| Chapter 19
| 0 | |
| In the course of an early morning constitutional I visited
Charlestown. Among the changes, too numerous to attempt to
indicate, which mark the lapse of a century in that quarter, I
particularly noted the total disappearance of the old state prison.
| 1 | |
| "That went before my day, but I remember hearing about it,"
said Dr. Leete, when I alluded to the fact at the breakfast table.
"We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in
the hospitals."
| 2 | |
| "Of atavism!" I exclaimed, staring.
| 3 | |
| "Why, yes," replied Dr. Leete. "The idea of dealing punitively
with those unfortunates was given up at least fifty years ago, and
I think more."
| 4 | |
| "I don't quite understand you," I said. "Atavism in my day
was a word applied to the cases of persons in whom some trait of
a remote ancestor recurred in a noticeable manner. Am I to
understand that crime is nowadays looked upon as the recurrence
of an ancestral trait?"
| 5 | |
| "I beg your pardon," said Dr. Leete with a smile half
humorous, half deprecating, "but since you have so explicitly
asked the question, I am forced to say that the fact is precisely
that."
| 6 | |
| After what I had already learned of the moral contrasts
between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it was
doubtless absurd in me to begin to develop sensitiveness on the
subject, and probably if Dr. Leete had not spoken with that
apologetic air and Mrs. Leete and Edith shown a corresponding
embarrassment, I should not have flushed, as I was conscious I
did.
| 7 | |
| "I was not in much danger of being vain of my generation
before," I said; "but, really--"
| 8 | |
| "This is your generation, Mr. West," interposed Edith. "It is
the one in which you are living, you know, and it is only because
we are alive now that we call it ours."
| 9 | |
| "Thank you. I will try to think of it so," I said, and as my eyes
met hers their expression quite cured my senseless sensitiveness.
"After all," I said, with a laugh, "I was brought up a Calvinist,
and ought not to be startled to hear crime spoken of as an
ancestral trait."
| 10 | |
| "In point of fact," said Dr. Leete, "our use of the word is no
reflection at all on your generation, if, begging Edith's pardon,
we may call it yours, so far as seeming to imply that we think
ourselves, apart from our circumstances, better than you were. In
your day fully nineteen twentieths of the crime, using the word
broadly to include all sorts of misdemeanors, resulted from the
inequality in the possessions of individuals; want tempted the
poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains,
tempted the well-to-do. Directly or indirectly, the desire for
money, which then meant every good thing, was the motive of
all this crime, the taproot of a vast poison growth, which the
machinery of law, courts, and police could barely prevent from
choking your civilization outright. When we made the nation
the sole trustee of the wealth of the people, and guaranteed to
all abundant maintenance, on the one hand abolishing want,
and on the other checking the accumulation of riches, we cut
this root, and the poison tree that overshadowed your society
withered, like Jonah's gourd, in a day. As for the comparatively
small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with
any idea of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your
day, to the ignorant and bestial; and in these days, when
education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but
universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of. You now see
why the word `atavism' is used for crime. It is because nearly all
forms of crime known to you are motiveless now, and when they
appear can only be explained as the outcropping of ancestral
traits. You used to call persons who stole, evidently without any
rational motive, kleptomaniacs, and when the case was clear
deemed it absurd to punish them as thieves. Your attitude
toward the genuine kleptomaniac is precisely ours toward the
victim of atavism, an attitude of compassion and firm but gentle
restraint."
| 11 | |
| "Your courts must have an easy time of it," I observed. "With
no private property to speak of, no disputes between citizens
over business relations, no real estate to divide or debts to
collect, there must be absolutely no civil business at all for them;
and with no offenses against property, and mighty few of any
sort to provide criminal cases, I should think you might almost
do without judges and lawyers altogether."
| 12 | |
| "We do without the lawyers, certainly," was Dr. Leete's reply.
