The origin and development of the moral ideas

Among the Atkha Aleuts, the punishment for certain offences was sometimes carried so far as to include the wife of the offender.111 Among the Ew̔e-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast, “a person found guilty of having procured, or endeavoured to procure, the death of another through the agency of the gods Huntin and Loko, is put to death, and his family is generally enslaved as well.”112 Among the Matabele, if a person is declared by the witch-doctor to have caused injury to somebody else by making charms, he “is immediately put to death, his wife and the whole of his family sharing his fate.”113 Among the Shilluks of the White Nile, “murder is punished with death to the criminal and the forfeiture of wives and children to the Sultan, who retains them in bondage.”114 Among the Kafirs, in cases of trespasses against the king, the sentence falls not only on the individual, but on his whole house.115 In Madagascar, the code of native laws, up to recent time, reduced for many offences the culprit’s wife and children to slavery.116 In some parts of the Malay Archipelago, according to Crawfurd, a father and child are considered almost inseparable, hence when the one is punished the other seldom escapes.117 In Bali, the law prescribes that for certain kinds of sorcery the offender shall be put to death.

It adds, “If the matter be very clearly made out, let the punishment of death be extended to his father and his mother, to his children and to his grand-children; let none of them live; let none connected with one so guilty remain on the face of the land, and let their goods be in like manner confiscated.”118

The Chinese doctrine of responsibility is to a great extent based upon family solidarity; in great crimes all the male relatives of the offender are held responsible for his deed. Every male relative, of whatever degree, who may be dwelling under the roof of a man guilty of treason, is doomed to death, with the exception of young boys, who are allowed their lives, but on the condition that they are made eunuchs for service in the imperial palace.119 In ancient Mexico, traitors and conspirators were not only themselves killed, but their children and relatives were made slaves to the fourth generation.120 According to an Athenian law, a man who committed sacrilege or betrayed his country was banished with all his children.121 Aristotle mentions a case of sacrilege in which “the bones of the guilty dead were disentombed and cast beyond the borders of Attica; the living clan were condemned to perpetual exile, and the city was subsequently purified.”122 The Macedonian law involved in punishment the kindred of conspirators against the monarch.123 Dionysius of Halicarnassus states that some of the Greeks “think it reasonable to put to death the sons of tyrants together with their fathers, whereas others punish them with perpetual banishment”; and he contrasts this with the Roman principle that “the sons shall be exempted from all punishment, whose fathers are offenders, whether they happen to be the sons of tyrants, of parricides, or of traitors.”124 But after the end of the Marsic, and civil wars, this rule was transgressed;125 and later on Arcadius, though expressly ordaining

that the punishment of the crime shall extend to the criminal alone,126 took a different view of the punishment for treason. By a special extension of his imperial clemency, he allows the sons of the criminal to live, although in strict justice, being tainted with hereditary guilt, they ought to suffer the punishment of their father. But they shall be incapable of inheritance; they shall be abandoned to the extreme of poverty and perpetual indigence; they shall be excluded from all honours and from the participation of religious rites; the infamy of their father shall ever attend them, and such shall be the misery of their condition, that life shall be a punishment and death a comfort.127 Among the Anglo-Saxons, before the time of Cnut, the child, even the infant in the cradle, was liable to be sold into slavery for the payment of penalties incurred by the father, being “held by the covetous to be equally guilty as if it had discretion.”128 Even later, the child of an outlaw, following the condition of the father, also became an outlaw; and this grievance was only partly remedied by Edward the Confessor, who relieved from the consequences of the father’s outlawry such children as were born before he was outlawed, but not such as were born afterwards.129 During the Middle Ages it was the invariable rule to confiscate the entire property of an impenitent heretic, a rule which was justified on the ground that his crime is so great that something of his impurity falls upon all related to him.130 The Pope Alexander IV. also excluded the descendants of an heretic to the second

generation from all offices in the Church.131 Owing to religious influence, illegitimate children were not only deprived of the title to inheritance, but they were treated by some law-books as almost rightless beings, on a par with robbers and thieves.132 If a person committed suicide, his goods were confiscated, and, according to a French mediæval law, his wife was besides deprived of her own private property.133 Even in the latter half of the eighteenth century, in France, in the case of an attempt made against the life of the king, the whole family of the criminal was banished.134 Nay, in various European countries, up to quite recent times—in England till 1870—forfeiture of property has been the punishment prescribed for certain crimes, including suicide;135 which means, if not actually the imposition of penalties on the survivors in a case where the culprit himself is out of reach, at least a gross disregard of their ordinary rights of property. It is hardly necessary to point out how often, in the very society in which we live, “social punishments” are inflicted upon children for their father’s wrongs.