m 95

 
 THE
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTMWOODB AND CO., NKW-6TBKET SQUARE 
 LONDON
 
 THE 
 
 PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 
 
 TO WHICH 
 
 PUBLIC 
 
 BALLOT 
 
 BY HENRY ROMILLY, M.A. 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 
 
 1886 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 HENRY ROMILLY, the author of the following 
 treatise, was the fourth son of Sir Samuel 
 Romilly. He was born October 21, 1805, and 
 died December 25, 1884. His tastes and educa- 
 tion inclined him towards the pursuit of lite- 
 rature or jurisprudence, but circumstances 
 prevailed to induce him to engage in that of 
 commerce at Liverpool, where, so long as he 
 remained, he also occupied a seat upon the 
 bench of magistrates. 
 
 He married, in 1850, Rosa Gardiner Morris, 
 an American lady, a descendant of the old 
 Quaker settlers of Pennsylvania. 
 
 He withdrew from commerce in 1858, and 
 spent the remainder of his life, on a property 
 belonging to him in a retired part of Hereford-
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 shire, in promoting the welfare of his poorer 
 neighbours. 
 
 His conviction on the subject treated of in 
 the following pages was not derived from any 
 authoritative opinion of his father, who as 
 appears from a private letter written in 1783, 
 when he was twenty- six years of age, and was 
 called to the Bar considered that capital punish- 
 ment could not altogether be dispensed with, 
 but who, at a later period while death was still 
 the penalty for stealing property of the value 
 of one shilling may have thought the time 
 unsuited to a discussion whether it should 
 remain the appropriate punishment for murder 
 or treason. 
 
 It has been thought that the occasion of the 
 publication of this treatise might be usefully 
 availed of to recall attention to another, also 
 written by my brother, on the subject of 
 ' Public Responsibility and the Vote by Bal- 
 lot,' published in 1865, and subsequently in a 
 second edition, with an answer to Mr. J. S. 
 Mill's objections to it, in 1867. 
 
 Of this treatise, Mr. Grote, the historian,
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 and most able and consistent advocate of secret 
 voting at elections for members of the House of 
 Commons, wrote in 1865 as follows : 
 
 ' It is an admirable piece of reasoning, 
 and I have read it with the greatest satisfaction 
 as well as instruction. The manner in which 
 Mill's arguments are handled is as good as can 
 be. There are various points of view which are 
 new even to me, much as I reflected on the 
 question in former days. 
 
 * The one reform which I care most about is 
 the Ballot, because that connects itself with the 
 full liberty of private judgment, of which, indeed, 
 it is only one exemplification, under peculiar 
 perils and temptations. 
 
 ( The importance of guarding the full liberty 
 of individual judgment and the expression 
 thereof against the tyranny and persecution 
 of bystanders often themselves conscientious 
 appears to me even greater in my old age than 
 it did when I was younger. No man has gone 
 further in upholding this right than John Mill, 
 and that by excellent arguments in his " Essay 
 on Liberty ;" but when I read his arguments
 
 via PREFACE 
 
 against the Ballot, they really disallow and even 
 condemn all right of private judgment on the 
 part of the voter. I know of no two things 
 more contradictory than the " Essay on Liberty " 
 and the reasoning against the Ballot.' 
 
 This treatise is reprinted at the end of this 
 volume. 
 
 FREDERICK ROMILLY.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 1 
 
 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND VOTE BY BALLOT . 207 
 
 LETTER FROM JOHN STUART MILL .... 298 
 
 REPLY TO THE ABOVE LETTER 307 
 
 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON MR. MILL'S LETTER . 322
 
 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 You ask me whether it can be right under any 
 conceivable circumstances that a man should be 
 allowed deliberately to put to death a fellow- 
 creature. As regards private persons, the ques- 
 tion is easily answered ; as regards a Government, 
 not so easily. In regard to private persons, let 
 me put the strongest case it is possible to put. 
 A is doing an enormous amount of mischief in 
 the world which there seems to be no prospect 
 of stopping except by his death. Can B be 
 permitted to put him to death ? Clearly not ; 
 because if the permission exists in one case it 
 must be extended to other cases, and that would 
 put the lives of men at the absolute disposal of 
 their neighbours, unless a tribunal were set up 
 
 B
 
 2 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTKH i 
 
 to decide when the permission was to be granted 
 and when it was to be withheld. But if such 
 a tribunal is set up, then it is clearly best to 
 place the power of life and death exclusively 
 in the hands of the tribunal, and to withdraw it 
 altogether from private persons. Accordingly 
 Governments have, with few exceptions, as- 
 sumed a power over the lives of their subjects, 
 and have endeavoured by adequate punishments 
 to prevent private persons from encroaching on 
 it. A Government assuming such a power must 
 begin by asking itself this question : What 
 limitations must we place upon the exercise of 
 the power of life and death ? If there were no 
 limitation, no man living in that society could 
 ever feel his life secure. He could scarcely be 
 said to be better off than if his life were at the 
 mercy of his fellow-subjects, for nothing could 
 be much worse than to be liable to be brought 
 before a tribunal on a general charge, not confined 
 within very strictly defined limits, of unfitness 
 longer to retain life. If a man's general course 
 of living were liable to be investigated with the 
 possibility of any such practical conclusion as
 
 LETTKR i THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 3 
 
 this, his life would be one of constant alarm 
 . and uncertainty. Accordingly all Governments, 
 which have not been mere vulgar despotisms, 
 have invariably restricted their power over the 
 lives of their subjects to the case of strictly de- 
 nned acts, to be proved by conclusive evidence. 
 The restriction might of course be carried to the 
 extent of entire abandonment. By a very few 
 Governments in the history of the world the 
 power has in fact been abandoned. Indeed, there 
 are two fundamental objections to the depriving 
 a human being of life which are as applicable to 
 the case of a Government as to that of a private 
 person ; objections so serious that the mere con- 
 templation of them might, one would have 
 supposed, have made Governments hesitate long 
 before they assumed such a power. 
 
 The first of these objections is that you 
 cannot take away the life of a criminal without 
 in great measure depriving him of the opportu- 
 nity of making good his claim to mercy at the 
 hands of another and a higher Tribunal, that 
 Tribunal which will decide his fate in another 
 world. By putting him to death, you are en- 
 
 B 2
 
 4 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER i 
 
 croaching on a Tribunal immeasurably above 
 your own, in a matter of which you are wholly 
 unfit to judge. I do not, of course, mean that 
 the existence of that Superior Tribunal affords 
 any reason against the application of a system 
 of punishments to the maintenance and pro- 
 tection of civil society ; but I do mean that it 
 is a strong reason against allowing deprivation 
 of life to form one of the punishments under 
 that system. The act so punished is an act 
 which, in the belief of a Christian, would also be 
 punished by that Superior Judge. For it is one 
 part of the Christian creed that acts which men 
 consider wicked in relation to their consequences 
 in this world, will be punished in a world to 
 come ; and it is another part of that creed, that 
 by sorrow for a past offence, accompanied and 
 attested by a subsequent course of virtuous 
 action, atonement may be made for that wicked 
 act, and its punishment by such atonement 
 averted. Now if time is a necessary accompani- 
 ment and test of the reality of such repentance 
 and it is scarcely possible to conceive it to 
 be otherwise then by putting to a speedy death
 
 LETTER i THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 5 
 
 the perpetrator of a great crime we are, so far as 
 we can do so, cutting off from him the oppor- 
 tunity of averting its punishment in another 
 world ; we are in intention, if not in effect, 
 arrogantly and cruelly interposing between that 
 man and his Almighty Judge. 
 
 The other fundamental objection is that 
 which exists to a ruler deliberately doing the 
 very thing which he professes to look upon 
 with the strongest feeling of grief, indignation, 
 and horror when it is done by one of his sub- 
 jects. It seems to be a plain practical contra- 
 diction for a ruler, who professes it as his object 
 to stimulate by every means in his power the 
 feeling that human life is sacred, and to pre- 
 serve, unimpaired, the sentiment of horror for 
 the act of taking away human life, to follow up 
 the perpetration of a first deliberate homicide 
 by the perpetration of a second deliberate homi- 
 cide. But this is, in truth, what society does 
 when it sends a murderer to the scaffold. You 
 may reply that such a contradiction is insepar- 
 able from punishment in any shape and in any 
 degree ; that when you punish you inflict pain
 
 6 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER i 
 
 in addition to the pain which has been already 
 inflicted by the offence. True, the infliction of 
 pain is inseparable from all punishment, but a 
 ruler may make choice of the kind of pain which 
 he will inflict. He need not make the pain of 
 the punishment correspond in kind with the 
 pain inflicted by the offence. He lies under no 
 obligation of perpetrating a cruel personal out- 
 rage, by way of punishment, on the man who 
 has been convicted of having perpetrated a cruel 
 personal outrage. The ruler who, in his 
 capacity of a punisher of crime, so acts, is not, of 
 course, open to the whole of the same censure 
 as the criminal, but he is open to the censure 
 of encouraging by his example acts which 
 he professes to hold in detestation and horror. 
 When a man perpetrates a murder, he is com- 
 mitting several faults. 1st. He is violating 
 one of the laws of his country. 2nd. He is 
 violating one or more of the great moral laws, 
 the law which forbids revenge and cruelty, or 
 some other. 3rd. He is giving an example of 
 indifference to human life which, if it became 
 general, would bring men down to the level of
 
 I.ETTER i THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 7 
 
 wild beasts. 4th. He is usurping the function 
 of that Being who has bestowed life upon us 
 as a free gift, and has done nothing to indicate 
 a permission to men to decide for each other the 
 duration of that life. Now, when a ruler sends 
 a criminal to the scaffold, he is not committing 
 the first nor the second of those faults, but he is 
 committing the third and the fourth of them ; and 
 he cannot excuse himself on the plea of necessity, 
 for he might have chosen a kind of punishment 
 not open to those grave objections. The punish- 
 ment which disgraces a man, that which deprives 
 him of liberty and of the exciting pleasures of 
 his former life, that which reduces him to the 
 bare necessaries of existence, or which inflicts 
 compulsory labour upon him, these punishments 
 are, singly or in combination, susceptible of 
 almost any given degree of severity from the 
 lowest to the highest, and they do not, any of 
 them, give an indirect sanction to the acts 
 which they are intended to prevent. That 
 Governments have seldom or never been alive to 
 these preliminary objections to the use of capital 
 punishment the second of them, indeed, an
 
 8 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER i 
 
 objection to the use of all cruel punishments 
 is a lamentable fact, which is resolvable into 
 that other still more general fact, that Go- 
 vernments have for the most part been quite 
 blind to the important though indirect influ- 
 ence which their situation as leaders of public 
 opinion gives them over the conduct and charac- 
 ter of their subjects. It is impossible not to 
 believe that the popular sentiment of the 
 sanctity of human life would be greatly in- 
 creased if civilised Governments generally took 
 up the position that for no human object what- 
 ever, under no circumstances whatever, could it 
 be right for any man, or body of men, invested 
 or not invested with authority over their fellow- 
 men, deliberately to deprive a human being of 
 life. Unfortunately Governments, so far from 
 being in advance, are generally (through dread 
 of change, and of the trouble and perplexity 
 which change always more or less brings with 
 it) grievously behind their subjects in the ap- 
 preciation of this matter. We all know how 
 slowly and reluctantly during the first thirty 
 years of the present century English judges and
 
 LETTER i THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 9 
 
 legislators were, so to speak, driven by the 
 yearly increasing hostility of prosecutors, jurors, 
 witnesses, and the general public to abandon a 
 system which affixed the punishment of death 
 to offences against private property of a very 
 secondary degree of criminality. Even at this 
 day in England and elsewhere it is almost im- 
 possible to get a legislator or a judge to make 
 a fair comparison, or indeed any comparison at 
 all, between the direct benefit arising from the 
 supposed superior efficacy of the death punish- 
 ment as compared with any other punishment 
 in deterring from murders, and the indirect but 
 widespread mischief arising from the public 
 exhibition of administrators of the law perpe- 
 trating deliberate homicides. And yet it is one 
 of the conditions of the proper determination of 
 the question for or against the punishment of 
 death that such a comparison should be made. 
 If any serious doubt can be shown to exist in 
 regard to the superior efficacy of the death 
 punishment as compared with some other prac- 
 ticable punishment as a deterrent from murders, 
 the indirect question to which I have referred
 
 10 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER i 
 
 above will, of course, assume a degree of import- 
 ance in exact proportion to the magnitude of 
 that doubt. In my letter No. IV. I shall enter 
 on this question, and shall say something upon 
 the fear of death as a deterrent from great 
 crimes.
 
