 151 B.). 'And if I abstract and expose your first-born, because I discover that the conception you have formed is a vain shadow, do not quarrel with me, as the manner of women is, when their first children are taken from them. For I have actually known some men ready to bite me when first I have deprived them of a darling folly.'"[199] That the exposure of children is generally mentioned only incidentally by Greek writers, is perhaps the strongest argument of all that the custom was regarded with indifference by the majority. A considerable number of the exposed children seem to have been rescued to be brought up as prostitutes, but many must have perished miserably. We have reason for doubting whether the average Greek would have shown an equal sympathy to that of Mr. Stephen's modern pickpockets, in the supposed case of danger to a child on the race-course;[200]--unless, indeed, the child were an especially fine bit of animal flesh.

The same narrow sort of expediency in morals which permitted the exposure of children is exhibited, again, in the lack of regard for the aged shown by the Athenians at all periods of their history;--in Sparta the old men were treated with some considerable respect. Says Mahaffy: "The strongest case against the Periclean Greeks, and one which marks their parentage most clearly from their Homeric ancestors, is the treatment of their old men. For here it is no inferior class, but their equals, nay even those to whom they directly owed their greatness, whom they cast aside with contempt when their days of usefulness had passed by.... The Greek lawgivers were accordingly most explicit in enjoining upon children the nurture and support of aged parents who could otherwise expect little from the younger generation. The Attic law alone added a qualification, that the children were to be without responsibility if their parents had neglected to educate them." Aristophanes describes the treatment of the aged in his "Wasps,"--"where he declares that the only chance of respect or even safety is to retain the power of acting as a juryman, so extorting homage from the accused and supporting himself by his pay without depending on his children. When he comes home with his fee, they are glad to see him, in fact he is able to support a second wife and younger children, as the passage plainly implies, whereas otherwise the father must look towards his son and his son's steward to give him his daily bread, 'uttering imprecations and mutterings lest he knead me a deadly cake,' a dark insinuation which opens to us terrible suspicions."[201]

The women of Greece were comparatively well cared for, as might be expected in a nation and country peculiarly susceptible to the influence of grace and beauty; they were consequently of a comparatively admirable type. However, we are fond, I think, of indulging in this respect, our preference for believing the romantic; so that we usually select carefully the best instances and infer that the standard of all Greece was on this plane. The reasons for this are manifold. We have the habit of imagining, from Greek art, that all Greek women were beautiful; and it is unpleasant to associate moral inferiority with great beauty, or to imagine its being treated with unkindness or disrespect. Again, we are pleased at discovering examples of love and faithfulness even in the far-away ages, and the pleasure of the discovery exalts the few instances with which Greek literature provides us to a disproportionate importance and significance. Disappointed at not finding their perfect ideal in their own age and nation, men have pleased themselves with the imagination of perfection in an object belonging to another age, with regard to which no sordid reality of every-day relation and common, vulgar needs could intervene to check enthusiasm. Furthermore, it is safer to admire those distant from us in time and place, since we are secure from any demand of faithfulness and self-sacrifice from their side. Poets and artists have assisted us in this license of agreeable fancy. So we dwell, with special emphasis, on the beauty of Penelope's character, which is not at all exceptionally faithful as measured by modern standards; we warm over the story of Antigone while we pass by, without special enthusiasm, a thousand instances as admirable in our own day and within our own observation; and we read, with delight, the tale of the Greek who encouraged his ignorant child-wife by gentle treatment until she overcame her timidity, became "tame and docile," and was persuaded to discard cosmetics and high-heeled shoes and devote herself to her household duties; though the most of us would regard the forced marriage of such a child, if it occurred in our own day, as no more than child-barter, and the conduct of the husband (doubtless not worsened by his representation of it) as but a moderate exhibition of common decency. Mahaffy says of the Greeks of the Homeric age: "There is ample evidence that the lower-class women, the slaves and even the free servants, were subjected to the hardest and most distressing sorts of work, the carrying of water, and the grinding of hand-mills; in fact we see them standing to men-servants nearly in the same relation that the North-American squaw stands to her husband--over-taxed, slave-driven, worn out even with field-work, while he is idling, or smoking, or sleeping."[202] The wives of Athens of all periods were little more than a higher class of household servants, with almost no share, by education, in either the science or the art that was the delight of their nation and made its superiority. The position of the hetairai was better in some respects; but the apparently widely spread preference of the Greeks of the cultured classes for what we term unnatural crime argues against any considerable degree of education even in their case. Women were sometimes found in the Greek schools of philosophy, but these were evidently isolated cases. The passage from the Theaetetus above quoted shows us the unhappy and subservient position of Athenian women in one respect; and many other passages of Plato throw an unfavorable light upon their lot; though we have, perhaps, to remember that the central figure of the Dialogues had some personal reason for being a woman-hater. "The outcasts from society as we call them were not the immoral and the profligate, but the honorable and virtuous. Accordingly, when we consult the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history."[203]

Human sacrifices were not unknown to the earlier Greeks. Of the later days, of Athenian culture, Mahaffy says: "Plutarch tells us that Themistocles was forced by the acclamations of the army to sacrifice three Persian prisoners of distinction brought in just before the battle of Salamis, though he was greatly affected at the terrible nature of the sacrifice, so that it appears to have been then unusual. But Aristophanes, long after, makes allusions to what he calls [Greek: pharmakoi], as still remembered at Athens, if not still in use (Ran. 732), and which the scholiasts explain, chiefly from Hipponax, as a sort of human scapegoat, chosen for ugliness or deformity (a very Greek standpoint) and sacrificed for the expiation of the state in days of famine and pestilence, or of other public disaster. I think that Aristophanes alludes to the custom as bygone, though the scholiasts do not think so; but its very familiarity to his audience shows a disregard of human life strange enough in so advanced a legal system as that of democratic Athens."[204]

Mahaffy calls attention to the exceeding cruelty practised by the Greeks in the Peloponnesian war, and adds: "It was not merely among Corcyreans, or among Thracian mercenaries, but among the leaders of Greece that we find this disgusting feature. The Spartans put to death in cold blood 225 prisoners whom they took in Plataea after a long and heroic defence.... But this is a mere trifle when we hear from Plutarch that Lysander, after the battle of AEgospotami, put to death 3000 prisoners (Alcib. c. 37 cp. the details in his Lysander, c. 13),... Athenians, men of education and of culture.... The unfortunate Athenian general, according to Theophrastus (Plut. Lys. 13), submits with dignified resignation to a fate which he confesses would have attended the Lacedemonians had they been vanquished.

"For the Athenians, with their boasted clemency and culture, were very nearly as cruel as their enemies. In the celebrated affair of the Mitylenaeans, which Thucydides tells at length in his third book, the first decree of the Athenians was to massacre the whole male population of the captured city. They repented of this decree, because Diodotus proved to them, not that it was inhuman, but that it was inexpedient." Mahaffy argues, in opposition to Grote, that there was no real sentiment of sympathy in the repentance of the Athenians in this affair, for "how could the imagined details of the massacre of 6000 men in Lesbos have been a motive, when the Athenians did, at the same time, have the ringleaders executed at Athens, and they were more than 1000 men (Thuc. III. 30)." These were "executed together, by the hands of Athenians, not with fire-arms but with swords and knives. A few years after, the inhabitants of Melos, many hundreds in number, were put to the sword, when conquered after a brave resistance (Thuc. V. 116), and here, I fear, merely for the purpose of making way for a colony of Athenian citizens, who went out to occupy the houses and lands of their victims."[205]

The practice of torturing witnesses in court was common in Periclean Athens. On this point, Mahaffy writes: "Our best authorities on this question are, of course, the early orators, especially Antiphon, in whose speeches on cases of homicide this feature constantly recurs. It is well known that in such cases the accused might offer his own slaves to be tortured, in order to challenge evidence against himself; and it was thought a weak point in his case if he refused to do so when challenged. It is also well known that the accusers were bound to make good any permanent injury, such as maiming, done to these slaves.

"But there were both restrictions and extensions of this practice as yet but little noticed. It was not the custom to torture slaves who gave evidence to a fact, but only if they denied any knowledge, or appeared to suppress it in the interest of their master (Antiphon, Tetral. A, [Greek: g]). On the other hand, it was common enough to torture female slaves and also free men....

... "Almost all the orators speak of it as an infallible means of ascertaining the truth. Demosthenes says it has never been known to fail."[206] The restrictions on certain extremities of torture in court diminish in importance when we consider that the poor slave stood, in reality, in all cases, between two alternatives of suffering, that inflicted by the court and that likely to be inflicted by his master in case his evidence displeased the latter. That he was a piece of property of some value was doubtless no more a safeguard to the Greek slave under the hands of his master than it has been in any modern slave-holding country; the Greek was doubtless at least as liable as the man of to-day to forget ultimate loss in the rage of present anger and the malevolent pleasure of revenge.

The condition of slaves among the Greeks furnishes us, indeed, with one of our strongest arguments against their moral code. We do not need to mention the Helots, whose name has become a synonym of degradation and misery. Slaves formed the greater part of the working population of Athens, and were much more numerous than the freemen. Nor were they necessarily even of inferior race or education. Not only did all prisoners taken in war become slaves, with their descendants forever, except as their masters chose to emancipate them (and the possession of such a superfluity sometimes rendered the Athenians generous in this respect), but, until the time of Solon, freemen might be sold into bondage for debt,--and not alone for a large debt, but also for a small one, and not merely until the debt was paid, but for all time. Nor have we reason to suppose that freemen were treated, even in the days of Athens' greatest culture, with great humanity. "At the opening of the Euthryphro there is a story told which is not intended to be anything exceptional, and which shows that the free laborer, or dependent, had not bettered his position since the days when Achilles cited him as the most miserable creature upon earth. 'Now the man who is dead,' says Euthryphro, 'was a poor dependent of mine who worked for us as a [free] field-laborer at Naxos, and one day, in a fit of drunken passion, he got into a quarrel with one of our domestic servants [slaves] and slew him. My father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. Meantime, he had no care or thought of him, deeming him a murderer, and that even if he did die, there would be no great harm. And this was just what happened. For such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon him that before the messenger returned from the diviner he was dead. And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father.'"[207]

We have not much evidence as to the treatment of animals in ancient Greece. Race-horses are likely to have been well cared for,--as long as they were young and swift or beautiful. But it does not appear probable, from what we know of the Greek attitude towards slaves and dependents, women and children, that a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have flourished in Greece.

When we come to inquire as to the moral status of the Greeks with regard to honesty, truthfulness, and reliability in general, we find them particularly lacking. Their failure to come up with modern standards in this respect "every schoolboy knows." Ulysses is called the "man of many wiles," with evident intent to compliment. In the poems of Theognis, favorites with the Greek nobility, "it was openly recommended to fawn upon your enemy, to deceive him till he was in your power, and then wreak vengeance upon him. It is usual, among critics, to speak of this as the attitude of Theognis, and of the special aristocracy to which he belonged. They forget that we find the same attitude in the moral Pindar (Pyth. ii. 84). It is expounded by Hesiod as proximate (*[Greek: Erg]. 165 sqq.), by Thucydides as universal, at a later epoch."[208] Mahaffy says of the Greeks up to the time of Thucydides, that they "had been often treacherous and cruel, generally dishonest and selfish; but, withal, often generous and gentlemanly, always clever and agreeable, and always carried away by a love of beauty more than by a respect for truth."[209] At the time of Darius, the Milesians, who had involved that king in a bloody and expensive war, and burned his Lydian capital, were yet treated kindly by him when taken prisoners, and settled in his own country. In return they were always trying to beg or embezzle the treasure of the king at Susa. "There was, indeed, a single exception, Scythes, tyrant of Zancle--who asked leave to visit Sicily, and returned to die in Persia. 'Him Darius considered to be the most righteous of all those who had gone up to him from Greece, in that he kept his promise to the great king.'"

"What an evidence of Greek dishonesty. We can well fancy the Aryan barons of Darius' court speaking in the tone of the Roman Juvenal. To them, too, the Graeculus esuriens was but too well known,--with his fascination, his cleverness, and, withal, his mean and selfish knavery. I need hardly remind the Greek scholar," continues Mahaffy, "that all through the Ionic revolt, and through the Persian wars, this treachery and this selfishness were the mainstays of the Persians; in fact, had they depended upon these more completely, the subjugation of Greece would have been a mere question of time."[210]

"There was a certain Glaucus at Sparta, celebrated for justice, as well as in other respects, to whom a Milesian, who had heard of his fame, came and entrusted a treasure, wishing as he said, to get the benefit of his justice, since Ionia was disturbed. Of course, such a temptation was too much even for this paragon of Greek honesty. When the heirs of the Milesian came with their tokens and claimed the treasure, he professed to know nothing of the affair," though when they had gone away, he consulted the oracle as to whether he might spend the money, and was so strongly rebuked, that he finally gave it back.[211] This Mahaffy mentions as an instance where the influence of the oracle was a moral one.

There remains one general and especially significant criticism to be made on Greek morals as a whole; the great mass of the people were little cared for and in a state of unfreedom. Professor Robiou of Rennes aptly remarks that the democracy of ancient times, and that of Athens in particular, had little in common with modern democracy. "The very large majority of the working population were slaves, and had, consequently, no rights of any sort, so that the 'laborers,' at whose political rights Xenophon and Aristophanes jest, were generally what we call patrons....

