The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Complete Contents...

IN this brief address, the object is to suggest—there being no time to present arguments at length. The subject has been chosen for the reason that it is one that should interest the legal profession, because that profession to a certain extent controls and shapes the legislation of our country and fixes definitely the scope and meaning of all laws.

All nations seem to have had supreme confidence in the deterrent power of threatened and inflicted pain. They have regarded punishment as the shortest road to reformation. Imprisonment, torture, death, constituted a trinity under whose protection society might feel secure.

In addition to these, nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maimings, whippings, brandings, and exposures to public ridicule and contempt. Connected with the court of justice was the chamber of torture. The ingenuity of man was exhausted in the construction of instruments that would surely reach the most sensitive nerve. All this was done in the interest of civilization—for the protection of virtue, and the well-being of states. Curiously it was found that the penalty of death made little difference. Thieves and highwaymen, heretics and blasphemers, went on their way. It was then thought necessary to add to this penalty of death, and consequently, the convicted were tortured in every conceivable way before execution. They were broken on the wheel—their joints dislocated on the rack. They were suspended by their legs and arms, while immense weights were placed upon their breasts. Their flesh was burned and torn with hot irons. They were roasted at slow fires. They were buried alive—given to wild beasts—molten lead was poured in their ears—their eye-lids were cut off and, the wretches placed with their faces toward the sun—others were securely bound, so that they could move neither hand nor foot, and over their stomachs were placed inverted bowls; under these bowls rats were confined; on top of the bowls were heaped coals of fire, so that the rats in their efforts to escape would gnaw into the bowels of the victims.

They were staked out on the sands of the sea, to be drowned by the slowly rising tide—and every means by which human nature can be overcome slowly, painfully and terribly, was conceived and carried into execution. And yet the number of so-called criminals increased. Enough, the fact is that, no matter how severe the punishments were, the crimes increased.

For petty offences men were degraded—given to the mercy of the rabble. Their ears were cut off, their nostrils slit, their foreheads branded. They were tied to the tails of carts and flogged from one town to another. And yet, in spite of all, the poor wretches obstinately refused to become good and useful citizens.

Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and headsmen—and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities and crimes have accomplished little for the preservation of property or life. It is safe to say that governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.

Why is it that men will suffer and risk so much for the sake of stealing? Why will they accept degradation and punishment and infamy as their portion? Some will answer this question by an appeal to the dogma of original sin; others by saying that millions of men and women are under the control of fiends—that they are actually possessed by devils; and others will declare that all these people act from choice—that they are possessed of free wills, of intelligence—that they know and appreciate consequences, and that, in spite of all, they deliberately prefer a life of crime.

Have we not advanced far enough intellectually to deny the existence of chance? Are we not satisfied now that back of every act and thought and dream and fancy is an efficient cause? Is anything, or can anything, be produced that is not necessarily produced? Can the fatherless and motherless exist? Is there not a connection between all events, and is not every act related to all other acts? Is it not possible, is it not probable, is it not true, that the actions of all men are determined by countless causes over which they have no positive control?

It can hardly be said that man intends permanently to injure himself, and that he does what he does in order that he may live a life of misery. On the other hand, we must take it for granted that man endeavors to better his own condition, and seeks, although by mistaken ways, his own well-being. The poorest man would like to be rich—the sick desire health—and no sane man wishes to win the contempt and hatred of his fellow-men. Every human being prefers liberty to imprisonment.

Are the brains of criminals exactly like the brains of honest men? Have criminals the same ambitions, the same standards of happiness or of well-being? If a difference exists in brain, will that in part account for the difference in character? Is there anything in heredity? Are vices as carefully transmitted by nature as virtues? Does each man in some degree bear burdens imposed by ancestors? We know that diseases of flesh and blood are transmitted—that the child is the heir of physical deformity. Are diseases of the brain—are deformities of the soul, of the mind, also transmitted?

