19 In the present year Temple, a justice of the peace, would not accept the evidence of a woman from Rochdale because she refused to take the oath in the form prescribed, saying that <he did not believe in punishment in the world to come. Trelawney ( the >On of the celebrated friend
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Of course, David Hume and Gibbon did not pretend to mystical beliefs. But the England that listened to Owen in 1 8 1 7 was not the same in time or in profundity. The sense of understanding was no longer restricted to a choice circle of educated aristocrats and scholars. On the other hand, the country had spent fifteen years in a prison cell which Napoleon had locked upon it-in one way, it had moved out of the current of ideas, and in another, life had thrust forward a huge majority of that
'conglomerated mediocrity' of John Stuart Mill. In the new England a man like Byron or Shelley wanders as a foreigner; he begs the wind to carry him away, but not to his native shore; another man the judges, with the help of a family crazed with fanaticism, rob of his children because he does not believe in God.20
The intolerance, then, directed against Owen bestows no right to deduce the falsity or truth of his doctrine; it gives only a measure of the insanity, that is of the moral servitude, of England, and particularly of that stratum of the people that goes to public meetings and writes articles for the newspapers.
And now there turns up a freak who simply tells them straight, and even with a kind of offensive naivete, that all this is rubbish, that man is not at all a criminal par le droit de naissance, that he is as little responsible for himself as the other animals are and that, like them, he is not answerable to a court of law, but to his upbringing-very much so. And that is not alclass="underline" before the faces of magistrates and parsons, who have as the only foundation, the only sufficient reason for their existence, the Fall, the punishment and the remission of sins, he announces publicly that a man does not create his character himself; that he has only to be put, from the day of his birth, in such an environment that it would be possible for him not to be a rogue, and he would be quite a decent fellow. But now society, with a of Byron and Shelley) asked the Home Secretary in Parliament on 1 2th February what measures he proposed to take to set aside such refusals.
The Minister answered, None. Similar cases have occurred more than once-with, for instance, the well known publicist Holyoake. To take a false oath is becoming a necessity.
20 Shelley in 1 8 1 7. The reasons for the Lord Chancellor's depriving him of the right to bring up his children were his illegal tie with Mary Godwin and the atheistical views that he uttered in his works. (A.S.)
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pack of absurdities, steers him into crime, and people punish not the social system but the individual.
And did Owen really suppose that this was easy to understand?
Did he really not know that it was easier for us to imagine a cat hanged for muricide, and a dog awarded a collar of honour for zeal displayed in the capture of a concealed hare, than a child unpunished for a childish prank-to say nothing of a criminal? To reconcile oneself to the idea that to a venge the whole of society on a criminal is vile and stupid, to inflict on the criminal in full synod, in safety and cold blood, as much injury as he inflicted when he was frightened and in danger, is repellent and unavailing, horribly hard and uncongenial to our gills.
It is too abrupt!
In the timorous obstinacy of the masses, in their narrowminded bolstering up of what is old, in their tenacious conservatism there is a kind of recollection that the gallows and penance, capital punishment and the immortality of the soul, the fear of God and the fear of temporal authority, the criminal courts and the Last Judgment, the Tsar and the priest-all these were once huge steps ahead, huge strides upward, great Errungenschaften, scaffoldings on which men, straining themselves to the utmost, clambered up towards a tranquil life ; canoes which, although they did not know the course, they paddled to harbours where they might rest from the hard struggle with the elements, from the labours of earth and from deeds of blood ; where they might find leisure free from alarms, and a blessed idleness, these prerequisites for progress, liberty, art and consciousness.
In order to preserve their dearly won tranquillity, men surrounded their harbours with bugbears of all kinds and gave to their Tsar a rod in his hand to drive them on and to defend them, and to the priest the power to curse and bless.
·
A conquering tribe naturally enslaved the conquered, and on its slavery founded its own leisure, that is its development.
Properly speaking, it was by means of slavery that there began the State, education, human liberty. The instinct of self-preservation led to ferocious laws, and unbridled phantasy completed the rest. Tradition, handed on from generation to generation, wrapped the origins more and more in a rosy cloud, and the oppressive ruler, just like the oppressed slave, bowed in terror before the decalogue, and believed that it had been dictated by Jehovah on Sinai to the flash of lightning and crash of thunder, or instilled into an elect man by some parasitical spirit dwelling in his brain.
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If we reduce all the different corner-stones on which states have been built to the chief principles that liberate them from
\vhat is fantastic, what is childish, what appertains to their age, we shall see that they are constantly the very same, co-eternal with every church and every state: the forms and scenery alter but the principles are the same.
The savage punishment of the king of a hunting tribe in Africa, who with his own hands cuts the criminal's throat, is by no means so far away from the punishment of the judge who delegates the killing to another. The point is that neither the judge in ermine and a white wig, with a quill behind his ear, nor the naked African king, with a quill through his nose, and quite black, has any doubt that he is doing what he is doing for the salvation of society, and that in some cases he has not only the right to kill but a sacred duty to do so.
Beside the fear of freedom-the fear that children feel when they begin to walk \vithout leading-strings-beside the habituation to those mandates steeped in sweat and blood, to those boats which have become arks of salvation in which peoples have survived more than one rainy day, there are also strong buttresses supporting the dilapidated building. The backwardness of the masses on the one hand, who are incapable of understanding, and, on the other, self-interested fear, which prevents any comprehension of the minority's point of view-for a long time these will keep the old order on its feet. The educated classes are ready, against their convictions, to walk in a leash themselves if only the mob is not released from it.
This, in fact, would not be entirely without danger.
Below and above are different calendars. Above is the nineteenth century, and below perhaps the fifteenth: or even that is not at the very bottom-there are Hottentots and Kaffirs of different colours, breeds and climates.