"As for the laborers and the inhabitants of the environs and villages, since political rights could be exercised only at the Athenian Pnyx and there was no idea of a representative system, it is clear that the presence of many of them in the assembly could be only an exception, in spite of the modest indemnity which was offered them; among the country people the large and middle-class proprietors alone were in a condition to take part regularly. That is to say, one has no difficulty in concluding that, in comparison with other times and other countries, the Athenian democracy was an aristocracy."[212] And we may add that, all things considered, the great mass of the people had less of liberty and privilege, were far more subject to the despotism and caprice of the few, than in most modern monarchies. In what modern country not inhabited by savages would a man be permitted, at the present day, to throw even a murderer into a ditch and leave him to perish of hunger and cold? The carelessness of the Greeks in regard to the inner spirit of morals is often excused on the ground that it was at least combined with a large degree of tolerance; but this tolerance appears to be, to a great extent, mythical. The politics of Athens ostracized men whose opinion was feared by the state, or rather by a certain number of citizens, and the Greek religion stained its records with the death of Socrates and the persecution of other philosophers. Stilpo was exiled for doubting whether the Athene of Phidias was a goddess and the books of Anaxagoras and Protagoras were publicly burned. There was, moreover, an inquisitorial bureau at Athens.[213] However, it is true that the Greeks were, as a people, too little in earnest and too superstitious to fall into doubt of the national mythology.

We have less difficulty in showing the superiority of modern to Roman civilization, and for the reason, partly, that we know more about Roman, than we do about Greek civilization.

The Romans were, from the beginning, a robust and warlike people, and the military discipline which made them conquerors extended into their social relations and even into their family life. The exposure of children appears to have been a common practice, and looked upon leniently even after direct infanticide was visited with some degree of general disapproval. Parents were the absolute masters of their children, having the power to put them to death, or to sell them as slaves; and this was not only true of children in their younger years, but during the whole life of the father. Livy and Valerius Maximus give numerous instances of parents who had put their children to death. It is recorded, however, that Hadrian banished a man who had killed his son, and decreed that whatever a son might earn in military service should belong to himself; while Alexander Severus forbade the killing of adult sons, and Diocletian rendered the sale of children illegal.[214] Lecky however remarks that "the sale of children in case of great necessity, though denounced by the Fathers, continued long after the time of Theodosius, nor does any Christian emperor appear to have enforced the humane enactments of Diocletian."[215]

Human sacrifices occurred among the Romans far more frequently than among the Greeks, and continued even down to a late date, says Mahaffy. "In the year 46 B.C., Caesar sacrificed two soldiers on the altar in the Campus Martius. Augustus is said to have sacrificed a maiden named Gregoria. Even Trajan, when Antioch was rebuilt, sacrificed Calliope, and placed her statue in the theatre. Under Commodus, and later emperors, human sacrifices appear to have been more common; and a gladiator appears to have been sacrificed to Jupiter Latialis even in the time of Constantine. Yet these awful rites had been expressly forbidden B.C. 95; and Pliny asserts that in his time they were never openly solemnized."[216]

If, however, the direct sacrifice of human victims came in time to be forbidden, there grew out of it, at a comparatively early period, a custom very nearly if not quite as barbarous, which was practised on an immense scale and down to a late date; namely, the gladiatorial contests. The men who took part in these contests were either slaves, criminals, military captives, or men especially trained for the "profession." Many of these last were exposed children who had been rescued for the purpose; their number being also recruited from other ranks. Lecky seems to excuse the condemnation of military captives to these shows, saying that their fate "could not strike the early Romans with the horror it would now inspire, for the right of the conquerors to massacre their prisoners was almost universally admitted."[217] The argument is similar to that noticed and criticised above--one bad principle cannot be an excuse for another, though the two are, doubtless, in this case, cooerdinate. Every criminal can give us a reason for his crime out of the uniformity of his own character. The question is, simply, whether we are considering the facts from a purely indifferent standpoint, as historical, or from an ethical standpoint; and if from the latter, then we must have some standard of measurement. We may choose to make this, in all cases, the average of the period and nation; though there will be, in that case, considerable difficulty in determining the average. Or we may use some ideal standard, which, as ideal, does not vary with all variations of the society considered, but is constant. But we have no logical right, having assumed the one standard, to confuse it with the other, treating the two as interchangeable. The standard of any age by which men judged their deeds is also part of the morality of the age, by which we may judge it. As for the criminals who fought in the arena, they were sometimes pardoned, when victorious, so that society received back again its most muscular, or skilful and alert criminals. Of all Roman authors and rulers, Lecky mentions only Seneca, Plutarch, Petronius, Junius Mauricus, and Marcus Aurelius, who condemn the games.[218] Cicero is undecided on the subject; rather in favor of them. The great satirist, Juvenal, though he repeatedly mentions, does not condemn them. And "of all the great historians who recorded them not one seems to have been conscious that he was recording a barbarity, not one appears to have seen in them any greater evils than an increasing tendency to pleasure and an excessive multiplication of a dangerous class." On the other hand, the attempt to introduce them into Athens was unsuccessful.[219]

An immense increase of gladiators and gladiatorial shows took place in the earlier days of the empire, when the increase of slavery freed a large portion of the Roman population from the necessity of labor, and men came to occupy themselves with amusements, on the one hand as a profession, on the other as means of passing the time. In the days of the Republic, the slaves were comparatively few in number and probably treated with more care, though scarcely with much consideration; all things were permitted the master by law, says Lecky, though probably the censor might interfere in extreme cases. "The elder Cato speaks of slaves simply as instruments for obtaining wealth, and he encouraged masters, both by his precept and his example, to sell them as useless when aged and infirm."[220] Under Titus and Trajan probably occurred the greatest number of shows that "were compressed into a short time,... and no Roman seems to have imagined that the fact of 3000 men having been compelled to fight under the one, and 10,000 under the other, cast the faintest shadow upon their characters."[221] Moreover, "the mere desire for novelty impelled the people to every excess or refinement of barbarity. The simple combat became at last insipid, and every variety of atrocity was devised to stimulate the flagging interest. At one time a bear and a bull, chained together, rolled in fierce contest along the sand; at another, criminals dressed in the skins of wild beasts were thrown to bulls, which were maddened by red-hot irons, or by darts tipped with burning pitch. Four hundred bears were killed on a single day under Caligula; three hundred on another day under Claudius. Under Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants; four hundred bears and three hundred lions were slaughtered by his soldiers. In a single day, at the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus, five thousand animals perished.... Lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles and serpents, were employed to give novelty to the spectacle. Nor was any form of human suffering wanting. The first Gordian, when edile, gave twelve spectacles, in each of which from one hundred and fifty to five hundred pair of gladiators appeared. Eight hundred pair fought at the triumph of Aurelian. Ten thousand men fought during the games of Trajan.... Under Domitian, an army of feeble dwarfs was compelled to fight, and more than once female gladiators descended to fight in the arena. A criminal personating a fictitious character was nailed to a cross, and there torn by a bear. Another, representing Scaevola, was compelled to hold his hand in a real flame. A third, as Hercules, was burnt alive upon the pile. So intense was the craving for blood, that a prince was less unpopular if he neglected the distribution of corn than if he neglected the games; and Nero himself, on account of his munificence in this respect, was probably the sovereign who was most beloved by the Roman multitude. Heliogabalus and Galerius are reported, when dining, to have regaled themselves with the sight of criminals torn by wild beasts. It was said of the latter that 'he never supped without human blood.'" Moreover, the prince was most popular who, at the show of thumbs, "permitted no consideration of economy to make him hesitate to sanction the popular award."[222] "Even in the closing years of the fourth century, the prefect Symmachus, who was regarded as one of the most estimable pagans of his age, collected some Saxon prisoners to fight in honor of his son. They strangled themselves in prison, and Symmachus lamented the misfortune that had befallen him from their 'impious hands,' but endeavored to calm his feelings by recalling the patience of Socrates and the precepts of philosophy."[223]

The conquest of Greece is alleged to have bettered somewhat the position of Roman slaves, since it involved the introduction of many slaves who were the intellectual superiors of their masters. But whatever good this may have effected seems to have been counteracted by the increase in number of the slaves and the consequent diminution in value of the individual slave as a piece of property. On the whole, the position of the slaves of North America, before the war of emancipation, bad as it was in some cases, seems to have been, on the average, quite paradisiacal when compared with that of their Roman forerunners. It has already been mentioned that Cato urged his compatriots to sell their aged slaves. Old and infirm slaves were constantly exposed to perish on an island in the Tiber. It was also customary, in case of the murder of the master, to put all the slaves of the household to death who were not in chains or helpless at the time of the murder. The testimony of the slave was generally received only under torture; he might be tortured in the attempt to compel evidence against his master; but, if he, of his own free will, accused his master of any crime, except treason, he was condemned to the arena. There were different punishments for slaves and for men of rank. "Numerous acts of the most odious barbarity were committed. The well-known anecdotes of Flaminius ordering a slave to be killed to gratify, by the spectacle, the curiosity of a guest; of Vedius Pollio feeding his fish on the flesh of slaves; and of Augustus sentencing a slave who had killed and eaten a favorite quail, to crucifixion, are the extreme examples that are recorded; for we need [!] not regard as an historical fact the famous picture in Juvenal of a Roman lady in a moment of caprice, ordering her unoffending servant to be crucified. We have, however, many other very horrible glimpses of slave life at the close of the Republic and in the early days of the Empire. The marriage of slaves was entirely unrecognized by law, and, in their case, the words adultery, incest, or polygamy had no legal meaning.... When executed for a crime, their deaths were of a most hideous kind. The ergastula, or private prisons of the masters, were frequently their only sleeping places.... We read of slaves chained as porters to the doors, and cultivating the fields in chains. Ovid and Juvenal describe the fierce Roman ladies tearing their servants' faces, and thrusting the long pins of their brooches into their flesh. The master, at the close of the Republic, had full power to sell his slave as a gladiator or as a combatant with wild beasts."[224]

Lecky admonishes us that we should not judge the whole institution of Roman slavery by this one side of the picture. He calls attention to the respect in which learned Greek slaves were often held, as showing a better phase of the system; but it is quite possible that certain slaves or classes of slaves should be held in respect and that the rest of the slaves should be treated, nevertheless, with anything but respect or kindness. The great wonder to the modern mind is that the Romans felt at liberty to hold learned Greeks slaves at all. Lecky points out that slaves were emancipated in great numbers; but we must remember, first, that slaves were very plentiful, further, that freedmen and their descendants remained bound, by a sort of feudal tie, to their former masters until the third generation, and moreover that it was considered an honor to have many freedmen in one's following; so that the advantage of manumission was often, as Lecky himself says, on the side of the master. Slaves were sometimes emancipated to prevent their revealing crimes of their masters under torture, and many slaves were given their liberty especially in order that they might make a show in the funeral train. Augustus, indeed, found it necessary to restrict emancipation by will to one hundred slaves.[225] Seneca mentions that masters who ill-treated their slaves were the object of public odium; but then it may occur to us to inquire what the Romans considered ill-treatment; some of the laws which Lecky cites in evidence of the improvement of the slave's position in the third or last of the periods under which he considers this position may appear to his readers as much evidence against, as in favor of, kindness on the part of the masters. "The Petronian law," he says, "which was issued by Augustus, or more probably by Nero, forbade the master to condemn his slave to combat with wild beasts without a sentence from a judge." We may inquire as to how difficult it was to obtain such a sentence. "Under Claudius some citizens exposed their sick slaves on the island of AEsculapius in the Tiber to avoid the trouble of tending them, and the emperor decreed that if [!] the slave so exposed recovered from his sickness, he should become free, and also that masters who killed their slaves instead of exposing them should be punished as murderers.... Under Nero, a judge was appointed to hear their complaints, and was instructed to punish masters who treated them with barbarity, made them the instruments of lust, or withheld from them a sufficient quantity of the necessaries of life.... Domitian made a law, which was afterwards reiterated, forbidding the Oriental custom of mutilating slaves for sensual purposes, and the reforms were renewed with great energy in the period of the Antonines.[226] Hadrian and his two successors formally deprived masters of the right of killing their slaves; forbade them to sell slaves to the lanistae or speculators in gladiators; destroyed the ergastula or private prisons; ordered that, when a master was murdered, those slaves only should be tortured who were within hearing; appointed officers through all the provinces to hear the complaints of slaves; enjoined that no master should treat slaves with excessive [?] severity; and commanded that, when such severity was proved, the master should be compelled to sell the slave he had ill-treated."[227] The humanity of the last law is open to dispute. Moreover, Lecky does not notice, here, that Constantine nevertheless felt it necessary to limit the punishment of slaves by prohibiting its administration with a cudgel, though not with the lash, and forbidding poison, mortal wounds, various kinds of torture, stoning, hanging, mutilation, or throwing from a height.[228] But he mentions two facts which indicate some degree of humanity in certain directions, and namely: that, though the law did not recognize the marriage of a slave, "it appears not to have been common to separate his family;" also, that the private property of slaves was recognized by their masters, though part or all of it usually reverted to the master on the death of the slave. The great mass of evidence goes to show, however, that what the Romans termed humanity to slaves would have been, in the eyes of modern "civilized" peoples, extreme barbarity.