 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 11 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 IN reply to one of the two principal arguments 
 of my first letter you refer me to the following 
 passage in Mr. Mill's speech of April 21, 1868, 
 in the House of Commons, in favour of capital 
 punishment : 
 
 Much has been said of the sanctity of human life 
 and the absurdity of supposing that we can teach 
 respect for life by ourselves destroying it. But I am 
 surprised at the employment of this argument, for it is 
 one which might be brought against any punishment 
 whatever. It is not human life only, not human life 
 as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human 
 feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we 
 should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of 
 existing ; and we may imagine somebody asking how 
 we can teach people not to inflict suffering by ourselves 
 inflicting it. But to this I should answer all of us 
 would answer that to deter by suffering from inflicting 
 suffering is not only possible, but the very purpose of 
 penal justice. Does fining a criminal show want of 
 respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal 
 freedom ? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to
 
 12 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER n 
 
 take the life of a man who has taken that of another is 
 to show want of regard for human life. We show, on 
 the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it by the 
 adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in 
 another forfeits it for himself, and that, while no other 
 crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to 
 live, this shall. 
 
 ' The argument,' says Mr. Mill, ' is one 
 which may be brought against any punishment 
 whatever.' It certainly may, but the question is 
 one of degree, and there are important differ- 
 ences between the cases put by Mr. Mill 
 which seem to me to weaken the force of his 
 comparison. There are overruling necessities in 
 some cases which have no existence in others. 
 It is a necessary condition of the maintenance of 
 civil society that Governments should for that 
 purpose take away private property and place 
 restrictions upon personal freedom. Money 
 must be raised, and the performance of certain 
 duties must be enforced, if a country is to be 
 defended from external aggression, or justice 
 administered. But there is no similar necessity 
 for putting men to death. A Government 
 might, without endangering its existence, divest
 
 LETTER ii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 13 
 
 itself of that power ; and some Governments 
 have, in fact, done so. But if a Government 
 should divest itself of the power of taxation, or 
 abandon all restrictions on personal freedom, 
 society would fall to pieces. In all cases, with- 
 out exception, it seems to be the plain duty of 
 a Government to set an example of respect for 
 great principles for truth, personal freedom, the 
 sanctity of the law, the inviolability of property, 
 the sacredness of human life by abstaining from 
 all unnecessary infractions of them. That duty, 
 like all others, may, of course, in certain cases 
 and to a certain extent be overruled by a superior 
 duty, and the first and paramount duty of a 
 Government is to maintain its own existence. 
 No such overruling duty can be said to exist in 
 the case of capital punishment, unless, indeed, it 
 should be proved that without capital punish- 
 ment all reasonable protection to life is impos- 
 sible, protection to life being amongst the first 
 and greatest purposes of all Governments. Such 
 proof would, of course, constitute an overruling 
 necessity ; but in the absence of any such proof, 
 when it is admitted that except as a punishment
 
 14 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER it 
 
 for great crimes Governments can have no occa- 
 
 o 
 
 sion to put men to death, and when it has 
 become a matter of controversy whether there 
 may not be some other and more effectual 
 punishment for great crimes, the argument in 
 favour of a Government setting the example pf 
 an inviolable respect for human life must be 
 allowed to retain considerable force. The 
 amount of good that a Government does by 
 setting an example of strict adherence to a great 
 principle, the degree in which such adherence is 
 possible, and the degree of weight which attaches 
 to each of the various circumstances which may 
 tend to overrule the duty of a Government in 
 that respect, must of course be considered sepa- 
 rately in the case of each of those principles, and 
 in the case of each particular Government and 
 country. The benefit of such adherence extends 
 over so wide a field, is so indirect, and, therefore, 
 so little capable of being proved by particular 
 instances, that it is universally underrated by 
 both peoples and Governments. 1 In the present 
 
 1 An instance of this is to be found in the treatment of 
 Ireland by the Imperial Government on the first occurrence of
 
 LETTER ii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 15 
 
 instance it is not so much that, as a matter of 
 fact, the putting criminals to death is, on the 
 part of the administrators of the law in Great 
 Britain, accompanied by any want of respect for 
 human life, as that the exclusion of that punish- 
 any symptoms of political disaffection in that country. Every 
 one perceives that a certain danger is imminent, and that to put 
 an unrestricted power of arrest and imprisonment in the hands 
 of the Government is the most certain and obvious mode of 
 meeting that danger ; above all, the easiest mode, the greatest 
 saving of trouble, and the least strain on the capacity of the 
 governors. No one thinks for a moment of the mischief of 
 sowing broadcast amongst the people the impression that Ireland 
 is not governed with that strict adherence to legality which ob- 
 tains in other parts of the kingdom, that the system pursued 
 is more a state of warfare than of civil government, and that if 
 laws are set aside on one side they may be set aside on the 
 other. Still less does any one remember that extraordinary 
 measures of repression are almost sure to create in the public 
 mind exaggerated impressions of the extent of the disaffection, 
 leading each particular man to feel that his own disloyalty is 
 safe in proportion as it is shared by the rest of his countrymen. 
 Governments, both Whig and Tory alike, have been morbidly 
 alive to, and have therefore always (as in the case of Fenianism) 
 exaggerated, the particular danger, and have therefore been 
 almost entirely blind to the more remote and more indirect 
 but not less certain danger of that frequent deviation from its 
 own principles of government, and accordingly they have 
 always, on every occasion of disaffection, been ready to pass 
 Irish Coercion Bills. History is full of similar mistakes of 
 Governments. The events in Jamaica, in the autumn of 1866, 
 after the outbreak at Morant Bay, afford perhaps the most 
 striking and melancholy instance on record of the blindness to 
 great principles produced by sudden and exaggerated panic.
 
 16 THE PUNISHMENT OF 'DEATH LETTER n 
 
 ment from our criminal code would extend and 
 strengthen the respect for human life ; not so 
 much, perhaps, by preventing murders as by 
 creating a more constant, anxious, and con- 
 scientious solicitude for the safety of men's lives 
 amongst the very numerous class of persons 
 engaged in occupations dangerous to life, and 
 a stronger feeling amongst those classes of the 
 criminality of neglect in that respect. 
 
 Nothing can be more true than Mr. Mill's 
 observation, that ' the human capacity of suffer- 
 ing is what we should cause to be respected.' 
 The great lesson, embracing within itself all 
 other lessons, which men have to learn is to 
 contribute all they can to the comfort and happi- 
 ness, and mitigate in all they can the pains and 
 misery, of their fellow-creatures ; but I very 
 much doubt whether it is wholesome doctrine 
 to place the respect for human life within this 
 universal law, and think no more about it. 
 There are special temptations to take away life, 
 special temptations to negligence in regard to 
 life, passions of extreme force and suddenness 
 threatening life, all of which require to be
 
 LETTEB ii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 17 
 
 specially counteracted ; and of the measures of 
 counteraction at the command of rulers I believe 
 that their solemn renunciation for themselves 
 and their subjects of all right to take away life 
 would not be one of the least effective. 
 
 In the last sentence of the passage I have 
 quoted, Mr. Mill says that ' rulers show most 
 emphatically their regard for human life by the 
 adoption of a rule that he who violates that right 
 in another forfeits it for himself, and that while 
 no other crime that he can commit shall deprive 
 him of his right to live, this the wilfully taking 
 away life shall.' This seems to amount to an 
 affirmation of the desirableness of that quality 
 in punishment which, under various names 
 characteristicalness, analogy, retaliation Ben- 
 tham has described in his treatise on the ' Prin- 
 ciples of Penal Law.' He has denned it as 
 being ' that rule which makes an offender suffer 
 an evil similar to that which he has wilfully 
 inflicted ; that rule which prescribes in the way 
 of punishment the doing to a delinquent the 
 same hurt he has done to another.' The im- 
 portance attached to this quality by Bentham, 
 
 c
 
 18 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LBTTEE n 
 
 trifling though it be, seems to me to be over- 
 rated. He says that one great merit of the 
 law of retaliation is its simplicity, and I think 
 he might with truth have added, its only merit. 
 Of the other two merits ascribed to retaliatory 
 punishments one that they are popular, the 
 other that they are in a superior degree effica- 
 cious it may, I think, with truth be said that 
 the popularity, unless deserved, is an evil rather 
 than a good, and that of the superior efficacy 
 there is no proof. Bentham observes that ' no 
 rule will find so easy an entrance into the ap- 
 prehension, sit so easy on the memory, as the 
 rule that every offender shall suffer an evil 
 similar to that which he has inflicted. The 
 rule,' he says, ' is at once so short and so ex- 
 pressive that he who has once heard it is not 
 likely to forget it, or ever to think of a crime 
 but he must also think of its punishment.' To 
 this I have only to reply that the association 
 between a crime and its established punishment, 
 whatever that punishment may be, is quite 
 certain enough for all practical purposes, and 
 that the strength or vividness of the association
 
 LETTEB ii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 19 
 
 will very seldom be increased by making the 
 pain of the punishment correspond with the 
 pain inflicted by the offence. The rule that 
 poisoners shall be hanged is as short and ex- 
 pressive, as likely therefore to dwell in the 
 memory, as the rule that poisoners shall be put 
 to death by poison. ' The idea,' says Mr. 
 Bentham, ' of perishing by the same kind of 
 death which he is preparing for his victim would 
 be peculiarly frightful to the poisoner.' Why 
 so ? The idea of the pain is not made more 
 vivid by the preparations. The sight of a 
 dagger does not give increased force to the idea 
 of the pain of a stab, nor the loading of a pistol 
 to the idea of the pain of a gunshot wound. 
 The act of mixing up poisonous ingredients in a 
 cup, or of putting the cup in the way of the 
 intended victim, will not call up into the mind 
 of the man so acting the particular pains of a 
 death by poison more vividly than the particular 
 pain of a death by hanging. It seems to me to 
 be fanciful in the extreme to suppose that the 
 hand of a sailor who is about to push one of 
 his fellow sailors overboard is more likely to be 
 
 c 2
 
 20 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER H 
 
 arrested by the prospect of being himself thrown 
 overboard than by that of being hanged from 
 the yard-arm. Nor, unless it should be proved 
 that death is, on the whole, the most deterrent 
 punishment for murder, can I see any good 
 reason for supposing that the hand of the man 
 who is preparing to take away the life of another 
 is more likely to be arrested by the prospect of 
 losing his own life than by that of any other 
 punishment. If death is more dreaded, it will 
 of course be more deterrent than any other 
 punishment ; but the circumstance that it will 
 inflict upon the murderer a pain similar to that 
 which he is himself about to inflict will not 
 make it more dreaded. He may, besides, have 
 reason to believe that the pain will be very 
 different in the two cases ; he may know that 
 to his intended victim death would be a happy 
 release, and to himself the most terrible of all 
 evils. Or the case may be the very reverse of 
 this ; he may know that he has himself no fear 
 of death, whilst the situation of his intended 
 victim makes it probable that to him it would 
 be a frightful calamity.
 