"It would not seem reasonable to us, in a case where the only
interest of the nation is to find out the truth, that persons
should take part in the proceedings who had an acknowledged
motive to color it."
| 13 | |
| "But who defends the accused?"
| 14 | |
| "If he is a criminal he needs no defense, for he pleads guilty in
most instances," replied Dr. Leete. "The plea of the accused is
not a mere formality with us, as with you. It is usually the end of
the case."
| 15 | |
| "You don't mean that the man who pleads not guilty is
thereupon discharged?"
| 16 | |
| "No, I do not mean that. He is not accused on light grounds,
and if he denies his guilt, must still be tried. But trials are few,
for in most cases the guilty man pleads guilty. When he makes a
false plea and is clearly proved guilty, his penalty is doubled.
Falsehood is, however, so despised among us that few offenders
would lie to save themselves."
| 17 | |
| "That is the most astounding thing you have yet told me," I
exclaimed. "If lying has gone out of fashion, this is indeed the
`new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness,'
which the prophet foretold."
| 18 | |
| "Such is, in fact, the belief of some persons nowadays," was
the doctor's answer. "They hold that we have entered upon the
millennium, and the theory from their point of view does not
lack plausibility. But as to your astonishment at finding that the
world has outgrown lying, there is really no ground for it.
Falsehood, even in your day, was not common between gentlemen
and ladies, social equals. The lie of fear was the refuge of
cowardice, and the lie of fraud the device of the cheat. The
inequalities of men and the lust of acquisition offered a constant
premium on lying at that time. Yet even then, the man who
neither feared another nor desired to defraud him scorned
falsehood. Because we are now all social equals, and no man
either has anything to fear from another or can gain anything by
deceiving him, the contempt of falsehood is so universal that it
is rarely, as I told you, that even a criminal in other respects will
be found willing to lie. When, however, a plea of not guilty is
returned, the judge appoints two colleagues to state the opposite
sides of the case. How far these men are from being like your
hired advocates and prosecutors, determined to acquit or convict,
may appear from the fact that unless both agree that the
verdict found is just, the case is tried over, while anything like
bias in the tone of either of the judges stating the case would be
a shocking scandal."
| 19 | |
| "Do I understand," I said, "that it is a judge who states each
side of the case as well as a judge who hears it?"
| 20 | |
| "Certainly. The judges take turns in serving on the bench and
at the bar, and are expected to maintain the judicial temper
equally whether in stating or deciding a case. The system is
indeed in effect that of trial by three judges occupying different
points of view as to the case. When they agree upon a verdict,
we believe it to be as near to absolute truth as men well can
come."
| 21 | |
| "You have given up the jury system, then?"
| 22 | |
| "It was well enough as a corrective in the days of hired
advocates, and a bench sometimes venal, and often with a tenure
that made it dependent, but is needless now. No conceivable
motive but justice could actuate our judges."
| 23 | |
| "How are these magistrates selected?"
| 24 | |
| "They are an honorable exception to the rule which discharges
all men from service at the age of forty-five. The President of the
nation appoints the necessary judges year by year from the class
reaching that age. The number appointed is, of course, exceedingly
few, and the honor so high that it is held an offset to the
additional term of service which follows, and though a judge's
appointment may be declined, it rarely is. The term is five years,
without eligibility to reappointment. The members of the
Supreme Court, which is the guardian of the constitution, are
selected from among the lower judges. When a vacancy in that
court occurs, those of the lower judges, whose terms expire that
year, select, as their last official act, the one of their colleagues
left on the bench whom they deem fittest to fill it."
| 25 | |
| "There being no legal profession to serve as a school for
judges," I said, "they must, of course, come directly from the law
school to the bench."
| 26 | |
| "We have no such things as law schools," replied the doctor
smiling. "The law as a special science is obsolete. It was a system
of casuistry which the elaborate artificiality of the old order of
society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few of the
plainest and simplest legal maxims have any application to
the existing state of the world. Everything touching the relations
of men to one another is now simpler, beyond any comparison,
than in your day. We should have no sort of use for the
hair-splitting experts who presided and argued in your courts.
You must not imagine, however, that we have any disrespect
for those ancient worthies because we have no use for them.