Women, among the Romans, were, like their children, under the control of the head of the family--father or husband. "The father disposed absolutely of the hand of his daughter and sometimes even possessed the power of breaking off marriages that had been actually contracted. In the forms of marriage, however, which were usual in the earlier periods of Rome, the absolute power passed into the hands of the husband, and he had the right, in some cases, of putting her to death." "The power appears to have become quite obsolete during the Empire; but the first legal act (which was rather of the nature of an exhortation than of a command) against it was issued by Antoninus Pius, and it was only definitely abolished under Diocletian."[229] Roman women had, at first, no share by law in the heritage of their fathers; but public opinion revolted, in some cases, from the law, and gradually this was considerably altered. When marriage became, under the Empire, a mere matter of mutual consent, divorce a mere matter of repudiation, the daughter, though married, often remained in her father's house, having full control over her own property. Practically, if not always legally, the position of women among the Romans seems to have been considerably better than among the Greeks; Roman wives became, gradually, far more nearly the equals of their husbands than Greek wives ever were, and appear to have received a proportionately greater degree of love. Their position, however, falls far behind that of even German women at the present day, and certainly much behind that of every other civilized nation.

After recording the use of animals in the public games, there is little need of considering the subject of their treatment specially; there can be no doubt as to its probable nature; though certain famous Romans had their brute favorites.

It is sometimes argued that, though we are morally superior to the Greeks and Romans in some respects, we fall short of their standard in other respects. Doubtless new forms of evil may arise in later periods, which were impossible under old forms of government and the social relations of earlier peoples. Each period and nation will, according to its circumstances, have its own peculiar forms of vice and misery. But the question which we are considering is not whether or not we have some forms of evil which the ancients did not possess, but whether the particular forms which prevail among us are or are not worse than those which prevailed in Greece and Rome, and, in general, whether the average of sympathy and altruistic action in modern times and among the foremost peoples is greater than the average among the Greeks and Romans. And it must be recollected, moreover, in considering the question, that while the evil in our midst is brought very vividly before our eyes through the medium of our many methods of news-carrying and of wide personal observation,--through our railways, our telegraphs, our many newspapers and periodicals,--we have, in reality, when all is told, very scanty knowledge of the daily life of the common people, of the ordinary, every-day miseries and sufferings, among the Greeks and Romans. But there are some features of these facts that tell in favor of modern times; for the ancients were but little impressed by the miseries of the poorer classes; and just the spirit that notes and makes much of our modern inhumanity is evidence of a broader sympathy peculiar to our later times.

Of Europe as a whole in the centuries after Rome's decline and its loss of power, it is not necessary to say much, in order to prove the moral superiority of modern times. We are all acquainted with the fierce contests between Christianity and its opponents, with the mutual persecutions, the martyrdoms of Christians and the retaliation of Christians upon "heretics," with the license and bigotry of the clergy, the robbery and oppression of the poor and dependent by these as well as by the titled castle-owners, the burning of "witches," the general intellectual and moral darkness which spread and covered even the lands of former comparative civilization and was lifted only as Europe as a whole advanced to a higher stage.

But without entering into any extended discussion of this complicated process of development as a whole, after the disturbance of the old equilibrium, it may not be undesirable to note the general course of events in some one country as typical, not in its special features, but in its general moral import, of the course of development in the other countries of Europe also.

The manner of the growth of state and social recompense for evil out of individual and tribal vengeance has already been touched upon. The enemy within, and the enemy without the tribe, the foe of the battle-field and the criminal were regarded, at many stages, with much the same feeling of animosity, the advantage being rather in favor of the criminal. To the Greek all those who were not Greeks were barbarians, against whom but little justice or mercy was necessary; and, as we have seen, the Romans condemned to the arena their war-captives equally with their criminals, together with slaves who were also, originally, war-captives. Crime is, in ruder societies, hardly distinguished from other forms of aggression that are, later, not included under this head. The definition of crime differs greatly in different periods of a people's history, changing as the conceptions of morality as duty to society as a whole emerge from the crude conceptions of individual and tribal constraint through revenge. It is for this reason that the history of criminal law and the administration of "justice" constitute, in reality, a history of moral evolution. There is nothing that is a clearer index of the moral status of a people than its treatment of those considered to be malefactors.

Caesar and Tacitus both mention human sacrifices as taking place in England before the Roman conquest; but little is known certainly on the subject. The Romans, of course, introduced their own laws and customs, which existed side by side with many ancient ones not wholly abolished. The torture and burning of slaves for various offences was customary. These penalties were gradually mitigated. But the invasion of the Teutonic tribes seems to have introduced many new barbarities. In the first half of the tenth century, for instance, appears a law which condemned to the stake female slaves who had stolen from any but their masters, the wood to be piled about them by eighty other slaves of their own sex; this last office being designed, doubtless, to impress the lesson upon the minds of the eighty attendants. Later, many heretics were burned, and the writ for the burning of heretics was not abolished until the reign of Charles II., though it was practically annulled by the laws of 1648. However, in 1649, a number of women were burned for witchcraft in Berwickshire, and burning continued to be practised, much later, in cases of heresy and witchcraft; still later in cases of high and petty treason, and up to the time of George III., for murder. In the thirtieth year of the latter's reign, a statute was passed substituting hanging for burning. In 1784, a woman was burnt at Portsmouth for the murder of her husband. During the last years, however, in which the sentence was carried out, it seems to have been customary for the executioner to wring the malefactor's neck before the burning. But comparatively trivial offences, among these false coining, were classed as treason, and it is noticeable also that the stake seems to have been a favorite punishment in the case of women-offenders, even in later days.[230] In the year 1530, two persons of the household of the Bishop of Rochester having died from poison thrown into some porridge by the cook, an "Act of Poisoning" was passed, according to which offenders coming under its definition were to be boiled to death. The statute was shortly afterwards repealed, but the bishop's cook was publicly executed in accordance with its provision.[231]

But simple burning or hanging was, for the most part, considered much too good for the man who had committed high treason; he was given the mere mockery of a trial, and, if convicted, was hanged, was taken down while yet alive, disembowelled, and his entrails burnt, was beheaded, and quartered. Law modifying this penalty first comes into prominence in the reign of William III.[232] When Richard I. sailed with his army for the Holy Land, it was ordained that whoever killed a man on board ship was to be tied to the corpse and thrown into the sea, whosoever killed a man on shore was to be burnt alive with the corpse, while simply drawing blood with a knife was to be punished with the loss of a hand, and a thief was to be shaved, treated to a head-bath of boiling pitch and feathers, and put ashore at the first place the vessel touched at.[233]

The payment of blood-money was a common custom among the Teutons, and so little distinction was made between greater and lesser crime that, while a murderer could commonly buy off the relatives of his victim, the petty thief often suffered death or mutilation for his offence. Pike says of these punishments in the early history of Britain: "It was for the free man of low estate, for the slave, and for women, that the greatest atrocities were reserved. Men branded on the forehead, without hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a churl. The horrors of the Danish invasions had no tendency to mitigate these severities; and those who were chastised with whips before were chastised with scorpions afterwards. New ingenuity was brought to bear upon the art of mutilation, which was practised in every form. The eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper lip were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive."[234] The law of the tenth century, according to which a female slave who had committed theft was burnt alive by eighty women-executioners, has already been mentioned; parallel to this law was the law that a male slave who was a thief was to be stoned to death by eighty slaves, any one of whom, who missed the mark three times, was to be whipped three times. "If a thief was a free woman, she was to be thrown down a precipice or drowned."[235] The law did not favor women.

The dividing line between mutilation and torture is a difficult one to draw. One of the earlier forms of "trial" was by ordeal. The accused, with his hand bound in cloth, was compelled to snatch a stone from elbow or wrist-depth in a caldron of boiling water, or to lift a weight of heated metal. If, at the end of three days, when the cloth which bound the arm was removed, no scald or burn was visible, the accused was pronounced innocent. These ordeals took place in the church with much sprinkling of holy water and other ceremony. The clergy themselves seem to have had less trying substitutes for these ordeals, often being compelled only to take oath on the sacrament, or to partake of consecrated bread or cheese which was supposed to produce evil results in case of guilt. As Pike suggests, it is quite possible that, as priests had the preparing of this bread or cheese, it may sometimes have come up to expectations in this respect; as it is also possible that the cloths bound on the arm of the layman who was to undergo the ordeal of fire or water may have been differently arranged in different cases.[236] As late as the reign of King John, trial was made by ordeal, and mention is also made of it in the reign of Henry II. It was not formally abolished until the year 1219.[237] For remaining mute before accusers in court, the dire penalty of imprisonment with starvation was inflicted, in the reign of Edward I., and to this punishment was added, about the time of Henry IV., torture by the press.[238] In 1570, a man found guilty of forging warrants for the arrest of two persons was sentenced to the pillory for two days, on the first of which one ear, on the second the other, was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that he must "by his own proper motion" tear it away.[239] The rack is supposed to have been introduced into England in the reign of Henry VI., and in the reign of Henry VIII. was added "Skevington's Daughter," an instrument by which offenders were compressed rather than extended until "the miserable human being lost all form but that of a globe." Blood was forced from fingers, toes, nostrils, and mouth, and ribs and breast-bone were commonly broken in. The thumb-screw was also in use, and there was a "Dungeon among Rats," and a chamber in the Tower called "Little Ease," in which it was impossible either to stand upright or to lie at full length.[240] The press was not abolished until the reign of George III.[241] It is recorded of the case of Burnworth, tried for murder in 1726, that he bore pressure of nearly four hundred weight, for an hour and three-quarters, before begging for mercy and pleading Not Guilty. He was, however, found guilty and hanged.[242] In 1630, Alexander Leighton was punished for "framing, publishing, and dispensing a scandalous book against kings, peers, and prelates," in the following manner: he was whipped, put in the pillory, had one of his ears cut off and one side of his nose slit, was branded on one cheek with a red-hot iron, was afterwards returned to the Fleet to be kept in close custody, and seven days later was whipped again at the pillory, had the other ear cut off, his other nostril slit, and his other cheek branded.[243] As late as 1734, John Durant, who "either was, or pretended to be, deaf and unable to read," had his thumbs tied and the knot drawn hard because he did not answer the accusation of the court; he was also threatened with the press.[244] Excepting in cases where the press was used, torture was not, according to Pike, practised in England after the first part of the seventeenth century; but the case just cited is a contradiction of so broad an assertion.

The introductions of customs of penance did much towards rendering the differences in the punishment and general treatment of the poor and rich, the humble and noble, more conspicuous. As for the clergy, they had special benefits given them, and were accustomed, in the early days of Britain, to murder, rob, and indulge their passions very nearly as they chose, without interference from the state.[245] But the Benefit of Clergy, which rendered any one subject to it, "practically exempt from the ordinary punishments for most of the greater crimes," was applicable, in later centuries, not only to clergymen proper, but also to all clerks, the term including every one who had been married and could read.[246] The position of the slave after the Teutonic invasion has been noticed. The position of the churl was nearly as bad. "The infliction of a penalty which he could not pay, and which none would pay for him, rendered him utterly bankrupt in freedom.... If he left the place assigned to him it was held that he had stolen his own body. He could be summarily hanged when caught, and his life was worth nothing to his lord, or even to his kindred, unless they redeemed him. This was the fate which was continually impending over the free man of low estate if he had the misfortune to make enemies among those who had the power to save or condemn him."[247] In the reign of Edward I., "a statute was passed which made it a grave offence to devise or tell any false news of prelates, dukes, earls, barons, or nobles of the realm. Others, too, were enumerated as being within the meaning of the act--the Chancellor, the Justices of either Bench, and all the great officers of state." Under Richard II., the statute was reenacted and made more stringent.[248]

For most trivial offences of all sorts, extreme punishment was meted out. Mutilation was often inflicted merely for the killing of game belonging to the King's forests, and though the Forest Charter of Henry III. provided that no one should, in future, lose life or limb for the sake of the King's deer, the penalty does not seem to have gone out of use at this period, for other offences. In the reign of Edward III., a tailor was sentenced, for brawling in court, to imprisonment in the Tower of London for life and the loss of his right hand; "and the rolls of Gaol Delivery of this period show conclusively that the ordinary punishments were hanging, the pillory, and the tumbrel or dung-cart."[249] Late in the reign of Henry VIII., an act was passed condemning any person who struck another so that blood was drawn, within the limits of the King's house, to the loss of his right hand. The pillory was in use up to the reign of Queen Victoria; "it could be applied to perjurers and suborners of perjury until the year 1837. It was even applied to women for no greater crime than fortune-telling, late in the eighteenth century."[250] "Of the other punishments associated with the old spirit of violence, and inflicted in public, the chief was whipping. It was commonly awarded to men guilty of petty thefts.... Instances in which women were whipped were by no means uncommon at the very end of the eighteenth century." Until 1808, pocket-picking, until 1811, stealing from bleaching-grounds, were punished with death. In 1813, 1816, and 1818, a bill was introduced to abolish capital punishment for a theft of five shillings from shops; but it was defeated in the House of Lords. In 1820, the amount necessary to the death-sentence was raised to L15. Until 1832, horse, cattle, and sheep stealing, theft from a dwelling-house, and forgery, were capital offences. In 1833, house-breaking; in 1834, returning from transportation before expiration of the sentence; and, in 1835, sacrilege and letter-stealing ceased to be punished with death. But it was not until 1861 that hanging was limited by law to cases of murder and treason.[251]