 LETTER ii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 21 
 
 Although Bentham has stated the arguments 
 in favour of analogy in punishment very clearly, 
 the following passage proves that he attached 
 but little importance to it. ' If in other re- 
 spects/ he says, 'any particular mode of punish- 
 ment be eligible, analogy is an additional advan- 
 tage ; if in other respects it be ineligible, analogy 
 alone is not a sufficient recommendation. The 
 value of this property amounts to very little, 
 because even in the cftse of murder, other pun- 
 ishments may be devised the analogy of which 
 will be sufficiently striking.' In confirmation 
 of this view of the subject, I would observe of 
 imprisonment for life which would seem at first 
 sight to have but little analogy with the crime 
 of murder that if it should be carried, as it 
 ought to be, to the extent of cutting off the 
 murderer completely and to the end of his life 
 from all communication with the external world, 
 including in that term even his own nearest 
 relations, the analogy is close and striking in 
 the very point in which if in any analogy 
 may be supposed to be beneficial, and is 
 wanting only in those points in which analogy
 
 22 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER 11 
 
 cannot but be injurious. The analogy between 
 the sudden extinction by death of the worldly 
 career of the murdered man and the sudden, 
 forcible, complete, and permanent withdrawal of 
 the murderer from everything which has hitherto 
 constituted his worldly career by life imprison- 
 ment, is quite sufficiently obvious and striking 
 to produce upon the public mind any beneficial 
 effects which may be supposed to be derivable 
 from similarity between the suffering produced by 
 the punishment and that inflicted by the crimi- 
 nal. The reproduction of the horrible and revolt- 
 ing details of a sudden death by violence may be 
 calculated in a still greater degree to strike the 
 imagination, and may thus in a still greater de- 
 gree flatter the popular fondness for retaliation, 
 and satisfy the popular idea of retributive justice ; 
 but whatever advantage if any, which I must 
 be allowed to deny there may be in this, it can 
 be obtained only at the expense of evils by 
 which it will be much more than counter- 
 balanced ; for it is difficult to conceive any- 
 thing more hurtful to the feeling of popular 
 respect for legally constituted authority than
 
 LETTEB H THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 23 
 
 that which associates the administrators of the 
 law with acts of extreme violence ; which allows 
 the revolting incidents of such acts to form one 
 of the chief links whereby the criminal and the 
 officers of justice are connected with each other 
 in the public mind. 2 
 
 Montesquieu so says M. Dumont has given 
 the authority of his name to this doctrine of ana. 
 logy between the offence and the punishment, but 
 his arguments (' Esprit des Lois,' Book XII. 
 cap. 4) are vague and weak in a degree which is 
 really surprising. A man who commits sacri- 
 lege, he says, should be punished by deprivation 
 of all the advantages given by religion. But 
 if, as is highly probable, the person committing 
 that offence is wanting in the sense of religion, 
 this deprivation will not only not be the most 
 deterrent punishment, but will scarcely be de- 
 terrent in any degree. 
 
 2 One of the most curious and instructive facts in modern 
 societies is the sort of moral and social blight which attaches to 
 the executioner of criminals condemned to death by the laws of 
 the country ; for if the punishment be such as to deserve our 
 respect and approbation, the office is in a high degree useful 
 and honourable. No such obloquy rests upon the officer carry- 
 ing out any other description of punishment.
 
 24 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER n 
 
 It seems to me that there is only one case 
 in which it might be useful to aim at analogy 
 between an offence and its punishment, the 
 case in which the offender has given proof of 
 thoughtlessness, of want of appreciation of the 
 fact that by his conduct he has been inflicting 
 pain on others. Nothing tends more to cure 
 children of cruelty than suffering of the same 
 kind as that which, from mere thoughtlessness, 
 they have been inflicting on others, and the 
 same remark applies more or less to persons of 
 all ages.
 
 LETTER in THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 BEFORE I say anything on the question of the 
 deterrent efficacy of capital punishment, I wish 
 to express my dissent from an opinion which has 
 been given by many of the witnesses examined 
 before the Capital Punishment Commission of 
 1864-5, to the effect that the fear of punishment 
 generally has little or no influence in preventing 
 great crimes. When a man is meditating the 
 commission of a great crime, say they, the passion 
 by which he is hurried on neutralises all other 
 considerations. He contrives to shut out from 
 his mind everything which could interfere with 
 his design, and never, in fact, enters into any 
 serious calculation of consequences. This is 
 probably in the main a correct view of the 
 matter. The explanation of it is that all very 
 strong passions are, by the constitution of the 
 human mind, absorbing. They occupy for the
 
 |j$ THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER in 
 
 time the entire mind. Whilst under the influ- 
 ence of anger, lust, or fear, a man seems for the 
 moment to have lost the use of his reason. 
 This proves but little, however, against the 
 deterrent force of the fear of punishment, which 
 operates at times when men are not under the 
 influence of strong passions, and operates exactly 
 in the same way as other deterrent motives, not 
 so much in preventing some particular act when 
 a man has arrived at the point of seriously 
 meditating the commission of that act, as in 
 forming within him a habit of mind which pre- 
 vents him from ever arriving at that point. A 
 habit of mind may be so strengthened by the 
 frequent recurrence of the thoughts in which it. 
 originated as to end by being perfectly effectual 
 in preventing a man from ever finding himself 
 face to face with an intended crime, great or 
 small. 
 
 Suppose the case of a perfectly selfish man, 
 one whose sole ultimate principle of conduct is 
 his own pleasure or advantage. It may have 
 occurred to his mind hundreds or thousands of 
 times in the course of his life that if the whole
 
 LETTER in THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 27 
 
 of the consequences possible, probable, and cer- 
 tain of a great crime, whether in the shape 
 of legal punishment, the fear of detection, the 
 trouble of keeping up contrivances to prevent 
 detection, the aversion of his fellow-men if he 
 should be suspected, the mere stings of con- 
 science, are fairly valued and set against any 
 possible personal advantages to be derived from 
 the perpetration of the crime, these latter would 
 be purchased at too high a price, ' que le jeu,' to 
 use the French expression, ' ne vaudrait pas la 
 chandelle.' The effect of such thoughts occur- 
 ring more or less frequently at times when he is 
 not under the influence of any strong passion or 
 temptation is to produce a habit of mind which 
 (although the man may be altogether wanting 
 in moral principle, and thoroughly impervious 
 to any motive arising out of genuine regard for 
 the welfare of his fellow- creatures) may yet 
 carry him respectably through life, and may 
 make it a matter of moral impossibility that he 
 should ever commit a great crime. Eliminate 
 one of its chief elements, that of legal punish- 
 ment, from this oft-repeated calculation, and
 
 28 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER in 
 
 who can doubt that the safety-valve will be 
 seriously weakened, and great crimes will in- 
 crease in number. This is a matter which can 
 only be decided a priori. Experience affords but 
 slender means of estimating the efficacy of deter- 
 rents, for the world hears only of the cases in 
 which the passion or temptation has been too 
 strong for the habit of mind formed by the 
 deterrents, the cases in which the crime has in 
 fact been carried out. It hears nothing of the 
 cases in which the deterrents have got the better 
 of the temptation, and the perpetration of the 
 crime has been prevented. 
 
 What does the world know of the Palmers 
 whose hands have been arrested by feelings pro- 
 duced in great part by the fear of punishment ? 
 There may have been, for aught we know to the 
 contrary, ten such men for every one who has 
 carried out his iniquitous design.
 
 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 29 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 THAT the fear of punishment is, on the whole, 
 much more efficacious in preventing crime than 
 the witnesses before the Commission on Capital 
 Punishment, to whom I referred in my last 
 letter, suppose, I have no doubt ; but that 
 question has no very important bearing on the 
 question to which I now propose to address my- 
 self, viz., the comparative efficacy of death and 
 of perpetual imprisonment as deterrents from 
 great crimes, and especially from the crime of 
 murder. I say perpetual imprisonment, because I 
 admit that, before I go any further, I am bound 
 to reply to the question which the advocates of 
 capital punishment are entitled to ask as the 
 preliminary to any discussion on their part with 
 those who are opposed to their system. To that 
 question, ' If the punishment of death should be 
 abolished, what punishment will you substitute
 
 30 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER IT 
 
 for it? ' there seems to me to be only one 
 answer, that which is, in fact, given to it by 
 the great majority of the advocates of abolition 
 examined by the Commission, viz., imprisonment 
 for the remainder of the offender's life. Impri- 
 sonment contains some valuable qualities as a 
 punishment which no other punishment contains, 
 and to these I shall refer hereafter, but the most 
 important point is, that if perpetual, it contains, in 
 an equal degree with death, the one great quality 
 which constitutes the special deterring efficacy 
 of that latter punishment, viz., that it cuts off 
 entirely and for ever the worldly l career of the 
 offender. One thing may, with scarcely an ex- 
 ception, be affirmed of a murderer, whether the 
 motive of his crime has been gain, or anger, or 
 a sexual passion, viz., that he is a man pursuing 
 worldly interests with intense ardour ; and if at 
 one single blow you can annihilate those interests, 
 leaving him with not an atom of hope of their 
 renewal, by substituting for them that mono- 
 tonous, wearisome round of unexciting events 
 
 1 I use the word ' worldly ' in the sense of world to a man 
 moving about freely in it.
 
 LETTER iv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 31 
 
 which make up the life of the interior of a prison, 
 you are in truth cutting off that man's worldly 
 career, in any sense which he is disposed to 
 attach to the word, almost as completely as if 
 you deprived him of life. 
 
 Another quality of death as the punishment 
 of murder which constitutes one of its chief re- 
 commendations, although it has not very often 
 been referred to by speakers or writers on the 
 subject, is one which is possessed in an equal 
 degree by perpetual imprisonment I mean the 
 protection it affords to society against a repe- 
 tition of the outrages of the individual offender. 
 Society may justly insist upon receiving this 
 protection ; and the point is more important than 
 might at first be supposed, for when a man has 
 once shown by his conduct that he is one of 
 those who pursue their own pleasures or interests 
 with an intensity of selfish ardour so great as to 
 make them indifferent even to the lives of other 
 men, there can be no sufficient security, except 
 that of physical incapacity, that one murderous 
 outrage will not be followed by others. One of 
 the great evils of abolishing the punishment of
 
 32 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LBTTEB iv 
 
 death if some punishment should be substituted 
 for it which should, under any circumstances 
 whatever, after any lapse of time whatever, end 
 in the offender being again let loose upon 
 society is the feeling of insecurity which would 
 thereby be produced. Against this evil, against 
 the dread of having a Burke or a Miiller moving 
 once more freely about amongst them, cost what 
 it may, the public must be protected, and per- 
 petual imprisonment would be as effectual a pro- 
 tection as death. But the imprisonment must 
 be perpetual in fact as well as in name. 2 No 
 allegation however strong of altered habits, of 
 heart-felt repentance, of amended life, should be 
 allowed, on so vital a point, to interfere with the 
 one great duty to society. These feelings may 
 be, and frequently are, feigned, and when backed 
 
 2 Mr. Bentham (in Book II. part ii. of his Principles of 
 Penal Law) observes that even in the case of the most dan- 
 gerous description of homicide, assassination for lucre a crime 
 proceeding from a disposition which puts indiscriminately the 
 life of every man into immediate jeopardy the danger is not so 
 great as from madmen who are restrained by none of the con- 
 siderations which influence ordinary malefactors, and yet that, 
 in the case of madmen, confinement is found sufficient to give 
 to society the necessary security against further mischief from 
 the same individual.
 