We not only admit, but we assert, that in the physical world there are causes and effects. We insist that there is and can be no effect without an efficient cause. When anything happens in that world, we are satisfied that it was naturally and necessarily produced. The causes may be obscure, but we as implicitly believe in their existence as when we know positively what they are. In the physical world we have taken the ground that there is nothing miraculous—that everything is natural—and if we cannot explain it, we account for our inability to explain, by our own ignorance. Is it not possible, is it not probable, that what is true in the physical world is equally true in the realm of mind—in that strange world of passion and desire? Is it possible that thoughts or desires or passions are the children of chance, born of nothing? Can we conceive of nothing as a force, or as a cause? If, then, there is behind every thought and desire and passion an efficient cause, we can, in part at least, account for the actions of men.

A certain man under certain conditions acts in a certain way. There are certain temptations that he, with his brain, with his experience, with his intelligence, with his surroundings cannot withstand. He is irresistibly led to do, or impelled to do, certain things; and there are other things that he can not do. If we change the conditions of this man, his actions will be changed. Develop his mind, give him new subjects of thought, and you change the man; and the man being Changed, it follows of necessity that his conduct will be different.

In civilized countries the struggle for existence is severe—the competition far sharper than in savage lands. The consequence is that there are many failures. These failures lack, it may be, opportunity or brain or moral force or industry, or something without which, under the circumstances, success is impossible. Certain lines of conduct are called legal, and certain others criminal, and the men who fail in one line may be driven to the other. How do we know that it is possible for all people to be honest? Are we certain that all people can tell the truth? Is it possible for all men to be generous or candid or courageous?

I am perfectly satisfied that there are millions of people incapable of committing certain crimes, and it may be true that there are millions of others incapable of practicing certain virtues. We do not blame a man because he is not a sculptor, a poet, a painter, or a statesman. We say he has not the genius. Are we certain that it does not require genius to be good? Where is the man with intelligence enough to take into consideration the circumstances of each individual case? Who has the mental balance with which to weigh the forces of heredity, of want, of temptation,—and who can analyze with certainty the mysterious motions of the brain? Where and what are the sources of vice and virtue? In what obscure and shadowy recesses of the brain are passions born? And what is it that for the moment destroys the sense of right and wrong?

Who knows to what extent reason becomes the prisoner of passion—of some strange and wild desire, the seeds of which were sown, it may be, thousands of years ago in the breast of some savage? To what extent do antecedents and surroundings affect the moral sense?

Is it not possible that the tyranny of governments, the injustice of nations, the fierceness of what is called the law, produce in the individual a tendency in the same direction? Is it not true that the citizen is apt to imitate his nation? Society degrades its enemies—the individual seeks to degrade his. Society plunders its enemies, and now and then the citizen has the desire to plunder his. Society kills its enemies, and possibly sows in the heart of some citizen the seeds of murder.

Is it not true that the criminal is a natural product, and that society unconsciously produces these children of vice? Can we not safely take another step, and say that the criminal is a victim, as the diseased and insane and deformed are victims? We do not think of punishing a man because he is afflicted with disease—our desire is to find a cure. We send him, not to the penitentiary, but to the hospital, to an asylum. We do this because we recognize the fact that disease is naturally produced—that it is inherited from parents, or the result of unconscious negligence, or it may be of recklessness—but instead of punishing, we pity. If there are diseases of the mind, of the brain, as there are diseases of the body; and if these diseases of the mind, these deformities of the brain, produce, and necessarily produce, what we call vice, why should we punish the-criminal, and pity those who are physically diseased?

Of course, society has the right to protect itself, no matter whether the persons who attack its well-being are responsible or not, no matter whether they are sick in mind, or deformed in brain. The right of self-defence exists, not only in the individual, but in society. The great question is, How shall this right of self-defence be exercised? What spirit shall be in the nation, or in society—the spirit of revenge, a desire to degrade and punish and destroy, or a spirit born of the recognition of the fact that criminals are victims?

In the light of these statistics, we are not succeeding in doing away with crime. There were in 1880, fifty-eight thousand prisoners, and in the same year fifty-seven thousand homeless children, and sixty-six thousand paupers in almshouses.

There is no reformation in degradation. To mutilate a criminal is to say to all the world that he is a criminal, and to render his reformation substantially impossible. Whoever is degraded by society becomes its enemy. The seeds of malice are sown in his heart, and to the day of his death he will hate the hand that sowed the seeds.