The worst element of the punishment by pillory or in any manner in public did not lie so much in the punishment itself, as in the violence of the mob, which appears to have been regarded as a legitimate part of the ceremony, and against which the criminal seldom received any protection. Sometimes, the man or woman sentenced to the pillory for a petty offence died of stoning at the hands of the onlookers; and Pike writes of the burning of a woman in 1721, for coining: "Her last wish was that she might say a prayer in peace. But the mob which had come out to take its ease and its pleasure had no mind to sacrifice its rights for the comfort of a criminal. A woman at the stake was a good butt for filthy missiles and ribald jests; the yelling rabble would not permit the poor wretch to collect her thoughts, or to hear her own words, and instead of sympathy they gave her stones. When the fire was kindled, even the consuming flames must have seemed less cruel than the men and women standing around."[252]

We all know the condition in which Howard found the prisons of his day; and if we possess strong powers of imagination, we may perchance be able partly to conceive what must have been their state in days when the people knew but very little of what passed within prison-walls, and the keepers wielded an almost absolute power over the prisoners. If the abuses which were common even two centuries ago were to occur in only a few instances to-day, the whole English nation would flame with indignation. In the fourteenth century, jail-breaking was frequent in cases where the prisoner could afford to pay for his escape; judges were often bribed; a "clerk" who was delivered over to the bishop before or after sentence, according to the Benefit of Clergy, could still be acquitted by the bishop in case the requisite number of compurgators were found to swear to belief in his innocence; and, moreover, clerks who had been convicted could not afterwards be tried for any offence committed before their conviction. On the other hand, if a woman attempted to obtain sentence against the murderer of a relative, she had not only to fear the revenge of the man's allies, who seem to have had things very much their own way; but in case courage deserted her at the last, and she failed to appear against the accused, she was "waived" or outlawed; again it may be remarked that the laws of England did not favor women.[253] Writs were forged, juries were packed, judges, justices, and sheriffs bribed. In the reign of James I., the young countess of Essex, who, having fallen in love with Lord Rochester during the absence of her husband, had obtained a divorce to marry him, became angry with a friend of her lover who counselled him against the marriage, caused him to be imprisoned in the Tower, had the Lieutenant and under-keeper of the Tower replaced by friends of hers, and through the aid of these administered poison to him. The countess and her husband were arrested on charge of causing the death, and the former pleaded, the latter was proved, guilty. Yet the two were pardoned, though some of their accomplices were executed.[254]

It is impossible that such customs should exist, in legal relations, in connection with great justice and sympathy in other relations. Some allowance may be made for idiosyncrasy, for individual and national peculiarities; it is possible that a bloody-minded and cruel ruler may find pleasure in petting pigeons, but his pleasure will be likely to be rather of an egoistic order, and his apparent kindness easily turned to cruelty if anger comes upon him. So, too, the cruel potentate may prove a kind husband and friend, as long as his own interests coincide, and do not conflict, with those of his friends or his family. But the man who is consistently treacherous and unfeeling in any one relation will not, as a rule, show consideration and tenderness in other relations, except in so far as these other relations subserve his own ends of gain or vanity; the point where they part company with such ends is the point where he will resort to another mode of action. The same is true of nations. Accordingly, we find brigandage and open robbery common even down to the end of the last century, and not only on the part of the poorer classes, or rather not so much on their part as on that of princes, nobles, and even the clergy; we find pirating and wreckage common on the sea; we find intrigue upon intrigue at court, nobles and members of the royal family continually plotting each other's murder, but nevertheless escaping punishment and received with adulation; we find the much-praised heroes of the Crusades devasting the lands through which they passed, violating wives and daughters of their hosts, and deserting to the enemy for bribes; we find wholesale massacres of unoffending Jews; we find perjury a profession, station an excuse for nearly every crime, religion a cloak for extortion and vice, and oppression of the poor and lowly universal. And yet we weep over modern deterioration!

We forget, when we read--perhaps with an exclamation that man is as much a savage as ever--how the onlookers at the burning of the Shanghai made no effort to save lives but only to secure spoil, that it is only a short time since such scenes must have been common enough on all the shores of Europe; we forget, when we shudder with horror at an exceptional case of unjust or brutal punishment on the borders of our civilization, that it is not long since torture and mutilation, barbarities of every sort, were practised among the foremost nations of the world, and for the most trivial offences. Nor do we always remember, when we grow indignant at the hard case of our poor, that there was a time when the excess of indigent population was prevented only by famines and pestilences which killed their thousands upon thousands, and of which we very seldom see the like in modern times; we forget that there was a time when the desperate rising of the continental peasantry against the bitter oppression of the landowners drew from even the reformer Luther the exclamation that the revolters ought to be throttled collectively. I have no intention to underrate present evils or to excuse them by past ones. I see no reason for believing that the present age should rest upon its laurels; on the contrary, I believe that we are only at the beginning of civilization; but I see no need for denying past evolution in order to make this assertion. Starvation is not easier to a man to-day, because it is proved to him that many more men died of hunger in the past than die of it in the present century. But just for this reason, I fail to understand why there should be so much effort expended by certain reformers in the attempt to disprove what history and observation yet so plainly show,--namely, that the condition of the masses at present, taken for all in all, is much better than it has ever been before; that misery is not so extreme or proportionately so widely spread; that the worst sorts of crime are decreasing; that justice is more general, and that sympathy is warmer, than in any previous age. It is true that we have new methods of exploiting the poor; but we need to consider how our ancestors would have used those opportunities had they possessed them; and we need also to remember, with regard to a particular form of evil, that some time is necessary for society as a whole to grow to a comprehension of its increase and importance, and to reach unanimity of opinion as to action for its removal. As forms of evil change, some one particular form may increase for a time, swallowing up in itself, as the larger wave accumulates several small ones, various other forms, until the slowly gathered resistance of public opinion brings the reaction.

We may gather valuable evidence as to our progress, even in comparison with recent times, by reference to our artistic literature. True, the great writers have often been far ahead of their times. But if we regard the average, we shall soon perceive the signs to which I refer. The stilted mannerisms of the ancient novel mark the absence of democratic feeling, and witness to the less general diffusion of true kindness, which, wherever it appears, tends to simplicity, having no need of mannerisms. Nothing, too, is more indicative of our advancement than the change in conceptions of humor; for to know what a nation laughs about is to know what are its ideals and shortcomings. Earlier humor is often mere vulgarity or brutality, or a mixture of the two; obscenity, vice, and the heartless torture of the weak and helpless are its favorite themes, and appear in the characters of its heroes and ideals. The truthfulness of Victor Hugo's description of earlier British "fun," in his "L'Homme qui rit," is borne witness to by English literature.

All modern literature marks the progress of the democratic idea. Our history and our art are full of the people. The very unrest and dissatisfaction of the time are signs of a more general and a better education, an increase of sympathy in degree and extent, and, I believe, of better nourishment and a more energetic physique. The higher ideals which were once the property of the few are become the property of the many. Our institutions are grown more democratic and humane. We have our free hospitals and dispensaries, our soup-kitchens and cheap lodging-houses, our asylums for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, old people and orphans, the weak and afflicted of all kinds, our guilds, "Settlements," and "Open-air" charities, our creches, our refuges and reformatories, our societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and to Animals, our "Open Doors," and "Midnight Missions," our trade and industrial schools, and our free schools and scholarships and free libraries. In times of famine, disease, and disaster, we band together to aid, and funds for the distressed pour in from every side, and not only from people of the nation to which the sufferers belong, but often also from those of distant parts of the world. Fancy the Greeks subscribing to a fund in aid of cholera-stricken barbarians; imagine the Romans, even, clubbing together, in every part of the world to which they had wandered, to succour the sufferers by a Johnstown flood; or conceive of the wealthy classes of the Middle Ages furnishing fires and food as did the Parisians during the unusual winter cold of 1890-91!

Not only has sympathy become more wildly diffused within the state; it has spread outside it also. National narrowness is slowly disappearing. The federation of the states of Europe and of the civilized world is no longer looked upon as a mad-man's fancy but as a sober possibility or even a probability. It is now agreed that war between the English-speaking nations of the earth,--between England and her colonies, or England and the United States, is very nearly, if not quite, an impossibility. The union of three of the most powerful nations of Europe, not for war but for peace, is assuredly of great political importance in itself; but of even more importance in the influence insensibly exerted by its continuance upon the opinions of the world. The masses of the people themselves are becoming more and more cosmopolitan, and we have an ever-increasing number of international unions and congresses, political, scientific, artistic, and ethical.

On the whole, it is, perhaps, as much a lack of imagination as anything which makes us fall into the mistake of underestimating our own age and overestimating all others. The crimes and abuses far away in times different from our own are difficult to conceive, and stir our blood even less than those distant in space; the sufferings of the Middle Ages, or even of one or two centuries ago, are more difficult to realize and move us less than a famine or flood in China or a murder in the heart of Africa. The things immediately before our eyes affect us most; and it is well, for many reasons, that this is so. Nevertheless, idealization of the past is evil in its consequences. For, if present progress is to some men an excuse for easy-going inactivity, the extent of existing evil is even more often an excuse for the same selfish course.

Man has had, in all periods, the tendency, in his discontent with the present, to invest with ideal attributes of every sort some past period in which the special evils he deplores did not, perhaps, exist; the dissatisfied of all times have imagined a golden age somewhere in the past. The old, who look on the innovations of a younger generation with distrust, and are likely to mistake, in remembrance, the gold of their own life's morning for an outer radiance independent of their youth, add to our delusion; while the young confuse their increasing knowledge of the evil of the world with an increase of the evil itself. But the more science progresses, and the greater our acquaintance with the facts of history becomes, the more these delusions tend to disappear. The much-praised simplicity of our ancestors was, in truth, a half-savagery, where the higher forms of justice were not practised, that finer tact and consideration which makes life best worth living was unknown, and many of the faults which we most deplore in our own day were considered rather virtues than otherwise. It is a moral pity that poets and philosophers have lent the beauty of their verse and the dignity of their eloquence to the idealization of the past. Indeed,

"I do distrust the poet who discerns No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court, To sing--oh, not of lizard or of toad Alive i' the ditch there,--'twere excusable, But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter, Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen, As dead as must be, for the greater part, The poems made on their chivalric bones."[255]

It is an especial pity that the reformer should ever devote his effort to the upholding of the old idea of the inferiority of the present to the past. Not in the past, but in the future, lies the Golden Age of man.

FOOTNOTES:

[183] "The Origin of Civilization," pp. 397, 398.

[184] Ibid. pp. 402, 403.

[185] Ibid. p. 398.

[186] Ibid. p. 407.

[187] See, as above, pp. 368, 369.

[188] Ibid. p. 371.

[189] Ibid. p. 69.

[190] Ibid. p. 72.

[191] Ibid. pp. 112, 113.

[192] See, as above, p. 405.

[193] See Lubbock, "Prehistoric Times," also especially Chaps. III. and IV. of "The Origin of Civilization."

[194] Cause or effect, which? Mexico is not a country poor in animal life.

[195] "The Origin of Civilization," pp. 372, 373.

[196] See "The Origin of Civilization," p. 396.

[197] Ibid. p. 398.

[198] Ibid. p. 371.

[199] "Social Life in Greece," 3d ed. p. 272.

[200] "The Science of Ethics," p. 237.

[201] "Social Life in Greece," p. 243 et seq.

[202] "Lectures on Primitive Civilization," p. 219 et seq.

[203] Mahaffy: "Three Epochs in the Social Development of the Ancient Greeks," pp. 31, 32.

[204] "Social Life in Greece," p. 238.

[205] "Social Life in Greece," p. 234 et seq.

[206] Ibid. p. 239 et seq. The italics are mine.

[207] "Social Life in Greece," p. 272 et seq.

[208] "Social Life in Greece," p. 97 et seq.

[209] Ibid. p. 157.

[210] "Social Life in Greece," p. 160 et seq.

[211] Ibid. p. 162 et seq.

[212] "Les Institutions de la Grece," p. 47 et seq.

[213] Lecky, "History of European Morals," I. p. 398.

[214] Ibid. p. 299 et seq.

[215] Lecky, "History of European Morals," II. p. 31.

[216] "The Origin of Civilization," p. 372.

[217] "History of European Morals," I. p. 285.

[218] "History of European Morals," I. p. 286 et seq.

[219] Ibid. p. 276.

[220] Ibid. p. 301.

[221] "History of European Morals," I. p. 287 et seq.

[222] Ibid. p. 280 et seq.

[223] "History of European Morals," I. p. 287.

[224] "History of European Morals," I. p. 302 et seq.

[225] Ibid. p. 236.

[226] Compare, however, "History of European Morals," I. p. 263: "Ionian slaves of a surpassing beauty, Alexandrian slaves, famous for their subtle skill in stimulating the jaded senses of the confirmed and sated libertine, became the ornaments of every patrician house, the companions and instructors of the young.... The slave population was itself a hotbed of vice, and it contaminated all with which it came in contact."

[227] "History of European Morals," I. p. 303 et seq. The italics are mine.

[228] L. O. Pike, "Crime in England," I. p. 20.

[229] "History of European Morals," II. p. 299.

[230] L. O. Pike, "A History of Crime in England," I. pp. 51, 344 et seq.; II. pp. 138, 176, 177, 287, 379 et seq.

[231] Ibid. II. pp. 81, 82.

[232] Ibid. I. p. 226; II. pp. 85, 86, 174 et seq., 324 et seq.

[233] Ibid. I. pp. 168, 169.

[234] "History of Crime," I. p. 50.

[235] Ibid. p. 51.

[236] "History of Crime," I. p. 52 et seq.

[237] Ibid. I. pp. 204, 210.

[238] Ibid. I. p. 210 et seq.

[239] Ibid. II. p. 85.