 LETTER iv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 33 
 
 up by frequent professions of a deep sense of 
 religion, they may, however insincere, be played 
 off upon gaolers, chaplains, and magistrates 
 with such skill as to baffle all the vigilance and 
 penetration even of a very acute mind. Indeed, 
 the sincerity of the prisoner himself is no suffi- 
 cient safeguard. He may deceive himself in his 
 estimate of the trustworthiness of newly formed 
 principles and amended habits, and, leaving the 
 prison with a very real wish to lead a good 
 life in the world to which he returns, his virtu- 
 ous intentions may, at the end of no very long 
 time, break down under the influence of temp- 
 tations which, not having for a long time been 
 tested, he falsely believed to have lost all power 
 over him. 
 
 The advocates of capital punishment usually 
 dispose of the question by a short and simple 
 dilemma. By universal consent, they say, any- 
 thing short of perpetual imprisonment in substi- 
 tution of death as the punishment for murder 
 would be insufficient, but in practice perpetual 
 imprisonment is an impossibility. 
 
 I have nothing to say against the first of 
 
 D
 
 34 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER IT 
 
 these propositions, and what I have to say 
 against the second of them I will defer for the 
 present, observing only in the meantime that all 
 the greatest reforms in human affairs have been 
 brought about by steady perseverance in the 
 doing of old-established impossibilities.
 
 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 35 
 
 LETTER V. 
 
 ON the question of the comparative efficacy of 
 capital punishment and imprisonment for life 
 in deterring from murders, there is little or 
 nothing in the way of direct experience to guide 
 us. Judges, advocates, gaolers, gaol chaplains, 
 and all persons whose duties bring them into 
 personal contact with criminals, have for the 
 most part concluded, from their observation of 
 the demeanour of criminals, that there is no 
 punishment comparable to that of death in the 
 terror which it inspires. But their experience 
 scarcely touches the real point at issue. It is 
 defective in both the things which have to be 
 compared. It tells us nothing as regards one of 
 those things, and it tells us something which 
 we know already, but of which the knowledge is 
 of no use to us in regard to the other. Of the 
 terror inspired by the prospect of imprisonment
 
 36 . THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH MTTER v 
 
 for life nothing can be known from experience, 
 because, as a practical reality, as anything more 
 than a verbal threat not intended to be carried 
 into execution, it has no existence in our criminal 
 system. Until perpetual imprisonment as the 
 punishment of murder shall have been rigidly 
 carried out for such a length of time as prac- 
 tically to exclude from the minds of persons 
 under temptation to commit murder all hope of 
 relaxation in their particular case, we cannot be 
 said to have any direct experience in the matter. 
 The evidence of judges, gaolers, gaol chaplains, 
 &c., to the effect that death is the most terrify- 
 ing of all the punishments of which they have 
 any experience, may quite be trusted as far as 
 it goes, but it, unfortunately, does not go far 
 enough to throw much light on the subject of 
 the desirableness or otherwise of capital punish- 
 ment, for it is confined to the period intervening 
 between arrest and execution ; and what we want 
 to know is, what degree of terror is inspired by 
 the prospect of death upon the scaffold, before a 
 crime has been perpetrated, before it has been 
 finally determined on, before it has suggested
 
 LETTER v . THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 37 
 
 itself to the mind as a practical possibility. The 
 various and striking forms in which terror ex- 
 hibits itself on the deck of a sinking ship affords 
 little or no material for judging of the degree in 
 which the dangers of the sea deter men from sea 
 voyages ; and the trifling difference between the 
 wages of mining and of other kinds of coarse 
 labour does afford proof that danger to human 
 life when remote and uncertain is not an element 
 of very great weight in determining human 
 conduct. No doubt the fear of the death punish- 
 ment, as of all punishment, operates more or less 
 at all times, and it may be said by those who 
 bring their personal experience to bear upon this 
 question, that if death has more terror for a 
 criminal than any other punishment at one time, 
 it must have so at another ; that if it be the 
 most terrify ing of all punishments after sentence, 1 
 
 1 That death, after sentence, is more terrifying than im- 
 prisonment for life, after sentence, is not in the absence of all 
 experience of the latter punishment as a practical reality 
 capable of proof from direct experience ; but I have little doubt 
 that experience, if it were not wanting, would prove it to be so. 
 Death, to be carried out in the course of a few days or weeks, 
 would, I believe, in nineteen cases out of twenty, be much more 
 terrifying than life imprisonment to commence at the end of the 
 same number of days or weeks.
 
 38 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER v 
 
 it will be the most terrifying, and therefore the 
 most deterrent, of all punishments before the 
 commission of the offence, and that the difference 
 be it great or small between the fear of pain 
 when the pain is almost certain and near at 
 hand, and when it is remote or uncertain, is as 
 applicable to imprisonment as to death. That 
 if death be more dreaded than imprisonment 
 when the crime has been brought home to the 
 perpetrator, and he is about to undergo his 
 punishment, it will also be more dreaded than 
 imprisonment at the time when the idea of per- 
 petrating the crime first enters his mind. That 
 this may at all events be assumed as true in the 
 absence of proof of its falsehood. There is little 
 to be said, as I have already shown, from direct 
 experience either in proof or in disproof of this 
 view of the matter. The subject is one on 
 which, in the absence of such experience, we 
 are in a great measure driven to a priori reason- 
 ing ; but it is a great mistake to suppose that 
 a priori reasoning in such cases is necessarily 
 inconclusive. Universal observation may have 
 proved to us the truth of certain principles of
 
 LETTER v THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 39 
 
 human nature, which may serve as the stepping- 
 stones to a conclusion quite as certain as any 
 which could be derived from direct experi- 
 ence. 
 
 Xow the weak point of death as a deterrent, 
 in all cases, is our constant familiarity with the 
 thought that being absolutely certain sooner or 
 later the time of its occurrence is altogether 
 uncertain. Whatever the terrors of death may 
 be when it seems to be near and certain, it has 
 no terrors for men in their ordinary condition of 
 health and occupation. Indeed, if it were other- 
 wise, if the possibility of a death close at hand 
 were constantly present to men's minds, not 
 only would all the enjoyments of life be poisoned, 
 but all its practical utility would be undermined. 
 No human being has ever existed whose path 
 has not been constantly beset with the risk of 
 death in an endless variety of forms, and origin- 
 ating in an endless variety of causes. There is 
 not a single moment, from the beginning of his 
 life to the end, when something may not occur 
 from disease, accident, or the hostility of other 
 men which shall be the commencement of a
 
 40 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER V 
 
 process ending more or less rapidly in death. 
 But the human mind has been so constituted 
 that the absence of all power of foresight in 
 regard to the time, the form, and the proximate 
 cause of the event deadens all fear of the event 
 itself, and men go about their business in life as 
 perfectly insensible to all fear of its being brought 
 to a sudden termination as though it had been 
 ordained by nature that life in this world should 
 never end, or should be of a certain minimum 
 duration. It is one of those elements of the 
 mental constitution implanted in us by the 
 Almighty, for which we have most cause to be 
 grateful ; for if we had been differently con- 
 stituted, life would have been a constant torment. 
 A man takes a railway journey. He know 
 that people occasionally lose their lives by rail- 
 way accidents. How is it that his journey is 
 not poisoned by the fear of any such consequence 
 to himself ? The reason is that so many of the 
 other actions of his life involved similar risks, 
 and that if each particular case be taken sepa- 
 rately the risk is very small. If he allows him- 
 self to be agitated by fear of accident on a
 
 LBTTEH v THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 4l 
 
 railway, why not on board a steamboat, or in 
 going up a ladder, or in riding or driving, or 
 shooting, or sleeping in an inn bed of which the 
 sheets may be damp, or in eating his dinner, 
 which accident or malice may have made a vehicle 
 of poison. The number and variety of events 
 which involve these small risks of death is so 
 great that if in all of them he gave way to fear, 
 he would scarcely be at peace for five minutes 
 together during the whole of his life. The result 
 is that he gives way to fear in none of them, and 
 habit soon enables him' to pass through life 
 altogether undisturbed by any fears except those 
 of some danger of the imminence and deadlines s 
 of which he has palpable evidence. 
 
 If death by drowning were the only death 
 which they were subject to, men would hesitate 
 seriously before they would commit themselves 
 to a ship ; but what is the chance of a death by 
 drowning added to the innumerable chances of 
 deaths from other causes which already hang 
 over our heads ? No such hesitation accordingly 
 is ever felt. So the chance of losing his life upon 
 the scaffold is only one more added to the num-
 
 42 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH I.ETTEB v 
 
 berless chances of deaths from other causes which 
 hang over the criminal. 
 
 Whatever effect the fear of death generally 
 may have upon his conduct, it will not increase 
 it in any great degree to add death upon the 
 scaffold to the other forms of death which already 
 threaten him. 2 
 
 It may be said that death upon the scaffold 
 will present itself with force to his imagina- 
 tion as the direct and natural consequence of 
 the particular act which he is meditating. But 
 human life is full of deliberate acts of which the 
 same thing may with equal truth be said. The 
 sailor, the miner, the railway engine-driver, the 
 soldier, the physician, and many others, are 
 constantly, of their own free will, without one 
 instant's hesitation, placing themselves in situa- 
 tions which are, not in a very trifling degree, 
 dangerous to human life. I have myself seen 
 three men embark in an open boat for a promised 
 pecuniary reward of no great magnitude to row 
 
 2 Except in so far as death upon the scaffold brings with it 
 certain pains which would not accompany other forms of death 
 disgrace, more intense grief and unhappiness to relations and 
 friends, &c.
 
 LETTER v THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 43 
 
 a distance of less than a quarter of a mile with a 
 chance which no one could better estimate than 
 they could, certainly not exceeding one chance 
 of life against one of death, and I saw two of 
 those men struggling hopelessly for life within 
 five minutes of that deliberate act of theirs. 
 Hundreds of men, workers in a coal mine, are, 
 as we all know, after an explosion ready to de- 
 scend at a moment's notice into the bottom of 
 the mine at the most imminent risk of their 
 lives, if there is the smallest hope of their rescuing 
 one single fellow- workman. It may be said that 
 these examples only prove that the noble and 
 generous impulse which fills the breast of good 
 men (the physician or the minister of religion, 
 for example, who goes into a focus of deadly infec- 
 tion to administer comfort to a fellow-creature) 
 is stronger than the fear of death, and proves 
 nothing against the reality and strength of that 
 fear. But then it must be remembered that in 
 this question of capital punishment it is also 
 the relative, not the positive, strength of the fear 
 of death which is the material consideration ; 
 and when the case comes to be applied to the
 
 44 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER v 
 
 man who is meditating the commission of a great 
 crime, it is unfortunately only too certain that 
 the bad passions are at least as strong as the 
 good ones ; quite as likely, therefore, to get the 
 better of the fear of death. 
 