On the contrary, we entertain an unfeigned respect, amounting
almost to awe, for the men who alone understood
and were able to expound the interminable complexity of the
rights of property, and the relations of commercial and personal
dependence involved in your system. What, indeed, could possibly
give a more powerful impression of the intricacy and
artificiality of that system than the fact that it was necessary to
set apart from other pursuits the cream of the intellect of every
generation, in order to provide a body of pundits able to make it
even vaguely intelligible to those whose fates it determined. The
treatises of your great lawyers, the works of Blackstone and
Chitty, of Story and Parsons, stand in our museums, side by side
with the tomes of Duns Scotus and his fellow scholastics, as
curious monuments of intellectual subtlety devoted to subjects
equally remote from the interests of modern men. Our judges are
simply widely informed, judicious, and discreet men of ripe years.
| 27 | |
| "I should not fail to speak of one important function of the
minor judges," added Dr. Leete. "This is to adjudicate all cases
where a private of the industrial army makes a complaint of
unfairness against an officer. All such questions are heard and
settled without appeal by a single judge, three judges being
required only in graver cases. The efficiency of industry requires
the strictest discipline in the army of labor, but the claim of
the workman to just and considerate treatment is backed by
the whole power of the nation. The officer commands and the
private obeys, but no officer is so high that he would dare display
an overbearing manner toward a workman of the lowest class. As
for churlishness or rudeness by an official of any sort, in his
relations to the public, not one among minor offenses is more
sure of a prompt penalty than this. Not only justice but civility
is enforced by our judges in all sorts of intercourse. No value of
service is accepted as a set-off to boorish or offensive manners."
| 28 | |
| It occurred to me, as Dr. Leete was speaking, that in all his
talk I had heard much of the nation and nothing of the state
governments. Had the organization of the nation as an industrial
unit done away with the states? I asked.
| 29 | |
| "Necessarily," he replied. "The state governments would have
interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army,
which, of course, required to be central and uniform. Even if the
state governments had not become inconvenient for other reasons,
they were rendered superfluous by the prodigious simplification
in the task of government since your day. Almost the sole
function of the administration now is that of directing the
industries of the country. Most of the purposes for which
governments formerly existed no longer remain to be subserved.
We have no army or navy, and no military organization. We
have no departments of state or treasury, no excise or revenue
services, no taxes or tax collectors. The only function proper of
government, as known to you, which still remains, is the
judiciary and police system. I have already explained to you how
simple is our judicial system as compared with your huge and
complex machine. Of course the same absence of crime and
temptation to it, which make the duties of judges so light,
reduces the number and duties of the police to a minimum."
| 30 | |
| "But with no state legislatures, and Congress meeting only
once in five years, how do you get your legislation done?"
| 31 | |
| "We have no legislation," replied Dr. Leete, "that is, next to
none. It is rarely that Congress, even when it meets, considers
any new laws of consequence, and then it only has power to
commend them to the following Congress, lest anything be
done hastily. If you will consider a moment, Mr. West, you will
see that we have nothing to make laws about. The fundamental
principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the
strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for
legislation.
| 32 | |
| "Fully ninety-nine hundredths of the laws of that time concerned
the definition and protection of private property and the
relations of buyers and sellers. There is neither private property,
beyond personal belongings, now, nor buying and selling, and
therefore the occasion of nearly all the legislation formerly
necessary has passed away. Formerly, society was a pyramid
poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were
constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained
upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble
witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props
and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central
Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out some twenty
thousand laws a year, could not make new props fast enough to
take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or
becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain. Now
society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial
supports as the everlasting hills."
| 33 | |
| "But you have at least municipal governments besides the one
central authority?"
| 34 | |
| "Certainly, and they have important and extensive functions
in looking out for the public comfort and recreation, and the
improvement and embellishment of the villages and cities."
| 35 | |
| "But having no control over the labor of their people, or
means of hiring it, how can they do anything?"
| 36 | |
| "Every town or city is conceded the right to retain, for its own
public works, a certain proportion of the quota of labor its
citizens contribute to the nation. This proportion, being assigned
it as so much credit, can be applied in any way desired."
| 37 | |
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