[240] Ibid. II. pp. 87-89.

[241] Ibid. II. p. 346.

[242] Ibid. II. p. 283.

[243] "History of Crime," II. pp. 162, 163.

[244] Ibid. II. p. 284.

[245] Ibid. I. p. 52 et seq., p. 146 et seq.

[246] Ibid. I. p. 297 et seq.

[247] Ibid I. p. 89 et seq.

[248] "History of Crime," II. p. 398 et seq.

[249] Ibid. I. p. 213.

[250] Ibid. II. pp. 82, 83, 377 et seq.

[251] Ibid. II. p. 450 et seq.

[252] See as above, II. p. 288.

[253] As above, I. p. 270 et seq.

[254] Ibid. II. p. 145 et seq.

[255] Mrs. Browning, "Aurora Leigh."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. THE RESULTS OF ETHICAL INQUIRY ON AN EVOLUTIONAL BASIS

In Professor Alexander's statement that "the good man of former days was as good as the good man of to-day,"[256] the standard applied to the two cases compared is not the same; the comparison is not a direct one between the two men, according to some common rule, but resembles a mathematical statement of proportion, or comparison of ratios; the man named good according to the standard of one age stands to the social conditions of that age as the man named good by the standard of a later age to the social conditions of his age. The implication of this double standard is, however, easily overlooked, so that the statement stands in danger of the reproach of misleading as a begging of the question; in "the good man of former days," the moral verdict is already delivered. A question of moral expediency arises here. How are we to define "the good man of former days"? Shall we declare, for instance, that that cannibal who fulfilled the ideal of pity in his society by sparing his conquered foe to abject and miserable slavery, instead of cooking him for dinner, was good, and as good as the man of highest benevolence of the present day? Or suppose an Australian savage who varies the tribal custom of wooing by carefully carrying home his victim after reducing her to unconsciousness, instead of dragging her over the ground at risk of life and limb, thus fulfilling a high tribal ideal; shall we compare such a man with lovers like Mill or Browning and pronounce him as good as the latter? Or, to take less extreme cases, shall we compare the Spartan of one period, with his ideal of successful theft, with a Socrates or a Bruno dying for sake of what they believed to be the truth, and pronounce one no better than the other? No one denies the right of the individual to fix the significance of his own terms, provided he adheres to this significance consistently; but mankind thinks slowly and painfully, and the double purpose of language, in the communication of thought to others and the registration of it as a stepping-stone to our own further reasoning, is likely to be frustrated by a too peculiar use of terms. In Ethics, this question of expediency takes on a moral aspect; and Alexander's definition of absolute right and wrong as action in accordance with, or opposition to, a standard fixed by the age and nation is likely to lead to moral as well as intellectual confusion--to the excuse of wrong-doing because of circumstances, on the one hand, and the dogmatic assertion of infallibility on the other, or at least to the confusion of the ideal standard with the easy-going standard of the average man of his age.

But it is true that this criticism is scarcely conclusive alone. For the definitions criticised are on a line with the idea of progress as at each moment establishing the equilibrium of the society, and fulfil the demand for self-consistency. A criticism of the use, in ethical theory, of a continually changing standard of moral judgment, must concern the more fundamental idea of a continually established equilibrium.

To the practical considerations of the possible confusion of the ideal with the average standard through Alexander's idea of the judgment of an age by its own standard, it might be objected that the moral standard implied in his theory is not at all the average standard, but the standard as represented by the ideal in the mind of the good man of his age.[257]

To this may be answered that he whom we regard as the good man of his age is by no means necessarily in harmony with his age, as is proved by the persecution that many good men endure; and the statement that the good man is not in harmony with his age means that he does not represent the character of his society as a whole, and cannot, therefore, be said to express an attained equilibrium of the society. His sentiments and ideal are not the sentiments and ideal of the society as a whole considered as an adjustment of sentiments and ideals. If it be replied, to this, that the good men of their age who undergo persecution must be regarded, according to Alexander's theory, as only prospectively good,--as representing an ideal that has not yet been proved to be the victorious variety,[258] then we are driven to return to the conclusion that, by the good man of his age who represents the social equilibrium, Alexander designates, not the man who leads the moral van, or he who plans an advance, but he who is carried on by it, the man who represents the preponderating mass of opinion, the ideal of the majority or the average ideal; and the practical criticisms above made hold good. Whatever may be said of our judgment of a past age by present standards, the standard by which we judge present action is not at all the average standard, but the highest moral ideal we can discover; and in this fact lies the whole significance of Ethics.

Or there is another form in which Alexander combines his idea of the good man and that of a social equilibrium. According to this interpretation, the equilibrium the good man represents is not an actually attained equilibrium, but merely one that would be secured were his ideal universally carried out,--an equilibrium realized only in so far as men are good.[259] In this case, indeed, the ideal may be rescued from the reproach of representing only the average, easy-going morality; but, at the same time, all the remarks that make present morality absolute because it represents and maintains a present social equilibrium, and the argument in a line with such remarks that all maintenance of existence means adjustment to the conditions, or equilibrium, become inapplicable. It might be contended that the whole dilemma is avoided by Alexander in the assertion that wickedness has but little share in the life of society[260]--that is, that goodness prevails; but such a statement may be disputed, except as morality is judged by the average standard; and, in this case, the argument begs the question, and the old problem recurs. It may further be added that the action of the good man in any other sense cannot represent the course that would be followed by every man, were all men good like himself, for his action takes into consideration the fact that all men are not good like himself and is a compromise with inideal conditions.

There is, in fact, and has been up to the present time, no "full" equilibrium of any society as a whole, and certainly no absolute equilibrium such as must coexist with an absolute right, which would be its expression. Du Prel, to illustrate his conception of the evolution of the systems of the heavens, imagines a group of dancers, each of whom sets out to dance a figure of her own without reference to the movements of the others; and he points out that if, in all cases of collision, the colliding parties either withdraw from the group or else move from this point together, a harmony of movement must finally be attained.[261] We may conceive of momentary equilibrium of small portions of a society, just as, in the case of such a group of dancers, we may conceive of any moment as possibly representing an absence of collision in some one part of the company, although, in other parts, many collisions are taking place. But there is, at present, no general equilibrium of ideals, no common ideal for any society as a whole, but, on the contrary, a mass of conflicting ideals continually at war with one another; although, of course, there may be calculated an average ideal made up from all extremes, and there may be discerned a preponderating ideal in smaller portions of a society that form a body by themselves. The isolation of such portions is, however, only relative, and any equilibrium that can be spoken of as attained by them is most imperfect. The "good man," in so far as we regard his goodness as inherited, may be said to represent an equilibrium; but it is only the equilibrium of some one favored line of descent, and not an absolute, but a relative, equilibrium. In so far as we regard the "good man's" goodness as the further result of especial association with good men, it may be, to a large extent, in harmony with their ideals, and may hence represent a certain equilibrium among men who preserve themselves from intimacy with individuals of low ideals or only average morality, thus forming a partly isolated body; but this equilibrium, again, is only a relative equilibrium, just as the isolation of the group is only partial. If our definition of morality is progressive and not statical, the good man must be he who leads the advance. But such a man is not representative of his society as a whole.

Alexander regards the infliction of incidental pains as of little consequence for the absolute rightness of conduct. But the necessity of these pains has a reactive influence on character. That, in order to do the work which I can do best and which, therefore, I ought to do for society, I must pass many beggars in the street without inquiry into their cases, and much misery of all sorts without materially lessening it, has a certain detrimental result to myself. All pain, the sight of which is endured without the taking of active measures for its alleviation, vitiates the sympathies; and, on the other hand, a certain hardness of heart is necessary to the endurance of mere existence, at the present time; a certain selfishness to the enjoyment even of a life spent in moral effort; for perfect sympathy would make life unbearable in sight and hearing of the suffering of many of our fellow-creatures. The need for self-defence has been felt at all stages of the world's progress--in olden times for self-defence of a brutal sort, in modern days for a less and less brutal self-defence; such self-defence is at present imperative, lest the yielding to one person result not only in a lack of fulfilment of our own duties to others than the one, but also in the strengthening, in that one, of a selfishness and dogmatism which may issue in further evil to others. And yet all resistance, where and in so far as carried out, vitiates temper and benevolence.

Alexander's position is positivistic in that it aims not to go beyond the facts; and this position might seem to lead naturally to the judgment of each age by a standard possible to the individuals of that age, that is, existent, in some form, in the society judged; and it might seem to lead, also, to the assertion of an absolute right where the existence of wrong is unfelt. But to this might be answered that, as soon as the higher standard does exist, the wrong may be judged by it; and that the judgment of a right as yet including elements of wrong implies the existence of another and higher standard as one of the facts. If Du Prel's company of dancers were automata, incapable of forecasting collisions, we might regard a momentary absence of collision in some one part of the company, from the standpoint of the automata concerned, as absolute equilibrium, since our judgment would have no regard to the rest of the company or the next move of the figures at present in equilibrium. But human beings are not automata, and the theory which regards the moral evolution from the standpoint of the ideals actually existent in society must take into consideration the actual realization which enters into the practical ideals of a large part of society, of the contrast of those ideals with a conceived higher standard at present impracticable. It is true that the consciousness of past ages, not comprehending in so great a degree the complexity of human interests, or looking so far into the future to distant results as does present mankind, had not so strong a sense of this contrast. But the contrast has arisen, was vaguely conceived even in far-distant times, and has continually grown more definite and pronounced in human thought. So far from its being true, as Professor Alexander conceives, that conscience always asserts the possibility of an absolutely right course,[262] it may be said that, although doubtless the mind always conceives, amongst the courses open to choice, some best course, there is a growing realization of the evil to conduct and character, of self and others, involved in any course possible under present conditions. The assertion of an absolute right, with an exact boundary-line dividing it from wrong, belongs to past Ethics; the appreciation of present evil doubtless differs in degree in different persons; but it is increasing both in extent and in intent, and is the explanation of the tendency to believe the present age worse than all past ages. It is not the sign of growing evil, but is, on the contrary, a part of a growing good; nevertheless, it registers the existence of present evil. There are few men of the present date, excepting the very young and exceptionally healthy and happy, who would agree with Alexander, that "it is ridiculous to suppose that wickedness occupies a considerable space in the life of a society."

Professor Alexander himself acknowledges the progress of society towards a state of good that shall be good not for a part of the human race merely but for the whole; and he recognizes also the fact that this extension of the ideal to the whole race means a progress in intent also. Such an ultimate state is certainly not ultimate in the sense that it is eternal; but it may be considered permanent in the same sense as the equilibrium of the solar system is permanent--in the sense that it remains practically the same for a period long to human thought. It expresses a perfect, though not an absolute, equilibrium. As such, it does not involve absolute happiness any more than absolute preservation of existence, immortality: it implies only the reduction of pain to a minimum through increasing wisdom and sympathy; through the endeavor, on the one hand, of a far-seeing and sympathetic society to protect the individual from disappointment, and through such increase, on the other, of the ethical pleasures that what Alexander terms "incidental pains" become inappreciable by contrast.

The evolution of human society is not an evolution of one state or country alone but of the habitable globe; a condition of full equilibrium can be reached only when, in one way or another, all countries are gathered into the circle of civilization and sympathy. Until this happens, the isolation of single societies must be repeatedly broken in upon and the process of equilibration disturbed by the introduction of new elements to which adjustment must take place; the new adjustment being in the sense of progress towards a higher system of equilibrium, that is, one of more elements, and the whole process constituting a continual progress in the direction of a full stability of Life upon the earth. While despotisms exist to pour into other, freer countries their hunted and miserable subjects, unused to the responsibilities of self-government, and often as unfit for peace as is the dog who has been always chained and tormented, democracy must feel the evils of tyranny even in her own system. While uncivilized, or mentally, morally, and physically degraded human beings exist in one country, men in other parts of the world are not secure from contact either directly with these lowest orders, or, at least, with those who have been rendered less honorable or more callous to suffering by their influence or habituation to their suffering. And while war rouses hatred, and hatred results in war, there will also be, in societies, internal fluctuations, jealousies, hatreds. Lack of sympathy, violence, or indifference to suffering in one respect or direction is likely to be accompanied by lack of sympathy, violence, indifference, in other respects: while, again, violence is likely to beget violence, indifference indifference, between individuals, classes, parties, or nations. Different degrees of progress may be visible in different countries; but the more facilities of communication increase, the more inevitable it will become that the evils existing in any one nation will affect all, as also that the progress of any one nation will affect all; in other words, progress must tend, more and more, to equalization in all countries. Fechner's ideas of the Tendency to Stability thus explain the loss of Greek and Roman civilization, as well as the insoluble mystery which Wallace finds in the fact of the attainment of greatness among earlier peoples, there being "no agency at work, then or now,[263] calculated to do more than weed out the lower types."[264]

Increasing sympathy is a continual accompaniment of the increasingly close relations of men to each other through the gradual peopling of all parts of the earth, but especially through the increasing facilities of communication by which the distant is brought into contact with us; but the sympathy is of gradual growth, and the continual renewal of the struggle for existence induces renewed evils, so that it might seem, at first glance, as if the evil must continue indefinitely and undiminished, only changing its form. As long as no absolute equilibrium has been attained, doubtless evil of some sort must exist; change is inevitably accompanied by disadvantages as well as advantages, everywhere. But several facts are to be noticed. First: The statement which has often been made, that the severity of the struggle for existence is increased in the social state and grows with the growth of society, is erroneous. That is to say, more is doubtless continually demanded of the individual, but it is no abstract "principle" or "law" outside man which makes this demand: it is the increased power of the average of society which makes it; or, that is, the increased requirements of the age are met with increased capacity, and this would still remain true if we reckoned capacity as merely dependent upon the inheritance of knowledge and implements. Cooeperation increases resources; and the average length of life is shown to increase with the progress of civilization. There is a lagging minority who suffer, for one reason or another, in the advance; these represent the inherently inferior types, or the types which suffer temporarily from outer disadvantage. The evils of competition in human society are not greater, they are simply more evident to human beings than the evils elsewhere in nature. The tragedies of the woods are bloody but short; death puts a speedy end to sufferings, and the earth quickly hides the victims. In society, on the other hand, cooeperation preserves not only the aged and feeble, the deformed and idiotic, of the more privileged classes; it even suffices to enable the most miserable to drag out a forlorn existence somewhat longer. It forbids the mother who finds her child a burden simply to leave it by the roadside as the savage mother does, and it will give a penny or two against starvation where it will not bestow enough for comfort. This prolongation of suffering is thus the sign of an increased but not yet sufficient sympathy; in other words, evil not only changes its form with social evolution; it also gradually loses its force. To suppose, indeed, that renewed progress must always be attended with as great evils as to-day attend it, is to make the erroneous supposition that character has no constancy, and the sympathy for one's fellow-men gained in one relation will wholly fail to act in others.