 Another cause detracting from the efficacy 
 of capital punishment is this, that in the opinion 
 of the world the bad portion of it equally with 
 the good a certain disgrace attaches to the fear 
 of death. The man who avows that the thought 
 of death is a frequent source of uneasiness to 
 him is generally despised. Such a feeling is 
 considered a weakness. It was so considered by 
 the friends of Dr. Johnson, and would, I have 
 little doubt, have been so considered by the 
 associates of Thurtell. A man in a violent 
 storm at sea, or in any situation involving 
 danger to life, knows so well that the betrayal of 
 any striking signs of fear would lower him in the 
 estimation of the persons by whom he is sur- 
 rounded, that, from that cause alone, he will 
 make the strongest efforts to repress any such 
 feelings. That the profession of being superior 
 to the fear of death may, in some cases, be
 
 LETTER v THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 45 
 
 affected, and in others may be little more than 
 a knack of keeping the mind hermetically sealed 
 to painful thoughts, is, I dare say, true, but this 
 does not affect my argument. The important 
 point is certain, viz., that all men, good or bad, 
 are a good deal influenced in their professions 
 by the expressed opinions and feelings whether 
 real or affected of other men ; and if in their 
 professions, then also in their conduct. There 
 can scarcely be habitual profession without 
 more or less of the reality. The habitual pro- 
 fession of indifference to death will tend in some 
 not very trifling degree to produce the reality of 
 that indifference. The consciousness that he is 
 palming off upon his associates feelings which 
 have no real existence within his breast is 
 always painful to a man ; and if the desire to 
 stand well with his associates leads him to 
 speak lightly of the prospect of death, he will 
 constantly, as a mere relief to himself, be making 
 more or less of an effort to think lightly of it, 
 and it is difficult to believe that those efforts 
 will be altogether inoperative. 
 
 From the above considerations it does not
 
 46 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER v 
 
 of course absolutely follow that death may not 
 still, on the whole, be the most deterrent of all 
 punishments, but those considerations do make 
 it plain that there are certain elements of weak- 
 ness detracting from its efficacy as a deterrent 
 which have no existence in other punishments. 
 Mankind has no feeling of contempt for a man 
 who is terrified at the prospect of imprisonment, 
 and the association between the crime and 
 its punishment is much closer, much more 
 difficult to exclude from the mind when the 
 punishment is imprisonment for life, than when 
 it is death. When imprisonment is the threat- 
 ened punishment, the association which is formed 
 in the mind of the criminal is between the pain 
 of the punishment as the consequence, and his 
 own criminal act as the one only possible cause; 
 whereas, when the threatened punishment is 
 death, the association is between the pain 3 of 
 the punishment and his own criminal act, as 
 one out of a great number and variety of pos- 
 sible causes, for death may fall upon a man from 
 
 3 To speak with perfect accuracy, I ought to say the principal 
 part of the pain.
 
 LETTEE v THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 47 
 
 innumerable causes wholly unconnected with 
 his misconduct. But the efficacy of the asso- 
 ciation as a deterrent will be weakened in exact 
 proportion to the number and variety of the 
 circumstances which may by possibility lead to 
 the same painful consequence. A man meditat- 
 ing a crime punishable with death may be sup- 
 posed to reason thus with himself : ' I am con- 
 stantly doing things which are dangerous to 
 human life ; why, then, should I hesitate at this 
 thing? The world despises a man who fears 
 death. The world admires a man who meets 
 death with courage, admires a man who does not 
 allow the fear of death to divert him from his 
 purpose. If, on the one hand, it is disgraceful to 
 be punished, on the other hand it is honourable 
 to die with calmness and resolution. There is 
 nothing fine or honourable to be set against the 
 disgrace of going to a prison.' 
 
 Disgrace is no doubt common to all punish- 
 ments ; but when a man dies on the scaffold 
 there is a counterpoise to the disgrace in the 
 admiration excited by his firmness ; and there 
 is no such counterpoise when a man goes off in
 
 48 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER T 
 
 the prison van to be immured in a cell. It is 
 idle to say, in reply to this, that the bravery a 
 man exhibits on the scaffold is not deserving of 
 admiration, and that, instead of making the fact 
 of that admiration the foundation of an objec- 
 tion to the punishment of death, we ought to 
 set ourselves to destroy that false sentiment of 
 honour. Whether false or not, it exists, and 
 we must deal with it. But it is not altogether 
 false. It is better to meet a deserved punish- 
 ment with firmness than with weakness. The 
 firmness is a great quality which, under more 
 favourable circumstances, might have made this 
 delinquent a noted benefactor of his race. It is 
 not in human nature to be insensible to an ex- 
 hibition of power in the endurance of extreme 
 pain, mental or bodily. I do not deny that the 
 fortitude which should endure many successive 
 years of imprisonment and its attendant hard- 
 ship and privations without a murmur is more 
 worthy of admiration than the spasmodic forti 
 tude which enables a man, during the half-hour 
 immediately preceding his execution, to pre- 
 serve his features unmoved, his voice unaltered, 
 and his steps unshaken ; but upon nine men
 
 LETTER v THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 49 
 
 out of ten the half-hour's fortitude on the scaf- 
 fold will tell a thousand times more than the 
 twenty years' fortitude within the prison walls. 
 To admiration of the twenty years' fortitude 
 within the prison walls minds not of the highest 
 and rarest order would be wholly insensible. 
 There are thousands of men who, after witness- 
 ing an execution, or even after reading a narra- 
 tive of it, might say to themselves, ' This man 
 has committed a barbarous murder, but, after all, 
 he is a fine fellow,' and would have been utterly 
 incapable of making any kind of moral estimate 
 of his daily and hourly conduct during twenty 
 consecutive years of a prison life. The idea of 
 one man within the prison walls being different 
 from another man within the prison walls will 
 never enter their imagination. They will under- 
 stand perfectly that the prison life would be a 
 cutting off of all the pleasures of "the present 
 life, but as a stage for the exercise of heroism, 
 deserving the admiration of the world it will 
 be unintelligible to them. Nor if perpetual 
 imprisonment were rightly administered could 
 they ever know of it. 
 
 E
 
 50 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 I PROPOSE in the following letter to go on with 
 the subject of the efficacy of the fear of death as 
 compared with that of perpetual imprisonment 
 as the punishment of great crimes. I have 
 already referred to the opinion expressed by 
 many of our most distinguished criminal judges 
 that death is the most terrifying of all punish- 
 ments, an opinion formed chiefly on their ob- 
 servation of the demeanour of great criminals 
 when upon their trial. I have shown that the 
 opinion, however well founded, is unfortunately 
 not very pertinent to the question of the deter- 
 rent efficacy of capital punishment, for however 
 great and undoubted the terror, it unfortunately 
 comes too late to be of any use after the com- 
 mission of the offence and not before it. 
 
 No spectacle is so likely to lead to false 
 conclusions as that of a man who is absolutely
 
 LETTER vi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 5 L 
 
 at your mercy, and who knows that you are 
 either actually signing his death-warrant, or in 
 a certain event which he perceives to be in a 
 very high degree probable, will do so. The 
 paroxysms of anxiety and fear suffered by a 
 man in that situation afford little or no ground 
 of inference in regard to the power of the fear 
 of death over men placed in circumstances of a 
 totally different kind. A man who is paralysed 
 with fear when he lies helpless at your feet 
 might be capable of rushing into action wholly 
 undisturbed by such fear if he were a free agent, 
 even though death were as probable and as near 
 in the latter case as in the former. I do not say 
 that this is true of all men, but innumerable 
 examples of men voluntarily placing themselves 
 in circumstances of danger deadly and imminent 
 some of which I have already cited prove that 
 it is true of a large proportion of mankind ; and 
 if so, it is little likely to be false of the man 
 meditating the commission of a great crime, 
 whose impression in regard to death as the con- 
 sequence of his act is that it is neither very near 
 nor very probable. 
 
 z 2
 
 52 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vi 
 
 A man will of course be much more violently 
 affected by the near prospect of a punishment of 
 which the entire and direct pain is to be con- 
 centrated within the space of half an hour, than 
 by that of a punishment of which the direct 
 pain is to be spread over many thousands or tens 
 of thousands of half hours. The near approach 
 of the latter punishment is that only of the first 
 weeks or days of it, but the near approach 
 of the former is that of the punishment in its 
 entirety. Let me apply to the illustration of 
 this point the analogous case of a reward. Con- 
 ceive, for the sake of argument, a pleasure of the 
 most intense kind to begin and terminate in the 
 course of a single day. The near approach of 
 that pleasure would affect a man with a much 
 more exuberant joy than the near approach of 
 some pleasure which should be much less in- 
 tense although of much greater duration. Let 
 me suppose the case of a man who has rendered 
 some great service to his country. Say that his 
 reward is to consist of a public ceremonial, in 
 the course of which honours are to be showered 
 on his head in the sight of his assembled coun-
 
 LETTEE vi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 53 
 
 trymen. His courage, his benevolence, or his 
 wisdom are to be proclaimed to the world in the 
 midst of the shouts of admiring multitudes, and 
 of the sympathy and approval of all that is best 
 and noblest in the country. The sensations of 
 that man on the day preceding the one on which 
 his public triumph is to take place will, of 
 course, be very different from those which he 
 would have experienced on the day preceding 
 that on which he should have received the first 
 half-yearly payment of a pension for life if that 
 had been the allotted reward of his services. 
 Any one who understands the difference between 
 the feelings and signs of joy of two men under 
 the influence of those two different kinds of 
 reward will also understand the difference be- 
 tween the feelings and signs of grief and terror 
 of two men, of whom one is in the course of a 
 few days to be publicly put to death, and the 
 other is to be conveyed to a prison, there to 
 spend the remainder of his life. Give a man the 
 choice between these two punishments on the 
 day immediately preceding the proposed execu- 
 tion, and the probability is as ten to one that he
 
 54 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vi 
 
 will choose the prison. Give him the same 
 choice twelve months before the sentences are to 
 be carried out, and it is an even chance that he 
 will choose the scaffold. It is the same with all 
 cruel punishments ; indeed with all punishments 
 of which the whole of the pain is concentrated 
 within a very short space of time. Give a man 
 the option between receiving three years hence 
 thirty lashes or a year's imprisonment, and he 
 might choose the former ; give him the same 
 option, the punishment to begin immediately, 
 and he will go to prison. The conclusion seems 
 to me to be inevitable that the prospect of death 
 on the scaffold is greatly more terrifying than 
 the prospect of imprisonment for life during the 
 short period intervening between arrest and exe- 
 cution, but that this affords no ground of in- 
 ference whatever in regard to the comparative 
 terrifying powers of the two punishments before 
 the commission of the offence, where the com- 
 parison would be undisturbed by any dread of 
 intense pain close at hand. 
 
