Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress lest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can be no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minority of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect its abolition in the first lustrum of their political activity. The New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before giving to the assassin’s “unhand me villain!” the authority of law. So we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand failures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals. And the criminal uncaught will treat us to a quality of toughness notably augmented by the Christian spirit of the régime.

  II.

  As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them both just and popular is the adoption by murderers of a system of painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no hope that the people will renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions endeared to them by memories and associations of the tenderest character. There is also, I fancy, a shaping notion in the public mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prison has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at home. Modern prison life has in their eyes something of the charm and glamor of an ideal existence, like that in the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had the folly to escape. Whatever advantages to the public may be secured by abating the rigors of imprisonment and inconveniences incident to execution, there is this objection, it makes them less deterrent. Let the penologers and philanthrope, have their way and even hanging might be made so pleasant and withal so interesting a social distinction that it would deter nobody but the person hanged. Adopt the euthanasian method of electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow poisoning with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded as the object of a noble ambition to the bon vivant, and the rising young suicide may go and murder somebody else instead of himself in order to receive a happier dispatch than his own ‘prentice hand can assure him.

  But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in the darker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and was freely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was more common than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But they one and all overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant: that the intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very low. Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty was more common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority, were more common. The world of even a century ago was a quite different world from the world of today, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. The popular adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not by a long cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time of that early English king, George III, when women were burned at the stake in public for various offenses and men were hanged for “coining” and children for theft, and in the still remoter period, (circa 1530) when poisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone the pêne forte et dure of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since made popular — in literature) — in these wicked old days it is possible that crime flourished, not because of the law’s severity, but in spite of it. It is possible that our respected and respectable ancestors understood the situation as it then was a trifle better than we can understand it on the hither side of this gulf of years, and that they were not the reasonless barbarians that we think them to have been. And if they were, what must have been the unreason and barbarity of the criminal element with which they had to deal?

  I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted; but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the “pile” will be “complete” with a vengeance. There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps, in the fact that all these ideas for comfortable punishment should be urged at a time when there appears to be a tolerably general disposition to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, still a few old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious to break the laws of his country will not with as light a heart and as airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would select for himself.

  III.

  After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, given a new body, and restored to society. This was in the year 2015. The first thing of interest that I observed was an enormous building, covering a square mile of ground. It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong wall of hewn stone upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one face of the wall was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded. While admiring the cyclopean architecture of the “reverend pile” I was accosted by a man in uniform, evidently The Warden, with a cheerful salutation.

  “Colonel,” I said, pressing his hand, “it gives me pleasure to find some one that I can believe. Pray tell me what is this building.”

  “That,” said the colonel, “is the new State penitentiary. It is one of twelve, all alike.”

  “You surprise me,” I replied. “Surely the criminal element must have increased enormously.”

  “Yes, indeed,” he assented; “under the Reform régime, which began in your day, it became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests were no longer possible and the prisons then in existence were soon overcrowded. The State was compelled to erect others of greater capacity.”

  “But, Colonel,” I protested, “if the criminals were too bold and powerful to be taken into custody, of what use are the prisons! And how are they crowded?”

  He fixed upon me a look that I could not fail to interpret as expressing a doubt of my sanity. “What?” he said, “is it possible that the modern Penology is unknown to you? Do you suppose we practise the antiquated and ineffective method of shutting up the rascals? Sir, the growth of the criminal element has, as I said, compelled the erection of more and larger prisons. We have enough to hold comfortably all the honest men and women of the State. Within these protecting walls they carry on all the necessary vocations of life excepting commerce. That is necessarily in the hands of the rogues as before.”

  “Venerated representative of Reform,” I exclaimed, wringing his hand with effusion, “you are Knowledge, you are History, you are the Higher Education! We must talk further. Come, let us enter this benign edifice; you shall show me your dominion and instruct me in the rules. You shall propose me as an inmate.”

  I walked rapidly to the gate. When challenged by the sentinel, I turned to summon my instructor. He was nowhere visible: desolate and forbidding, as about the broken statue of Ozymandias,

  “The lone and level sands stretched far away.”

  RELIGION

  I.