Again, it might possibly be thought that increase in density of population, even as condition of the closer contact necessary to increase of sympathy, must go on ad infinitum, with ever-increasing, or at least ever-renewed, misery, until the individual be left with barely standing-room; indeed, the picture of such a denouement has occasionally been drawn. But it is to be remembered that the conditions of mutual comprehension, dependence, and sympathy, come to lie, in later social stages, less and less in mere density of population and more and more in those many devices of modern life which we have termed means of communication. The increase of the human species must tend, in time, to self-correction; the only alternative is the extinction of the race through growing unhealthfulness of conditions. But this alternative is an impossibility; the human species cannot be annihilated as a whole except through some catastrophic event which interferes with the present course of evolution by the destruction of the earth--or through that final gradual decay which must accompany the earth's decline in power of nourishment. From internal causes we cannot expect the species to perish; for again in this case it is impossible that a struggle should be continued until the last individuals are destroyed. Indeed, the idea of destruction through insanitary crowding gives us at once a contradiction of the supposition of limitless increase, and a partial solution of the question. But the later and higher solution of the question is another. The fittest will survive; and the fittest will be those who perceive the evils of overcrowding and take active measures to avoid it. The fittest will be those who perceive that they are acting for the good of their children, and that of society as a whole, if they do not bring into the world more offspring than they can furnish with a healthy constitution, good moral training, and a sufficient education for self-support and comfort under conditions of normal labor. The term "health" is not an absolute one; but if we once suppose a start made in the direction of the decrease of pressure, we must suppose, other things being equal, that those lines of descent and parts of society in which it arises will be favored in the struggle for existence, and will come to supplant other parts. To suppose that the increase of pressure can go on ad infinitum is, indeed, to reckon--if we look at the matter from the purely psychological side--without man's reason. Social development and moral theory have not favored any limitation of progeny as long as population was sparse. But certain facts are beginning to be recognized: (1) that the propagation of their kind by the criminally constituted and by the hopelessly diseased is immoral; (2) that the propagation of offspring to such poverty and ignorance as stunts them physically, and makes their entrance into the criminal or pauper classes a probability, is also immoral; and (3) that duty does not demand of men and women that they shall sacrifice health and happiness, and drag out a miserable, overworked, joyless existence in illy rearing an over-large and probably weakly family. The greatest favor, privilege, and luxury that parents can confer upon children is that of health, and the next greatest is that of healthy parents, neither ill-tempered with care nor morbid and dull with overwork, but alert to perceive and ready to sympathize in all their trials and aspirations, and endowed with sufficient leisure to give some attention to that quite as important duty as child-bearing--the character-training of children. Selfishness is, of course, possible in the direction of limitation of increase as in every other direction, and in this case it must defeat the end to a great extent; but such selfishness must tend to correct itself as sympathy develops and society, in its approval, recognizes and demands more and more what is for the good of all.

The course of our reasoning does not pretend to predict an absolute social equilibrium, which must include the immortality of man on the earth, together with the prevention of every accident and of every disappointment whatsoever. A word has already been said as to the probable necessity of the death of the individual; and with death are given also disease and age and their attendant mental evils. We may suppose, however, under an increased healthfulness of general conditions, an increase of vitality which shall make death, in an ever greater proportion of cases, rather the issue of a gradual failure of the powers than the result of violent illness. That the tendency is in this direction is demonstrated by the gradual increase of the length of life. A high degree of mental, moral, and physical harmony in human society is no more "wonderful" or inconceivable than the high degree of harmony already attained in the movements of our own solar system. On the one hand, social progress means the attainment of results which call less and less for reform; and, on the other hand, we are accustoming ourselves to social change; reforms, the like of which would once have convulsed the world are now accomplished with little inconvenience, and we are able to go forward with a rapidity of which no former age was capable.

We may look at social development from still another point of view, as a process by which the preservation of the individual gradually becomes cooerdinate with the preservation and welfare of the species. Darwin surmises that the work of the benevolent or intellectually great man for his people may be as important for its welfare and the determination of its conquest in the struggle for existence as is the propagation of offspring. As social organization progresses, and the relations of men become more intimate and complex, all the acts of the individual grow to be of greater and greater significance for his kind, while, reciprocally, the health and happiness of the individual increase in importance for his kind. And thus, from both sides, virtue and health, virtue and happiness, also tend towards coincidence in the individual life, and environment comes more and more to favor the virtuous. Sympathy, which is for the general good in many relations, increases in strength as inward characteristic and acts with more and more certainty and universality, so that the society which has been merciful and helpful in a degree towards many individuals comes to show mercy and helpfulness in a greater degree, and with more uniformity, towards more and more individuals; while, at the same time, the welfare and the happiness of the individual become more and more cooerdinate with the welfare of society as a whole, and the latter is accordingly more universally sought. This does not necessarily mean that it is sought from motives of self-interest; on the contrary, as society progresses, the individual is more and more moulded to such harmony with its needs that he finds his happiness in seeking its welfare.

The earlier punishments of offenders were extreme and cruel; the majority, in endeavoring to protect itself, had little regard for the individual, as the individual also had little regard for the welfare of the majority. With social progress, however, the majority become more humane even towards their enemy, the criminal. The checks which the fear of extreme physical punishment alone could impose at an earlier period are gradually succeeded by the checks furnished in the approval and disapproval of society as a whole, and of those to whom the individual is bound by ties of affection and of respect. That is, in the sympathetic feelings themselves a dependence on others is developed which acts as an effectual preventive and stimulus, and must become more and more effectual as society advances and the range of sympathy widens. This increasingly altruistic form of even the checks to evil is taken no account of by the pessimist. As the necessity for severity decreases, severity even in social disapproval must lessen; as the individual comes to yield more readily and promptly to a slight spur, extremer methods will be discarded. Thus fear will be, by degrees, replaced by hope. This development is seen not only in sectarian matters but also in the history of religious thought; nearly every religion has had its heaven and its hell, but with social progress and the broadening of sympathy, the hell falls more and more into disrepute, the motive of heavenly reward being rather emphasized.

As sympathy broadens, we come to feel, not alone pain at the pain of others, but in an increased degree and with regard to ever wider circles, pleasure also in their pleasure. The altruistic pleasure afforded by the relief of pain, as the more necessary to the preservation of existence, has been the earliest developed. A great good in its province, it may contain, nevertheless, an element of vanity that opposes itself to a further evolution. There is no doubt that a certain kind of benevolence would greatly miss the gratification and self-aggrandizement experienced in the relief of poverty and suffering. The higher but not yet so universal capacity is that of rejoicing in others' good and happiness as well as sympathizing in their sorrow. This capacity shows itself as yet chiefly in the more intimate relations of love and friendship. In these, too, the influence of approval and disapproval is powerful, and the pleasure we give a friend in being worthy of his esteem may make our best happiness. Here we have a hint of an increasing union of love for the individual and love for the ideal which must tend to raise friendship itself to the highest plane.

As a result of our considerations, we may deny the truth of Rolph's assertion that the stimulus of want will be forever necessary in order to secure exertion--that is, if by want is meant misery or great pain of any sort; if merely desire is meant, which the anticipation and early accomplishment of satisfaction may prevent from becoming pain, we may admit the statement. In this case, however, the argument which Rolph deduces against the possibility of a final state of social harmony is invalid.

But it is not the intention of our argument to assert that all desires without exception will be fulfilled in any future condition of society. What may be said is that, in an increasing degree, sympathy will endeavor to satisfy the wants of the individual, while, on the other hand, the approval and fellow-feeling of society, and the consciousness of having performed his duty, will come to represent to the individual, in a greater and greater degree, recompense for personal loss. This change of direction in desire and gratification is no weakening of it: it is no more necessarily true that the man of perfect principle is poorer in emotion than the man whose passions lead him to sacrifice his fellow men than it is true that the average man of civilized society is poorer in emotion than the brutal savage. Merely, human evolution is a continual development of higher and more complex emotions, which rise into force on the proper occasion to modify the more primitive ones, or, more accurately speaking, the lower emotions of the savage themselves take on a higher form through organization with later ones.

Spencer, in criticising theories of altruistic morals, endeavors to show that time and energy are lost in the distribution, through others, of the happiness or means of happiness which might with more profit, because a better understanding of need, be sought by the individual himself; and he remarks, that it is a question how much of the happiness which means also vitality the individual may rightly sacrifice to society. But the refusal of individuals to sacrifice anything of personal gratification must lead, under present conditions of desire, to extreme sacrifice on the part of other individuals; so that the principle of the illegitimacy of sacrifice logically contradicts itself. It is not perfectly clear what is meant by a "division and redistribution" of happiness, or the means of happiness, against which Spencer directs his argument. It is probable that the author has in mind, and is especially opposing, a particular school of theorists whose ideas we will consider later on. Suffice it to say, at this point, that social harmony can never be reached by the stubborn continuance of each in his line of inharmonious conduct, but can only be attained by such gradual moulding of habit and desire that by natural organization individuals will come to be in harmony with each other. It is the history of social evolution that the individual, though always determining what are his own needs, as it is obvious that he can best do, is increasingly aided in satisfying them by cooeperation, while he also gives increasing aid in return. Against the list of the advantages of egoism enumerated by Spencer and others, I would muster the advantages of altruism, for by cooeperation alone can the individual attain the pleasures which now so often lie beyond his reach; by it alone can society attain a higher plane; and the pleasures of altruism are the highest and the most unfailing. The selfish man will suffer disappointment and loss as well as the benevolent man, and he will lack the refuge of sympathy and of the power to find happiness in the happiness of others. What man who has felt the joys of sympathy would exchange even the hardships it brings for the brutal liberty and unmoved selfishness of the savage! what man who has known the joys of the higher, the more unselfish love, would exchange them for the ungoverned and quickly-palling pleasures of the profligate! These joys first lend life worth and meaning; through association and altruism, cooeperation in action and feeling, man first becomes a power in the world. Yet the man who is capable of the higher sympathy is incapable of a selfish calculation of its personal advantages to him.

Wundt has an objection to Evolutional Ethics as it is understood by this treatise, on the score of the assumptions with regard to moral inheritance involved. "How, out of tendencies stored up in the nervous system, moral conceptions arise, is, and remains, a mystery," he says.[265] The problem is nothing more or less than that of the connection of brain-function and psychical process, in inheritance; and we may say again that we no more perceive the necessity of explaining the "how" of this before accepting the evident facts, than we see the necessity of explaining, in the same sense, the connection between light and heat, or between the seen vibrations and the heard note. Moreover, the "mystery" belongs as much to the conservation of character in the individual life as to its conservation in the race; if an explanation be necessary before acceptance of the facts in the one case, it is assuredly necessary in the other also; and its necessity must be fatal to Physiological Psychology. It is time that that ancient scarecrow of superstition, "a mystery," were removed from the field of science. When Wundt further proceeds to interpret Spencer's theory of heredity as one of the inheritance of distinct and definite ideas in their original form, he reads into the theory what Spencer himself, with his conceptions of instinct and reflex action, never put there, and what, moreover, no modern writer on philosophy has distinctly asserted. This present treatise is much more open to Wundt's criticism than is Spencer's work, though it makes no positive assertion as to the nature of "instinct" and so-called "automatism," but leaves the question as to their unconscious character open. The appearance of common psychical phenomena at the period of puberty, and with characteristics peculiar, moreover, to the particular lines of descent, would be enough to establish the fact of heredity, if no other testimony were forthcoming; and yet no one can "explain" the sudden appearance of these phenomena at a certain age.

But the most of the objections to Evolutional Ethics are not on such score as this. A while ago, the conservatives in Ethics declared that the theory of Evolution, even if true, had nothing to do with morals, which occupied a region far above the plane of science. Now, the most of the conservative schools content themselves with merely asserting that evolution may be true even in application to Ethics, but that it is useless in this province, since it adds nothing of value to theory or practice. It may be well to examine into this assertion. A priori, we could scarcely suppose that increased knowledge in any branch could fail to be of importance to that branch and to affect it in some manner. Knowledge is power, and we should presume not less so in Ethics than in any other science.