 From what precedes I conclude that the 
 opinion (referred to by me at p. 37) is erro-
 
 LETTER vi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 55 
 
 neous which assumes that death on the scaffold 
 is more terrifying than imprisonment for life in 
 the same proportion before the commission of 
 the offence and after arrest ; on the contrary, it 
 seems to me certain that pain which is intense 
 and of short duration will terrify proportionally 
 more when near at hand, and proportionally less 
 when remote and uncertain, than pain which is 
 less intense but of longer duration.
 
 56 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTEB vn 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 I NOW come to what seems to me to be the most 
 serious of the objections to the punishment of 
 death as a deterrent from great crimes, and I 
 must observe that it is an objection which in no 
 degree applies to imprisonment for life. The 
 objection is, that the circumstances which un- 
 avoidably attend its practical application are 
 such as to excite the sympathy of the public 
 in favour of the perpetrator of the crime, and 
 thereby seriously to impair the efficacy of the 
 punishment as an example. The administrators 
 of the law in England, from the highest to the 
 lowest, from the judge to the turnkey, seem to 
 labour under a frightful consciousness that the 
 punishment is too terrible to be carried out with 
 that cold, unmoved inflexibility which is the 
 proper demeanour of a magistrate and his 
 officers when they are executing a just and
 
 XETTER vii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 57 
 
 necessary law required for the protection of 
 society against the criminal assaults of its 
 enemies. It is in truth not in human nature 
 to be cold and unmoved when the business on 
 hand is the taking away the life of a fellow- 
 creature. The human heart rebels against it, 
 and relieves itself by acts of personal consider- 
 ation, of kindness, of tenderness almost, for the 
 criminal, which, in so far as they are known to 
 the world outside and to a great extent they 
 must be known can operate only in one way, 
 that is, to excite the public sympathy in his 
 favour. Mr. Justice Shee, in his evidence before 
 the Capital Punishment Commission, amongst 
 other suggestions for the mitigation of the evils 
 of capital punishment, recommends that the 
 treatment of criminals under capital sentence 
 should be in the highest degree kind and gentle, 
 and avowedly directed to the end of preparing 
 them for death ; that it should be such as to 
 soften their hearts and dispose them to repent- 
 ance and resignation. But certainly no such 
 recommendation was needed. Nothing under 
 our system of capital punishment can be more
 
 58 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vn 
 
 kind and gentle than the treatment received by 
 convicted murderers under sentence of death. 
 As a matter of fact it is so, and it is not in 
 human nature that it should be otherwise. It 
 is attended with very injurious consequences, 
 but it is inevitable. People of average humanity, 
 professing a religion of which one of the princi- 
 pal doctrines is that of a future state of rewards 
 and punishments, who are about to deprive of 
 life a man whose soul is charged with a horrible 
 crime, are driven, as a mere relief to their feel- 
 ings, to use every possible method of persuasion 
 in order to draw from him such expressions of 
 penitence as may suffice to satisfy them that 
 they are not going to kill body and soul to- 
 gether. But all this tenderness lavished upon 
 convicted murderers, and paraded before the 
 public as, by the aid of the Press, it invariably 
 is tends, of course, to mitigate those feelings 
 of disgust and abhorrence for great crimes which 
 it should be the endeavour of society, by every 
 means in its power, to stimulate. The holding 
 up to us a malefactor of the very worst kind as 
 a proper object of compassionate interest is not
 
 IBTTEE vii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 59 
 
 the only evil. Another, and perhaps a greater, 
 evil is the suggesting to us that an offence 
 which an earthly tribunal has just pronounced 
 to be unpardonable is, by a perfectly just and 
 wise Judge, and by virtue of a certain number 
 of professions of penitence, the genuineness of 
 which there is no time to submit to any real 
 test, likely to be pardoned. Nothing is less to 
 be desired than that the judge and officers of 
 human tribunals should publicly enter upon the 
 question of the probable fate, at the hands of 
 the Almighty Judge, of offenders against human 
 laws. Their sole function is to protect society 
 by punishing acts by which, if left unpunished, 
 society would fall to pieces. The question they 
 have to try is confined to the particular act 
 which constitutes the man's supposed crime, 
 but by the principles of our religion, as we 
 understand and accept it, that is only part of 
 the question which the Almighty Judge will 
 try in the case of His creatures. According to 
 the belief of a Christian that question is co- 
 extensive with the man's entire life, from its 
 first day to its last ; and if human judges, by
 
 60 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vu 
 
 putting a criminal to death, deliberately send 
 him before that Supreme Tribunal upon a dif- 
 ferent issue from that which would have had to 
 be tried if his life had been allowed to run its 
 natural course, it is impossible that they should 
 not feel oppressed by the terrible responsibility 
 incurred by them, and should not feel an irre- 
 sistible desire to convince themselves that at 
 least that man's case in another world has not 
 been made worse by their interposition. A 
 clergyman attending upon a convicted murderer 
 under sentence of death is placed by those 
 human judges in a very false position. It is 
 scarcely possible that he should avoid giving 
 some kind of assurance to the prisoner, deriving 
 authority from his sacred office, of pardon in the 
 next world. The words he uses never, I dare 
 say, in their strict and literal sense, amount to 
 that, but when we reflect upon the number of 
 criminals who, at the last moment, express a 
 confident expectation of pardon and happiness 
 in the next world, it is difficult to believe that 
 this is not the practical result on the prisoner's 
 mind of his intercourse with his religious
 
 LETTBB vii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 61 
 
 adviser. The ministration of the clergyman in 
 substance, although not in direct terms, in effect, 
 if not in intention, usually amounts to this, 
 ' Be sorry for your fault, express that sorrow to 
 your Maker, and you may confidently hope for 
 pardon.' If so, the case can scarcely fail to come 
 before the public as that of a man who, having 
 committed a crime so bad as to render it impos- 
 sible that he should be allowed longer to remain 
 in this world, will be received as one of the 
 blessed in a world to come ; and if a clergyman, 
 perceiving the consequent mischief to society, 
 sternly refuses to lend himself to the production 
 of such an impression, he is in fact, during those 
 last few days on earth of this wretched man, 
 aggravating his torture in a degree of which the 
 bare contemplation is scarcely endurable. Mr. 
 Justice Shee goes so far as to recommend 1 that 
 at executions a form of prayer should be read by 
 the chaplain of the gaol, reminding the criminal 
 of the promise of pardon to all those who truly 
 repent. But what is to be the test of true re- 
 pentance ? The man will be deprived of life in 
 
 1 Page 629 of Capital Punishment Commission.
 
 62 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vn 
 
 the course of a fortnight. What test of genuine 
 repentance is possible in that time ? If his life 
 were spared, would he cure himself of his faults 
 and lead an amended life ? Would sorrow for 
 his past wickedness, and the determination to 
 make such atonement as might be possible, stand 
 firm during the long course of his prison life ? 
 Who knows ? We are not going to put him to 
 that trial. Having refused him the opportunity 
 of giving any substantial proof of the reality 
 of his repentance, we must of necessity be 
 satisfied with such proof as the shortness of 
 his allotted time admits of. The consequence is 
 obvious, viz. that a few sentences uttered in 
 the solemn and impressive manner which is in- 
 separable from all that a man says or does in the 
 last hours of life, expressive of sorrow for his 
 sins and of hope of the pardon of his Creator, 
 must be considered effectual. Neither the 
 clergyman nor any other of the persons attend- 
 ing upon him during that short but sad inter- 
 val would dare to throw a doubt on that point. 
 The conclusion suggested to the public mind is, 
 that the murderer's salvation is secure. All the
 
 LKTTEE vii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 63 
 
 intercourse with him from the day of his convic- 
 tion to that of his execution tends to this con- 
 clusion. In passing sentence, the judge urges 
 him to lose no time in making his peace with 
 God. Within the prison the attendants upon a 
 man who has only three weeks to live, of course, 
 scrupulously abstain from making any allusion 
 to his crime ; the chaplain prays with him, and 
 repeats to him that the mercy of the Redeemer 
 has no limit that man can assign, and it gene- 
 rally ends by his going to the scaffold in the 
 expressed belief that he is as secure of eternal 
 happiness as the most virtuous man that ever 
 walked upon the earth. 
 
 I am not now discussing, and do not in- 
 tend to discuss, the question of the efficacy of 
 that three weeks' repentance of a convicted 
 murderer, or any other purely religious question. 
 It would be highly culpable and arrogant, and, 
 so far as the subject I am engaged upon is con- 
 cerned, quite useless to do so. I am considering 
 religion in one point of view only, viz. in its 
 effects on the affairs of the world, as the great 
 support and foundation of pure morality amongst
 
 64 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vii 
 
 men in their relation with each other. Now 
 religion can be made to give a sanction to 
 morality in one way only, namely, by the assump- 
 tion that the actions which we look upon as 
 constituting virtue and as a proper subject of 
 reward, and those other actions which we look 
 upon as constituting vvice and as a proper subject 
 of punishment, are also so looked upon by our 
 Creator and Judge ; and it is plain that if, on 
 the occasion of the perpetration of some act 
 which in our estimation is one of the very 
 highest degree of wickedness, we are to en- 
 courage the belief that such an act will be no 
 bar to the admission of the perpetrator, in 
 another world, amongst the ranks of the just 
 and virtuous, we are simply repudiating our own 
 theory, and knocking from under us the very 
 foundation on which, by that theory, the union 
 between religion and morality rests. But I 
 have endeavoured to show not only that we do 
 in fact, under our system of capital punishment, 
 give encouragement to that belief, but that, so 
 long as human sympathies survive, it is inevit- 
 able that, under that system, we should do so. 
 
 / 
 
 r
 
 LETTER viz THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 65 
 
 The alternative is one against which all human 
 sympathy revolts. The mere instinct of 
 humanity repels the idea of torturing a man 
 whom you are about to deprive of life, by throw- 
 ing doubts on the efficacy in another world of 
 the words of sorrowful supplication which he 
 has just addressed to his Creator. 
 