  This is my ultimate and determining test of right—”What, in the circumstances, would Christ have done?” — the Christ of the New Testament, not the Christ of the commentators, theologians, priests and parsons. The test is perhaps not infallible, but it is exceedingly simple and gives as good practical results as any. I am not a Christian, but so far as I know, the best and truest and sweetest character in literature, is next to Buddha, Jesus Christ. He taught nothing new in goodness, for all goodness was ages old before he came; but with an almost infallib
le intuition he applied to life and conduct the entire law of righteousness. He was a lightning moral calculator: to his luminous intelligence the statement of the problem carried the solution — he could not hesitate, he seldom erred. That upon his deeds and words was founded a religion which in a debased form persists and even spreads to this day is mere attestation of his marvelous gift: adoration is a primitive mode of recognition.

  It seems a pity that this wonderful man had not a longer life under more complex conditions — conditions more nearly identical with those of the modern world and the future. One would like to be able to see, through the eyes of his biographers, his genius applied to more and more difficult questions. Yet one can hardly go wrong in inference of his thought and act. In many of the complexities and entanglements of modern affairs it is no easy matter to find an answer off-hand to the question,”What is it right to do?” But put it in another way: “What would Christ have done?” and lo! there is light. I Doubt spreads her bat-like wings and is away; the sun of truth springs into the sky, splendoring the path of right and marking that of error with a deeper shade.

  II.

  Gentlemen of the secular press dealt with the Rev. Mr. Sheldon not altogether fairly. To some very relevant considerations they gave no weight. It was not fair, for example, to say, as the distinguished editor of the “North American Review” did, that in professing to conduct a daily newspaper for a week as he conceived that Christ would have conducted it, Mr. Sheldon acted the part of “a notoriety seeking mountebank.” It seldom is fair to go into the question of motive, for that is something upon which one has the least light, even when the motive is one’s own. The motives that we think dominale us seem simple and obvious; they are in most instances exceedingly complex and obscure. Complacently surveying the wreck and ruin that he has wrought, even that great anarch, the “well meaning person,” can not have entire assurance that he meant as well as the disastrous results appear to him to show.

  The trouble with Mr. Harvey of the “Review” was inability to put himself in another’s place if that happened to be at any considerable distance from his own place. He made no allowance for the difference in the point of view — for the difference, that is, between his mind and the mind of Mr. Sheldon. If Mr. Harvey had undertaken to conduct that Kansas newspaper as Christ would have done he would indeed have been “a notoriety seeking mountebank,” or some similarly unenviable thing, for only a selfish purpose could persuade him to an obviously resultless work. But Mr. Sheldon was different — his was the religious mind — a mind having faith in an “overruling” Providence who can, and frequently does, interfere with the orderly relation of cause and effect, accomplishing an end by means otherwise inadequate to its production. Believing himself a faithful servant of that Power, and asking daily for its interposition for promotion of a highly moral purpose, why should he not have expected his favor to the enterprise? To expect that was, in Mr. Sheldon, natural, reasonable, wise; his folly lay in believing in conditions making it expectable. A person convinced that the law of gravitation is suspended is no fool for walking into a bog. Mr. Harvey may understand, but Mr. Sheldon can not understand, that Jesus Christ would not edit a newspaper at all.

  The religious mind, it should be understood, is not logical. It may acquire, as Whateley’s did, a certain familiarity with the syllogism as an abstraction, but of the syllogism’s practical application, its real relation to the phenomena of thought, the religious mind can know nothing. That is merely to say that the mind congenitally gifted with the power of logic and accessible to its light and leading does not take to religion, which is a matter, not of reason, but of feeling — not of the head, but of the heart. Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises. They are accepted or rejected according to the original mental make-up of the person to whom they appeal for recognition. Believers and unbelievers are like two boys quarreling across a wall. Each got to his place by means of a ladder. They may fight if they will, but neither can kick away the other’s support.