The assertion that Evolution adds nothing to theory would indeed be as just with regard to other sciences as with regard to Ethics; or, rather, it would be more just with regard to the natural sciences. For they at least recognized, before the appearance of the theory of Evolution, the element of constancy ordinarily called law, and attempted to formulate this constancy as a basis of thought and action. To these concepts of constancy and the predictions founded upon them, the theory of Evolution merely added greater certainty and a more extended range, supplying the bond of union between various branches, and showing the inner relation of many before disconnected theories; its whole force was one of clarification. But the work of Evolution for Ethics, though of a similar nature, has been of even greater degree and significance; it has unified and clarified the attempts made to discover a basis for moral principles and has rendered that foundation for the first time secure; it has cleared away, with one sweep, the rubbish of ancient superstition, made exact methods possible, and raised Ethics to the plane of a Science. If it had added anything absolutely new and entirely unconnected with previous theory, it would be as unintelligible to us as Calculus to a Fiji-Islander; if it had no intimate and vital connection with foregoing ideas, it would meet with no comprehension or acceptance. Science, too, is an evolution, not a creation. The value of the theory of Evolution lies in the very fact that it is simply an addition, though a large one, to previous thought, a higher phase of conception which rises naturally out of the old. But the cavillers say on the one hand: "It teaches a theory of conscience as instinct, therefore we may still cling to the old and unaltered doctrine of the veiled and sacred 'mystery of Feeling'"; and on the other hand: "We already accepted a basis of reason and Utility, therefore our theory, not being overthrown, needs no alteration." Both schools forget that, in science as elsewhere, the new develops from the old, but evolution brings with it, nevertheless, a difference of degree that finally issues in difference of kind. It has been said even by one belonging to the advanced school of Ethics, that, if the course of Evolution could be shown to prescribe immoral conduct, the duty of the moral man would be to oppose evolution even if he perished in the attempt. The conception which lies at the basis of this assertion is as erroneous as that which asserts that man must go forward on the path taken by evolution whether he will or no.[266] To suppose the will of society opposing the course of Evolution is to suppose a self-contradiction. Nature and man's will are not two different things in this process; man is the part of nature which is involved in the evolution considered. Our prediction of the direction of social development is a prediction of his will; he will will in certain ways constant in the broad sense in which all nature is constant, constant as character and reason are constant. The individual has assuredly the power to oppose himself to all other individuals, if he so wills; and his influence will not be lost; but it is exactly this willing and the mutual influence of individuals upon each other which the theory of Evolution, as applied to Ethics, endeavors to take into account. The result in prediction cannot be properly likened, as it is likened by Stephen,[267] to the inference of the future of an organic whole from its present parts. It does not define the progress in society as a whole from a study of the individual; it is, on the contrary, an inference of the future of the whole from its past and present considered in the light of general natural laws, and is as legitimate as the computation of the future position of heavenly bodies from their observed past movements and present position; though we can doubtless make only general predictions from general observations. Or, if we approach the question from another side, we may say that the science of Ethics endeavors to ascertain the ideal by which the welfare of all may be attained, and that the solution of this problem cannot be given otherwise than through rules for the attainment of the general health in the broadest sense of the word; for this corresponds to a final harmony of desires through survival of the fittest.

The power of prediction is, thus, evidently not to be interpreted as if the evolution of morality would go on except through the human will, and through this will in individuals. In any assertion to the contrary, the same old contradictory division is assumed, of nature as active opposed to nature as passive; man is first regarded as a part of nature and then again as outside nature and compelled by it. We divide him into two parts: the one necessarily coincident with the nature in himself, the other antagonistic to it; the one absolutely passive, the other active; and yet these two are the same, and we regard them as the same from other points of view. Nor does prediction impose any "laws" upon the will from without; it is simply inference from the observed relations in the action of individuals: it does not create or alter those relations. It reckons, not from man as compelled by "Necessity," but from man as possessing will and acting from reason. If man is reasonable, he will perceive that it is for the good of himself as well as for that of the rest of his race to attain a state of harmony; as he is reasonable, he will perceive that social progress is for his benefit as well as for that of others. The increasing solidarity of society continually rendering progress desirable, and the line of the fittest, that is, of those who will in a manner that best fits them for social conditions, continually tending to coincidence with the line of moral progress, the final triumph of the moral is assured. It is not in any way denied that man chooses this course of advancement. On the contrary, wherever we begin in our analysis, we come round finally to the variation of reason, emotion, and will.

As above noticed, the false interpretation of the significance of Evolutional Ethics on the subject of man's will in relation to progress sometimes gives rise to the opposite erroneous impression to that just noticed, to the impression, namely, that progress will go on whether men strive for it or not, and that it is of no particular consequence what the individual does, or at least that Evolutional Ethics can furnish nothing but statistics and predictions, never motives to right-doing. This confusion has caused much self-contradiction, has given rise to the most of the discussion on the subject of Absolute and Relative Ethics, and has impelled certain authors to close their books with something very like a half doubt of the efficacy of their own method except as one of observation. But the value of Evolutional Ethics lies not only in the fact that it goes deeper than any other system and analyzes more clearly the ground of moral conduct,--thus removing doubt with those who are open to conviction, and furnishing a less fallible criterion to those who desire to perceive where right lies in order to perform it,--but in that it also renders obvious the fact that conduct opposed to the welfare of society becomes, with time, more and more disadvantageous. The individual may escape punishment for his misdeeds: but the chances against him are greater, the greater these misdeeds and the longer they are persisted in; it is the "average of the line of moral progress" that is favored by natural selection. A system of Ethics is a part of the environment which acts on the individual; its force is no more lost than is that of any other part of the environment, although the result in the particular case will depend, also, on the character of the individual appealed to. But if Evolutional Ethics cannot bring any such force to bear on the individual as will change his character in an instant, rendering him apt and ready to act according to the ideal, whatever may have been his previous character, there is neither any other system of Ethics which can do this, and there has seldom been one so sanguine as to hope to do it. Theological Ethics, or rather, Theology, has asserted the possibility of such instant transformation, and the doctrine of Socrates that the knowledge of right will secure its performance is a much less extreme instance of a similar idea. But Evolutional Ethics, while rendering manifest the necessity of unceasing endeavor, affords us encouragement by its assurance of the possibility of progress, and its demonstration of the fact that the force of endeavor can no more be lost than any other force. It adds dignity to the smallest acts, and lends earnestness and worth to life. It neither contains any excuses for inaction nor leaves any reason open to pessimism except a selfish one; to the man to whom his own selfish gratification is all in all, the knowledge of social evolution is not a matter of encouragement and rejoicing; but to the lover of his kind it must be. Evolutional Ethics admonishes us to labor, yet teaches us the necessity of patience, since, however the individual will, nothing arises all at once, and the evolution of morals in society as a whole must, like all other evolutions, be a gradual, because a many-sided one. It admonishes us, too,--and this is well,--that we cannot sin without leaving ineffaceable stains upon our own character. The past is never dead, either in its results outside ourselves or in our habit; and it is not the drunkard only who one day awakens to find himself irrevocably moulded, by steps of habit so slight as to have been almost imperceptible, to that which he once loathed and detested. "Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness."[268] We may not be a mere spectator of the struggle for existence even if we will; the dead weight of inaction is itself a force opposed to other force. Willy, nilly, so long as we live we must bear the responsibility of taking a part for or against the progress and welfare of the world.

But there is, as I have said, a system which asserts the possibility of instant entire change of character, as well as of the forgiveness and obliteration of past sins. What manner of obliteration is this? Not the obliteration of the consequences of the acts, since that is impossible, but an obliteration of responsibility for them such that the doer may erase them from his conscience. The innocent on whom the evil results fall are, then, according to this view, the only ones who shall suffer for them. The doctrine of the Atonement takes away that sense of personal responsibility which is most essential to morality, and this removal of responsibility explains the ease with which Christians of all ages have combined a fervid religiosity with vice and crime. Christian theories of morals of the present day forbid the issue of indulgences; but the consciousness that full and free forgiveness is always waiting to receive the offender whenever he gets ready to repent, even if it is not until his death-bed, is most pernicious in its results. So we learn, for instance, that the "Mollie Maguires," a league formed in the mines of Pennsylvania a few years ago, for the express purpose of murder by cooeperation, were in the habit of opening their meetings with prayer, and of withdrawing regularly from the society, for one quarter of the year, to attend church, in order then to murder with an easy conscience for the other three quarters. The senior member of Conan Doyle's "Firm of Girdlestone" is no mere fiction of the imagination. I have no desire to join with those who pronounce all Christians, or everything in Christian doctrine, morally unsound; I only maintain that the doctrine of the Atonement is in itself pernicious, and is shown to be so by its easy reconciliation with evil action.

Theological Ethics is defective in other respects also. A system which represents God as accomplishing his own will in the world in "mysterious ways," to question which is sacrilege, has necessarily led to the excusing of much evil as punishment or discipline, and so to inaction against it. "Men can do so little themselves to make the world better," said a fervent Christian to me not long since; "we must leave these things to God." So, poverty has been held to be a mysterious dispensation of Providence which it was not necessary to do away with even if its abolishment were possible, but the slight alleviation of which was counted among the means of atonement for other sin. Thus it has been in other ways than in itself a curse to mankind, furnishing a sort of indulgence for the immoralities of the rich. Poverty has even been represented as a blessing, since it was to be compensated with double joy in the hereafter. The Christian, pointing the miserable and starving to Heaven as a recompense for pain, experienced, without largely inconveniencing himself, a sense of his own piety and desert, and exerting himself to no radical cure but only to a meagre dole of charity, shifted all responsibility of the cure or its omission, by prayer, to God. So Salter is led to exclaim: "If we must pray, let us pray to men; for there all the trouble lies. Could you, O churches, but open the hearts of your worshippers as you seek to move the heart of God, the need for all other prayer would soon be gone."[269]

Again, Theology has continually taught that man's first duty was to save his own soul from hell, and in this doctrine, ideas of repentance and redemption, faith and worship, have played a larger part than "mere morality." The tendency has, therefore, been towards an "other-worldliness," an egoism of the Hereafter, rather than a fulfilment of the commandment of love. Faith has been exalted above love of Truth, and blind obedience above reasoning morality. Thus it was that Christians entered, with such zeal, into the persecution of heretics. Had the commandment of justice: "do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," been followed, the Inquisition could never have taken place. But Christians forget, when they point to this commandment in evidence of the superiority of Christian Ethics, that it is not the only command or doctrine that the Bible contains. Nor is this conception of love to others, which Christians have continually cited as testimony of the divine origin of their religion, confined to Christianity or even original with it. Many other religions contain it. The Buddhist religion enjoins towards all creatures such love as that with which a mother "watches over her own child, her only child."

It is true that the majority of the objectionable points of Christian Ethics are found in the Old Testament. This testament is, however, accepted as the exponent of divine truth, though the authority it now possesses is slight in comparison with that which it formerly held. Yet Christ himself says: "Think not I am come to destroy the Law (i.e., the Pentateuch),[270] or the Prophets, I come not to destroy, but to fulfil. For, verily, I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." Repeatedly, Christ shows himself a strict conformant to the Jewish code. But if we examine the Pentateuch, the Jewish Law, we shall easily find on what grounds the burning of heretics and witches, and all the other cruelties of the Middle Ages were committed in the name of Christianity. Lubbock writes, for instance:[271] "Among the Jews, we find a system of animal sacrifice on a great scale, and symbols of human sacrifice which can, I think, only be understood on the hypothesis that the latter were once usual. The case of Jephthah's daughter is generally looked upon as exceptional; but the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth verses of the twenty-seventh chapter of Leviticus appear to indicate that human sacrifices were at one time habitual, among the Jews." See also 2 Sam. xxi. 1, 5-9, 14. In Lev. xx. 27; Ex. xxii. 18, the stoning of witches is commanded. In Ex. xxii. 20; Deut. xiii. 1-5, 6-10, 14, 15; xvii. 1-5; xviii. 20, it was commanded that men be put to death for idolatry or heresy or for "dreaming dreams" in the service of another god, and that idolatrous cities should be utterly destroyed even to the cattle within them. Superstition and insanity must have fared ill among the Jews. Ex. xxxi. 14, 15; xxxv. 2, 3; sentence of death is pronounced on any who shall perform even so much labor as the kindling of a fire on the Sabbath; and Num. xv. 32-36, describe how a man was put to death, by God's command to Moses, for gathering sticks on that day. Death was also commanded for murmuring and for all sorts of ceremonial offences; see, for instance, Ex. xii. 15, 19; xxx. 33-38; Lev. vii. 20-27; xvii. 8-10, 13-16; xix. 5-8; xxiii. 29, 30; xxiv. 10-16, 23; Num. i. 51; iii. 10, 38; iv. 15, 18-20; xi. 1; xvii. 13; xviii. 3, 7, 22; see also especially Deut. xxviii. 15-68; xxxii. 22-42. Command of subjection to the priesthood on pain of death is found in Deut. xvii. 8-12, and examples of fearful punishment for protest against its supremacy are given in Num. xvi. 3-15, 20, 21, 26-35, 41-47, 49. It may be noticed, that here the children are represented as perishing with the parents by God's express command and miracle. Many instances of the stoning and putting to death of whole families for the sins of some member or members of the family are recorded in the Old Testament, and prove that the expression "visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation," is not to be interpreted as a mere reference to heredity, as many have endeavored to prove it to be. See on this point Is. xiv. 21; also Ps. cix. 7-20; cxxxvii. 9. The origin of ordeals may be traced to Num. v. 11-31.