 I wish to guard myself against misconception 
 on another point. I do not assert that there is 
 any hypocrisy in a convicted murderer's profes- 
 sions of penitence ; on the contrary, 1 believe 
 them to be perfectly sincere. That a murderer, 
 unless he has positive disbelief in a future state 
 of reward and punishment, should be penitent, 
 in a certain sense of the word, between sentence 
 and execution is not only probable, but is 
 nearly certain. It is scarcely conceivable that a 
 man who is leaving this world and going, as he 
 believes, into another should not yield to the 
 strenuous efforts made by the minister of religion 
 in attendance upon him to turn his mind to the 
 most effectual means for conciliating the Being 
 on whom his fate in that future life must depend. 
 It is not credible that there should be no reality 
 
 I
 
 66 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER TII 
 
 in his sorrow ; for who can fail in truth and 
 sincerity to lament an act which was done with 
 an exclusive view to objects connected with this 
 world when matters have so turned out that he 
 has not only failed in those objects, but has 
 brought himself into a position of terrible doubt 
 with regard to the only thing which is now left 
 to him, to his prospects, viz., in a world to come. 
 But what does all this prove, except the certainty 
 of the evil which I have pointed out as a neces- 
 sary consequence of capital punishment. The 
 sequence of cause and effect is sufficiently 
 obvious genuine remorse for his crime on the 
 part of the criminal, exhortations to prayer on 
 the part of the minister of religion, accompanied 
 by representations of the efficacy of true re- 
 pentance in procuring a remission of sins in 
 another world ; confident anticipations of par- 
 don and happiness hereafter on the part of the 
 criminal, published to the world with all that 
 particularity and minuteness which are sure to 
 attend his last words and acts ; weakening of 
 the motives which operate as a counterpoise to 
 the temptations to great crimes. No one who
 
 LETTER vn THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 67 
 
 reflects upon the tenacity with which every man 
 clings to the one remaining hope when all other 
 hopes have been extinguished, will feel much 
 surprise at the readiness and confidence with 
 which criminals under sentence of death grasp 
 at the prospect of pardon and happiness in 
 another world. The fact is one of which the 
 instances are numerous, one of them I will cite, 
 because it furnishes me with an illustration of 
 another of the evil consequences of capital punish- 
 ment ; that evil, arising out of capital punish- 
 ment, is the frequent union in the same man, 
 the frequent association, therefore, in the mind 
 of the public, of what is praiseworthy, and good, 
 and touching, with crimes of revolting atrocity. 
 The case I refer to is that of Bordier in 1867. 
 He deliberately murdered the woman with whom 
 he lived as a wife, and but for some sudden 
 mental reaction at the moment of the intended 
 crime would have murdered his children also. 
 Attempts were made to save him on the ground 
 of insanity, but there was no evidence of insanity 
 which could have weighed for a moment with 
 any man of sense. His last days, however, 
 
 * 2
 
 68 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vn 
 
 between sentence and execution (a minute de- 
 scription of which appeared, of course, in the 
 newspapers) were in the highest degree edifying. 
 He was described as ' fondling and caressing his 
 children as a young mother would her infant 
 babe.' In a letter to his mother he speaks of 
 the woman whom he has killed as ' her that I 
 had loved even to my last sigh.' ' He prays 
 for the maternal benediction.' ' He dies without 
 a complaint.' ' He has had the happiness to 
 reconcile himself with his God, whom he has 
 known and loved.' ' Man,' he says, ' may re- 
 pulse and chastise me, but God, who sees in me 
 my profound repentance, pardons and consoles 
 me in my prison. I put my confidence in my 
 Saviour who died for me. The priest who 
 attends me every day has promised to write and 
 give you other details. Adieu,' he says, ' my 
 dear mother, and may we meet in a better world.' 
 To his sister he writes that, ' as his last hour 
 approaches, when he must pay to mankind the 
 debt for the crime he has committed, he is ready 
 to appear before his Creator, to render an 
 account for all his actions, good and bad, with
 
 LETTER TII THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 69 
 
 the certitude that He will pardon him.' To his 
 shopmates he writes thanking them for all the 
 kindness they have shown him. ' I feel pretty 
 well,' he says to them, ' and am ready to suffer 
 for the crime I have committed, and I hope with 
 courage, and also to be forgiven by the blessed 
 Lord.' At the execution he conducts himself 
 (so says the report of the ' Star ' newspaper from 
 which this account is taken) in a most becoming 
 manner, and exhibits great firmness without 
 anything approaching to bravado. The marks 
 of physical suffering arising from bad health and 
 a painful surgical operation are described, not- 
 withstanding which, he walked up the steps lead- 
 ing to the scaffold with a firm step. ' When he 
 arrived at the top,' it is said in conclusion, ' he 
 bowed twice to the crowd, and a good many of 
 the persons assembled cheered and clapped their 
 hands.' There is nothing extraordinary in all 
 this. The same thing takes place, more or less, 
 in the case of a large proportion of those who die 
 on the scaffold. If there is anything which will 
 bring out what is good in a man's character 
 gratitude for past kindness, sorrow for past
 
 70 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTEE VH 
 
 faults, entreaties for forgiveness to those he has 
 injured, hope of pardon in another world, founded 
 partly on such portions of his life as he knows 
 to have been right it is the prospect of a sudden 
 termination of his earthly career within a few 
 weeks ; and it is only natural that the world 
 should respect those who, during those last 
 few weeks, and at the final scene of all, are able 
 to keep down mere brute terror and open their 
 minds even though it be then only for a short 
 time, and too late for any practical use in this 
 world to what is good and true. But how 
 does all this operate as a deterrent from great 
 crimes? And, if it is desirable that what is good 
 in the perpetrator of a cruel murder should be 
 laid open to the public, why not, and a fortiori, 
 what is good in lesser criminals? But the truth 
 is that, neither in the case of great criminals nor 
 of small, is it any part of the business of a 
 Government to provide the public with occasions 
 for passing moral judgments in complicated cases 
 of human character. This function may well be 
 left to Him whose judgment is unerring. The 
 proper business of a Government is to deter
 
 LETTEB vii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 71 
 
 from crime, and it can never conduce to that 
 end to inflict upon the perpetrators of the 
 greatest and most revolting of all crimes a 
 punishment of such a kind that, without fault 
 on the part of any one concerned in the matter, 
 it cannot be carried into execution without 
 affording an opportunity for the public exhibi- 
 tion of the criminal under circumstances and in 
 a form calculated in a high degree to deaden our 
 horror for the crime, by exciting our sympathy, 
 respect, and even admiration for the man. 
 
 ' But why conceal the truth,' I shall be told, 
 ' you who are a lover of truth, in regard to what 
 is commendable in a criminal, and tends with 
 justice to detract from our bad opinion of him? 
 Of our bad men as of our good, of our murderers 
 as of our judges and statesmen, surely it is best 
 that we should know the true characters.' Yes, 
 I reply, but in the case of the murderer- under 
 sentence of death, the commendable points of 
 character are not true. They are in the greatest 
 degree deceptive. They are the mere short- 
 lived effect of the peculiar situation of a man 
 who is to be removed from this world in the
 
 72 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vn 
 
 course of a few days. If he were pardoned, 
 would they continue to form part of his real 
 character? No one believes it. It is difficult to 
 conceive of Bordier, the destroyer of the woman 
 whom he was morally bound to cherish and 
 protect, that he was compassionate, tender, for- 
 giving, patient, grateful for past kindness. His 
 exhibition of himself in this character was not, I 
 dare say, the mere acting of a hypocrite, but, in 
 any sense having moral significance, it was as 
 fictitious as that of the professional actor on the 
 boards of a theatre. It may have been a true 
 representation of the feelings of the man who 
 was about to die, but not of the feelings of the 
 man as he had lived. To the general public it 
 was altogether misleading. 
 
 In your answer to my last letter you observe 
 with truth that the evils pointed out by me 
 would be removed by preventing publicity, by 
 withholding from the public all particular in- 
 formation in regard to the intercourse of prison- 
 ers under sentence of death with their relations, 
 their religious adviser, and their attendants 
 within the prison. Already, to prevent the
 
 LETTEB TII THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 73 
 
 special evils arising from public executions, 
 we have determined to execute our criminals 
 within the prison walls. Why not go a step 
 farther and, in order to prevent the perpetra- 
 tors of great crimes from being paraded before 
 the public in colours such as to excite pity, 
 respect, and admiration, why not, you say, draw 
 an impenetrable veil over those last days of the 
 convicted murderer ? I entirely concur in this 
 view of the matter. In the interest of the pub- 
 lic, and to prevent any weakening of the motives 
 which deter from great crimes, I have no doubt 
 that, so long as capital punishment is main- 
 tained, it would be desirable to oblige the 
 friends and relations to take their final leave of 
 the condemned prisoner within twenty-four hours 
 of his sentence, and from that day to withdraw 
 him absolutely and entirely from the observation 
 of the public. Any particular information in 
 regard to his words, acts, and demeanour during 
 those three weeks are more likely, I believe, to 
 weaken than to strengthen the deterrent effect 
 of his punishment on the public mind. I do 
 not deny that, with a view to the repression of
 
 74 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vn 
 
 great crimes, it would be desirable, if possible, 
 to bring home to the public mind the mental 
 agony of those three weeks, for that as I have 
 elsewhere observed constitutes the real pain of 
 the death-punishment. But this is precisely 
 what we have little or no power of doing, for 
 the purely mental pains are not those which 
 manifest themselves most forcibly by external 
 signs, are not those which the persons having 
 communication with the prisoner during those 
 last days would be most likely to perceive, 
 would be most disposed to dwell upon, or, if they 
 were so, would find it easy to describe. Mere 
 pity for the man whom they are about so soon 
 to deprive of life makes it inevitable that they 
 should dwell in preference on the words, feel- 
 ings, and incidents which reflect credit upon 
 him on his religious hopes, on his expressions 
 of sorrow at the thought of his past wickedness, 
 on his entreaties for forgiveness at the hands of 
 those he has injured, on his intervals of mental 
 calm rather than on those of mental disturb- 
 ance, on his resignation and hopes of future 
 happiness rather than on his terror and despair.
 
 LETTER vn THE PUNISHMENT OF D,EATH 75 
 
 ' The great business of the civil ruler,' says 
 Fielding, ' is to raise terror and to strip it of all 
 pity and all admiration, and to effect this,' he 
 adds, ' it seems that the execution should be as 
 soon as possible after the commission and con- 
 viction of a crime.' In the present day regard 
 for the eternal interests of the criminal will 
 always prevent any material shortening of the 
 interval between sentence and execution, but it 
 would in a great degree answer the same pur- 
 pose (that is, it would prevent the terror in the 
 public mind from being weakened by pity and 
 admiration) to make that interval a closed book 
 for the public. With all men, but more parti- 
 cularly with the uneducated, awe and dread are 
 stimulated by a certain mixture of mysterious 
 concealment. 2 It is the same with imprisonment 
 
 2 Speaking of the priests 'whose politics,' he says, 'have 
 never been doubted,' Fielding observes that ' those of Egypt in 
 particular, where the sacred mysteries were first devised, well 
 knew the use of hiding from the eyes of the vulgar what they 
 intended should inspire them with the greatest awe and dread. 
 The mind of man is so much more capable of magnifying than 
 his eye, that I question whether every object is not lessened by 
 being looked upon, and this more especially when the passions 
 are concerned, for these are ever apt to fancy much more satis- 
 faction in those objects which they affect, and much more of
 
 76 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH I.ETTEB VH 
 
 for life as it is with the death punishment and 
 its antecedent three weeks of prison life ; both 
 will produce less terror in the public mind in 
 proportion as the real incidents are known. Of 
 all spectacles the most imposing and the most 
 wholesome which you could present to the pub- 
 lic eye would be the formal passage of the con- 
 demned criminal from that public court and 
 from the presence of that audience which has 
 just heard sentence pronounced upon him, into 
 final and complete oblivion. This is as certain 
 in relation to the man who is to live out his 
 natural life within the walls of a prison as of 
 the man whose life is to be cut short on a 
 scaffold in the course of a few weeks. Bring 
 that man again upon the public stage in any 
 shape or under any circumstances, and you 
 infallibly bring him there as an object of sympa- 
 thetic interest, which, if your object is example, 
 is the very last sentiment you can wish to asso- 
 ciate in the public mind with the perpetrators of 
 great crimes. 
 
 mischief in those which they abhor, than are really to be found 
 in either.' ' Causes of the Increase of Bobbers,' p. 464 of 
 voL x. of Murphy's edition of Fielding's works.
 