  Believing the things that he did believe, Mr. Sheldon was entirely right in thinking that the main purpose of a newspaper should be the salvation of souls. If his religious belief is true that should be the main purpose, not only of a newspaper, but of everything that has a purpose, or can be given one. If we have immortal souls and the consequences of our deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world, determining there our eternal state of happiness or pain, that is the most momentous fact conceivable. It is the only momentous fact; all others are chaff and rags. A man who, believing it to be a fact, does not make it the one purpose of his life to save his soul and the souls of others that are willing to be saved is a fool and a rogue. If he think that any part of this only needful work can be done by turning a newspaper into a gruelpot he ought to do so or (preferably) perish in the attempt.

  The talk of degrading the sacred name, and all that, is mostly nonsense. If one may not test his conduct in this life by reference to the highest standard that his religion affords it is not easy to see how religion is to be made anything but a mere body of doctrine. I do not think the Christian religion will ever be seriously discredited by an attempt to determine, even with too dim a light, what under given circumstances, the man miscalled its “founder” would do. What else is his great example good for? But it is not always enough to ask oneself, “How would Christ do this?” One should first consider whether Christ would do it. It is conceivable that certain of his thrifty contemporaries may have asked him how he would change money in the Temple.

  If Mr. Sheldon’s critics were unfair his defenders were, as a rule, not much better. They meant to be fair, but they had to be foolish. For example, there is the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, whose defence was published with Mr. Harvey’s attack. I shall give a single illustration of how this more celebrated than cerebrated “divine” is pleased to think that he thinks. He is replying to some one’s application to this matter of Christ’s injunction, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.” This command, he gravely says, “is not against money, nor against the making of money, but against the loving it for its own sake and the dedicating of it to self-aggrandizing uses.” I call this a foolish utterance, because it violates the good old rule of not telling an obvious falsehood. In no word nor syllable does Christ’s injunction give the least color of truth to the reverend gentleman’s “interpretation;” that is the reverend gentleman’s very own, and doubtless he feels an honest pride in it. It is the product of a controversial need — a characteristic attempt to crawl out of a hole in an enclosure which he was not invited to enter. The words need no “interpretation;” are capable of none; are as clear and unambiguous a proposition as language can frame. Moreover, they are consistent with all that we think we know of their author’s life and character, for he not only lived in poverty and taught poverty as a blessing, but commanded it as a duty and a means of salvation. The probable effect of universal obedience among those who adore him as a god is not at present an urgent question. I think even so faithful a disciple as the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst has still a place to lay his head, a little of the wherewithal to be clothed, and a good deal of the power of interpretation to excuse it.

  III.

  There are other hypocrites than those of the pulpit Dr. Gatling, the ingenious scoundrel who invented the gun that bears his name with commendable fortitude, says he has given much thought to the task of bringing the forces of war to such perfection that war will be no more. Commonly the man who talks of war becoming so destructive as to be impossible is only a harmless lunatic, but this fellow utters his cant to conceal his cupidity. If he thought there was any danger of the nations beating their swords into plowshares we should see him “take the stump” against agriculture forthwith. The same is true of all military inventors. They are lions’ parasites; themselves, of cold blood they fatten upon hot. The sheep-tick’s paler fare is not at all to their taste.

  I sometimes wish I were a preacher: pre
achers do so blindly ignore their shining opportunities. I am indifferently versed in theology — whereof, so help me Heaven, I do not believe one word — but know something of religion. I know, for example, that Jesus Christ was no soldier; that war has two essential features which did not command His approval: aggression and defence. No man can either attack or defend and remain Christian; and if no man, no nation. I could quote texts by the hour proving that Christ taught not only absolute abstention from violence but absolute non-resistance. Now what do we see? Nearly all the so-called Christian nations of the world sweating and groaning under their burdens of debt contracted in violation of these injunctions which they believe divine — contracted in perfecting their means of offense and defense. “We must have the best,” they cry; and if armor plates for ships were better when alloyed with silver, and guns if banded with gold, such armor plates would be put upon the ships, such guns would be freely made. No sooner does one nation adopt some rascal’s costly device for taking life or protecting it from the taker (and these soulless inventors will as readily sell the product of their malign ingenuity to one nation as to another) than all the rest either possess themselves of it or adopt something superior and more expensive; and so all pay the penalty for the sins of each. A hundred million dollars is a moderate estimate of what it has cost the world to abstain from strangling the infant Gatling in his cradle.