The Old Testament also sanctions slavery, and makes no protest against the selling of children into slavery; see Ex. xxi. 2-6, 7; Lev. xxv. 44-47; although the Israelites were to treat slaves and servants of their own nation with much greater kindness than that used towards those of other nations. Ex. xxi. 20, 21, prescribes that a man shall not be punished for beating his servant to death, provided the servant does not die directly under his hand, but linger a day or two; "for he is his money." Christians have often protested that their religion cannot be held responsible for the sins of the prophets,--for David's murder of Uriah in order to obtain the wife with whom he had already committed adultery; for his torture of the Ammonites with saws and axes and harrows and fire, and his houghing of the horses of a thousand Moabitish chariots; for Solomon's concubinage and his slaughter of Joab according to David's last orders; for Elijah's wholesale slaughter of the priests of Baal; or for the thousand other vices, crimes, and atrocities described in the Old Testament as committed by God's chosen men, generally without punishment or protest from him. However, the case is not so easily dismissed when we find just as great cruelties and atrocities directly ascribed to God's express command or miraculous interposition. A large number of such are included in the passages already noticed; and we further find descriptions of a destruction from God for the crime of census-taking[272]--1 Chron. xxi. 1, 11-15--for touching the ark in the endeavor to save it from a fall--2 Sam. vi. 6, 7,--and for many other trifling offences. God is always represented as favoring the Israelites in their wars and massacres, and often as commanding the slaughter of thousands; so that we can easily understand how it happened that the cowardly murderers of the Duke of Gloucester, in the time of Richard II., swore "upon the Body of Christ before a certain chaplain of St. George in the church of Our Lady of Calais, that they would not disclose the murder they were about to perpetrate,"[273] as also, on what precedent Russia, at the present day, has her war-engines blessed by priests of the "God of Battles." Deut. xx. 10-15, commands the slaughter of males captured in a siege, but the sparing alive of women and children as booty; and Num. xxxi. describes a case in which the command was carried out, with the reservation of a certain portion of young girls for the priests. See also Deut. xxi. 10-14. Furthermore, a religion that makes man absolute ruler of the earth and all living things, and sanctions animal sacrifice, cannot conduce to a sense of the duty of self-restraint towards other species, and is, in fact, often used as an excuse for the autocracy and cruelty of man.

It is, indeed, strange to see civilized peoples of the nineteenth century proclaiming the divine origin of laws and beliefs like these--laws and beliefs at least as barbarous as those of the Greeks and Romans whose gods the Christians deride, and far behind the Ethics of some philosophical systems produced among those "heathen" peoples. As has been said, various attempts have been made to explain away these barbarities, or to withdraw all responsibility for them from God, to whom the Old Testament often directly ascribes them. But in the light of what we know of other primitive peoples the customs of the Jews are only too easily comprehensible; the same barbarities of human and animal sacrifice, slavery, murder without pity, and unscrupulous cruelty of every sort, were to be found, as we have seen, among many other ancient peoples. As for withdrawing the responsibility from the God of the Jews, Christians forget that, in denying the divine origin of the cruel, brutal, and obscene laws ascribed to God together with other laws of less barbarity but of organic growth with these, they are forever destroying the grounds of belief in any assertion of divine supervision, and throwing doubt, by implication, on the New Testament as well, since Christ and his followers were believers in the Law and the Prophets, and often refer to their assertions and accounts of divine direction. But most religions have claimed, and do claim, the divine origin and ratification of their laws, as a means of enforcing them.

The God of the Jews, Jehovah, was originally a nature-god, the god of the heavens, like Zeus, Jupiter, and many other of the greatest gods of other peoples. Science has exploded ancient ideas of the sky; but the Christians still cling to the old terms brought into use at a time when men believed in a flat earth and a region of spirits above floored by an opaque heaven. The God of the Jews was, like the gods of all primitive peoples, a "jealous" and revengeful god, rather to be "feared" than loved; for to such peoples, possessing few resources against the powers of nature and ignorant of their character, the destructive forces of the elements appeared at first rather evil than good, and therefore to be conciliated and appeased; the gods take on their friendly character only as man comes to learn how the forces of nature may be employed for his benefit, and as he slowly attains, in himself, to sympathetic and moral feeling. Accordingly, the Jews were continually occupied with all manner of propitiatory offerings of their most valuable possessions--their herds and the fruits of the earth; and these were burnt under the impression common to nearly all primitive and savage tribes, that they suffered by fire a sort of death and entered the spiritual world. Gradually, the Jews became more civilized, and took on the higher ideals of Eastern religions with which they came in contact; but even to very recent date, the "fear" of God was regarded as the chief essential emotion on the part of the worshipper. Of late, as social ideals have become higher, and sympathy more general, the idea of love, lost for a time through the mixture of Eastern peoples with more barbaric ones, has come to the fore. That a doctrine of polytheism is clearly taught in Gen. iii. 22; vi. 1-4, Christians do not generally even notice. The idea of demigods, found in the latter verse, is called by them, when they meet with it in the Greek or Roman religion, a "myth"; and the idea of sexual intercourse between men and gods, also taught in these verses, is held worthy of all abhorrence, when these "heathen" religions are under consideration. The fact is, that exegesis, forced to advance by progressing civilization, has left far behind the simple original meaning of bible-texts,--such obvious meaning as Christians find in the Buddhist, Persian, or Egyptian Scriptures, when they peruse them. This is true of the New Testament as well as of the Old. The Christian religion has indeed developed into a system of Christian philosophy as different from the Christianity warranted by the Old and New Testaments as were the later Buddhist philosophies from original Buddhism.

When Christ conferred upon his Apostles the power to forgive sins, he laid the foundation for papal authority, and confirmed the ancient authority of the priesthood, preparing the way for that organization of priestcraft which figured so prominently in all the sorrowful history of the Middle Ages. Moreover, the vein of sadness and the subordination of natural modes of life which mark his teaching as they mark only in a greater degree those of the Buddha, easily led to the celibacy and mortification of the flesh which so long condemned the most aspiring from a moral point of view, the most gentle and conscientious, to a life of loneliness, and peopled the world with the progeny of the less moral. Indeed, if we read Matt. xix. 12 correctly, Christ distinctly taught emasculation as a high religious virtue.

The New Testament tolerated the slavery upheld by the Old Testament, and we not only find no protest whatever against it, but we even find Paul returning a runaway slave to his master. Not only Paul, but John also, taught both predestination and hell-fire for idolaters and unbelievers, as well as for the fearful and doubtful, equally with murderers, whoremongers, and liars: Rev. xvii. 8; xx. 15. Christ himself plainly proclaims the damnation of unbelievers--Matt. xxii. 13, 14; xxiii. 14, 33; Mark xvi. 16; etc.--and he at the same time asserts a very positive doctrine of predestination, avowing that he himself takes special pains that many of those to whom he preaches shall not be able to understand him, believe, and be saved: Mark iv. 11, 12; John xii. 39, 40. His language on these subjects is very clear, and bears no sign of being intended as figurative, though modern Christians prefer to regard it as such rather than to relinquish a religion the morals of which would, by other interpretation, be proved inadequate to the demands of the standards of higher civilization; the same method of exegesis applied to the sacred books of Confucianism or of Buddhism, from which it now appears probable that very many of the Christian ideas were derived, would suit them ill. But even if Christ's language were figurative, it must have some meaning; the wrath and vengeance of God are continually spoken of in the New Testament as well as in the Old. Such expressions were not looked upon, until of late, as figurative, and they doubtless did much to justify, to the minds of earlier Christians, the burning of heretics. The justification of all sin in God's elect, a permanent indulgence, is plainly taught by Paul, Rom. viii. 33; iv. 5-8; 1 Cor. vi. 12. Let us take the Buddhist Scriptures, and, in the light of the better passages, or in the light of Siddhartha's devotion to truth and to his fellow men, interpret the passages which, morally, we find wanting, and we shall find this religion as beautiful as the Christian.

A chief reason often advanced by Christians for continued faith in their religion, is the comfort conferred by a belief in immortality and the forgiveness of sins through Christ; that is, the rescue of men from the "wrath of God" through the offering of an innocent being, a "human sacrifice," which was to bear this wrath, and appease it, according to the old Jewish idea of the scapegoat. The morality of the last doctrine we have already condemned; there is no real making atonement in this world; we should recognize this fact, bear the responsibility of our deeds, and in the light of past experience, avoid the repetition of our old sins. And the moral question as to mortality or immortality is not: "What is the pleasanter to believe?" but "What is the truth?" In this recommendation of the pleasant in belief, we have but an illustration of one of the chief defects of Christian theory, which lays most stress upon faith and far less upon a love of the Truth at all costs. The peace of the Christian's death-bed is often made one of the chief arguments in favor of the Christian religion. But the mind in which there exists the noble love of truth will seek this only at the cost of all peace and blind content.

On the general connection of faith and morals, Clifford writes: "Belief in God and in a future life is a source of refined and elevated pleasure to those who can hold it. But the foregoing of a refined and elevated pleasure, because it appears that we have no right to indulge in it, is not in itself, and cannot produce as its consequences, a decline of morality."[274] Indeed, Christianity, as has been already remarked, and as is conclusively shown by any conscientious and unprejudiced examination of the Bible itself, leaves room for an ease of conscience and a self-excuse in even very great sins, which no high standard of morals can tolerate. How many of those who attend church regularly, on Sunday, are restrained by their religion from practising vice and injustice on week-days, under the consolation, if their conscience troubles them at all, that their prayers for forgiveness and the bestowal of charity, or even, in extremity, a death-bed "repentance" will make their peace with God? In place of an attempt at reparation towards men, against whom sin is really done, Christians are taught to seek the "forgiveness" of God. Some there are, indeed, who remember only the law of love and endeavor to follow it. All honor to them. But they are adherents of a modern Christian Philosophy, the product of many good men who have winnowed out the wheat of their religion and left the chaff; they are not followers of the Bible, or even of the New Testament, as a whole. Many there are who are perceiving this, and the old system needs replacement with a newer and higher--with a system which affords clear and evident grounds for moral action, leaves no room for mysticism, self-justification, or inaction, offers no opiate to conscience. Such a system must be founded on the solid rock of scientific Truth; not on any doctrine of blind obedience to traditions; it must take into account man's evolution, that it may progress with his progress.

Many term the Ethics of science dry and uninspiring, and turn, with preference, to religions which, if they give us mysticism or pessimism, give us poetry also; for man is an emotional as well as an intellectual being; and there may be much poetry in pessimism. But again, it may be said that the Truth is that which we should first seek. And especially let it be remembered that, if poetry is lacking, it may be that the deficiency is in ourselves. It is a history many times repeated, that men call their age and its ideas dry and uninteresting, and seek their ideals and inspirations in the past, until the master-mind arises, who boldly faces and interprets the realities about him; and then men exclaim and wonder, and find that their own blindness, and not the age, was at fault. We cling by habit to the old and fear the new; and so we have yet to inspire these new ideals with the beauty gained by association and habit; in themselves, they do not lack beauty. In truth, as I believe that there is more of poetry in the gray wires strung across our streets and guiding the swift, silent, fearful forces in which lies power to light a city or destroy a life, than ever was in any feeble-flamed Grecian lamp, so I believe also that, in the dry, hard, cold-seeming facts of modern science there lurks more poetry than all the ages gone have known; though we may need the poet to interpret it to us. The highest poetry is that of love; and it is the realization of this poetry that the Ethics of Evolution teaches, promises, and enjoins. Certainly the superficial Utilitarianism which looks only at external forms of government and customs and the arithmetically calculated relations of men, not at their inner character and the organic complexity of moral questions, cannot satisfy in the long run. Nor can the bald Materialism satisfy which, standing by its analysis in physical terms like the physiologist in the dissecting-room with his chemicals about him and the dead nerves and muscles in his hand, exclaims with a triumph that is half a sneer: "This is all." It is not all. The synthesis of nature and of life cannot be represented by its parts merely; the bond of organization wanting, all is wanting. Nor is the action in the brain more real, more forceful, more spontaneous, or freer, than the love for a friend, the thought of him, or the will to do him a kindness.

FOOTNOTES:

[256] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 292; Part I., this book, pp. 250, 251.

[257] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 287, etc.; Part I. p. 249, this book.

[258] "Moral Order and Progress," pp. 307, 312; Part I. pp. 250, 252, 253, this book.

[259] "Moral Order and Progress," Book I. Chap. II.; Part I. pp. 231, 232, this book.

[260] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 332.

[261] See "Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Weltalls."

[262] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 270; Part I., this book, p. 247.

[263] On the theory of Weismann.

[264] "Human Progress, Past and Present," "The Arena" for Jan., 1892.

[265] "Ethik," p. 344.

[266] See Part I. p. 147.

[267] "The Science of Ethics," pp. 32-34.

[268] George Eliot, "Romola."

[269] Salter, "Ethical Religion."

[270] It is strange that even enlightened Christians often, without thinking, interpret the "Scriptures" referred to by Christ as if they, in some way, included the New Testament, which was not written till long after his death.

[271] "The Origin of Civilization," p. 373.

[272] Superstitious fears are often awakened in savage tribes, and among the ignorant of our own more advanced societies, by attempts at census-taking.

[273] Pike, "History of Crime," I. p. 405.

[274] Essays and Lectures, "The Influence upon Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief."

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