 I.ETTBH TII THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 77 
 
 Your suggestion, however, judicious though 
 it be, is impracticable. The difficulty is that 
 which meets us at every step when we go out of 
 our proper sphere to put limits upon the dura- 
 tion of the life which the Author of nature has 
 bestowed upon us. As a matter of feeling, it is 
 intolerable to the administrators of the law, in 
 dealing with a man whose worldly career they 
 are going to cut off in the course of three weeks, 
 to do anything which can aggravate his suffer- 
 ings or those of his relatives during that short 
 and sad interval. No consideration, therefore, 
 of the public interests, no argument of any kind, 
 will ever induce them to deprive him of biter- 
 course with his relations up to nearly the last 
 moment of that three weeks' life. But, if the 
 relations are admitted to the prisoner, more or 
 less the public is admitted to him. The rela- 
 tions will of course do all they can to subtract 
 from the load of infamy which presses upon the 
 family by making public every word or act of 
 the prisoner which can raise him in the public 
 estimation, and by keeping back every word or 
 act which can have the contrary effect. The
 
 78 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vn 
 
 public will be told of his penitence, his prayers, 
 his patience, his hopes of pardon in another 
 world, his gratitude for the little kindnesses 
 of his attendants ; but of anxiety, of terror, of 
 despair, there will be not a word. The unaided 
 imagination of men will form something like an 
 adequate picture of these torments of the mind, 
 the effect of which will only be weakened by 
 those other details which are sure to be exag- 
 gerated by the affection of relations and friends.
 
 LETTER vni THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 79 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 I COME now to perpetual imprisonment as a 
 punishment for murder. Three objections have 
 been made to it by witnesses examined before 
 the Capital Punishment Commission of 1864-5 : 
 the first that it is not severe enough to be effica- 
 cious ; the second, that it is too severe to be 
 tolerated ; and the third, that, whether too cruel 
 or too mild, it never would or could be carried 
 into effect. The third of these objections must 
 be dealt with at once, because that objection, if 
 sound, puts an end to the controversy. If the 
 only punishment which would have a chance of 
 success as a substitute for death is incapable of 
 being applied in practice, it would be supremely 
 idle to say another word in favour of abolition. 
 But do these objectors mean that there are sub- 
 stantial difficulties in the way of carrying out 
 perpetual imprisonment, or merely that Govern-
 
 80 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vm 
 
 merits would not have firmness to carry it out ? 
 Both suppositions must be considered. 
 
 The only substantial difficulties I can find 
 stated in the evidence taken before the Commis- 
 sion are the following : First, it is said that a 
 prisoner, kept separate, never allowed to see or 
 even to hear from relations or friends, debarred 
 from all communication with the outer world, 
 treated, in short, as civilly dead, subjected to a 
 painful and wearisome routine of labour, and 
 fully aware that this treatment was to terminate 
 only with his life, would, under the pressure of that 
 entire deprivation of hope, become desperate ; 
 would either lose his reason or become unman- 
 ageable ; that if he did not go mad, he would 
 murder his warders or perpetrate other outrages, 
 and the situation of the gaolers would become 
 untenable. Now, I will put the case as strongly 
 as it is possible to put it against my own view 
 of the matter, for I will suppose the case, not of 
 a single prisoner, but of a combination of all the 
 prisoners of a gaol so far as combination in 
 such a situation is possible to subvert all order 
 in the prison. But it is clear that in a fair trial
 
 LETTBK vni THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 81 
 
 of strength between the prisoners and the gaolers 
 the former would have no chance, because superior 
 force may be brought to bear upon each prisoner 
 separated, and he may be subjected to such dis- 
 cipline (solitary confinement, darkness, fetters, 
 reduction in the supply of food, &c.) as might 
 be required to induce him to keep the peace. A 
 prisoner who should, nevertheless, continue to 
 be outrageous and obstinately refuse to submit 
 to everything required of him, could, of course, 
 only be treated as you treat a maniac ; and as 
 long as that outrageous conduct continued, so 
 long would it be necessary to keep up that treat- 
 ment. The gaolers could not do otherwise ; 
 they must either do that or give up the gaol 
 to the prisoners and take to their heels. It is 
 absurd to suppose that there would be any im- 
 proper cruelty in so treating a prisoner ; for 
 either the man is really mad, in which case you 
 cannot do better than treat him as you would a 
 refractory patient in Bethlehem Hospital, or, if 
 not mad, he has the remedy for his sufferings in 
 his own hands. No rational manager of a gaol 
 will, in the present day, treat prisoners with more 
 
 G
 
 82 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vni 
 
 severity over and above the usual and recognised 
 routine of the gaol than is necessary to maintain 
 discipline and prevent the establishment from 
 being subverted. But will any one explain what 
 conceivable motive a sane man, being a prisoner 
 in a gaol, can have in entering upon a course of 
 outrageous resistance to the persons who hold 
 him in custody, and whom he knows to be able 
 to conquer him by sheer physical force ? If he 
 deceives himself on the point of their superior 
 strength, twenty-four hours' experience will set 
 him right. The only practical result to him 
 must be the abridgment of the few comforts he 
 has in his present state of life. 
 
 The proposition on which the argument 
 rests is that a man who is confined for life with- 
 out hope of release will become desperate in the 
 sense of being violent dangerously to himself or 
 others. But supposing, for the sake of argu- 
 ment, that it were so, of what practical import- 
 ance is it except to the man himself ? The 
 gaolers can have no difficulty in protecting 
 themselves. If the man's desperation goes to 
 the extent of making life insupportable to him.
 
 LETTEE vni THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 83 
 
 you cannot of course keep life in him in oppo- 
 sition to his determination to put an end to it, 
 because he may refuse all food. That is an 
 extreme case, which admits of no remedy ; and 
 as nothing can be done, it is idle to discuss what 
 you ought to do. The man dies, but the gaoler 
 is not placed in any difficulty. In every case 
 short of that extreme point of desperation you 
 can do all that is wanted. You can control 
 your prisoner as you would control a maniac, 
 so long as you are unable to induce him by the 
 ordinary motives to submit quietly to the routine 
 of the gaol. 
 
 The most common form in which the objec- 
 tion has . been put by the witnesses before the 
 Capital Punishment Commission is that prisoners 
 for life, rendered desperate by the extinction of 
 all hope of release, would murder their warders, 
 and that, inasmuch as the most severe punish- 
 ment known to the law had already been inflicted 
 upon them, you would be rendered helpless by 
 inability to carry punishment any further. The 
 same argument might be applied to the mur- 
 derer under the present system during the period 
 
 G 2
 
 84 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vm 
 
 which intervenes between his sentence and his 
 death on the scaffold. 3 The argument, besides 
 being in the highest degree fanciful, altogether 
 overlooks the fact that, although the application 
 of punishment as a deterrent is the appropriate 
 mode of repressing violence amongst the people 
 of a country, there are other more direct and 
 more efficacious means at the command of the 
 governors of a prison, means which are indeed 
 applicable to all establishments which are under 
 the immediate direction and control of public 
 officers. Of course, in the most skilfully managed 
 prison you are not absolutely exempt from the 
 risk of violence on the part of the prisoners, for 
 
 3 At pages 100 and 101 of the evidence taken before the 
 Capital Punishment Commission, Mr. Hunt puts the argument 
 in these words : ' Supposing that capital punishment were 
 abolished, and that a prisoner, convicted of murder under cir- 
 cumstances of the greatest atrocity, were sentenced to imprison- 
 ment for life, if he murdered his warder, what would you do 
 to him then ? ' The answer is obvious. ' I should do exactly 
 what you would do if, under the present system of capital 
 punishment, he had been sentenced to be hanged, and mur- 
 dered his warder in the interval between the sentence and his 
 execution. Neither you nor I could do anything except to pre- 
 vent his committing a third murder, and that is to look more 
 closely to the discipline of the gaol. I could not keep him in 
 prison for a longer term than that of his natural life, and you 
 could not hang him twice.'
 
 LETTER vin THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 85 
 
 you may be taken unawares in a case in which 
 you did not anticipate outrage ; and such cases 
 do from time to time occur in prisons, but 
 they are exceedingly rare. You can always 
 take adequate precautions against any class of 
 prisoners, or any individual prisoner whom you 
 believe to be specially dangerous, and you may 
 always render further mischief on the part of 
 the same man impossible. The practical lesson 
 to be derived from the objection is, not that 
 perpetual imprisonment is impracticable, but 
 that you must not put the management of prisons 
 in the hands of weak or incompetent gaolers. 
 Colonel Stace (Governor of Oxford Gaol from 
 1859 to 1863), in his evidence before the Com- 
 mission, observes that it would be extremely 
 difficult to manage a prison consisting exclu- 
 sively of life men ; and he adds that it would 
 require a very large staff and very strict disci- 
 pline. The suggestion of so easy and obvious a 
 remedy is equivalent to saying that there is no 
 serious difficulty in the matter. 4 
 
 4 The object is an important one, and the only inconve- 
 nience of a large staff is that it would cost more money than a
 
 86 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER Tin 
 
 I think I am justified in saying that the 
 objection is fanciful, because it is evident upon 
 the face of the matter that the prisoner has the 
 strongest possible interest in being upon peace- 
 able terms with his warders, except upon the 
 supposition of a gaol so ill-managed as to afford 
 a reasonable hope of escape through the murder 
 of a warder. The internal organisation of all 
 prisons affords means of punishing breaches of 
 discipline. The gaoler could not say to a 
 prisoner for life, Your term of imprisonment 
 shall be increased, but he could and would say 
 
 smaller staff. In the Appendix to Lord Russell's ' Essay on 
 the English Government and Constitution,' I find it stated that 
 during the forty years from 1823 to 1863, 441 persons were 
 executed in England for murder. This is at the rate of eleven 
 a year, and if five be added for Ireland and Scotland, this 
 would give sixteen as the annual average for the kingdom ; and 
 if twenty years were assumed as the average duration of the 
 prison life under a system of life-imprisonment as the punish- 
 ment of murder, there would be 320 murderers on an average 
 living within the prisons of the United Kingdom. If 200?. a 
 head should be taken as the average annual cost of maintaining 
 these murderers in prison under that exceptionally expensive 
 system of prison management, there would have been expended 
 at the end of forty years rather more than two millions and a 
 half of the public money, equal, perhaps, to a couple of months' 
 cost of a war with a barbarian prince in a remote corner of the 
 world.
 
 LETTBR viii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 87 
 
 to him that which in ninety-nine cases out of 
 a hundred would be perfectly effectual : ' Your 
 mode of life within the gaol shall be made still 
 more painful to you than it is already, if you do 
 not conduct yourself peaceably.' 
 
 Some of the witnesses before the Commission 
 insist chiefly on the point that the treatment 
 which it would be necessary to apply to prisoners 
 for life might drive them mad ; that separate 
 confinement, for example, on a man without hope, 
 might deprive him of his reason. But why, let 
 me ask, should life -prisoners be all treated ex- 
 actly alike ? Some men might possibly be driven 
 mad by separate confinement if long persisted 
 in ; if so, why persist in it ? Why not allow of 
 intervals of exemption from the separate treat- 
 ment ? There are many men who would cer- 
 tainly not be driven mad by separate confinement. 
 In no system of treatment applied to human 
 beings can you possibly lay down inflexible 
 rules on points of great magnitude. Why not 
 give the governorship of this class of prisons to 
 men of more than average skill, judgment, and 
 experience ? these qualities are to be had, if
 
 88 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTEB vin 
 
 we choose to pay the market price for them 
 and leave something to their discretion in the 
 treatment of the prisoners ? The system of 
 what are called secondary punishments for great 
 crimes is of course not free from difficulties, but 
 the difficulties are very far indeed from being 
 insurmountable. I am afraid that the principal 
 reason why there is such a weight of opinion in 
 favour of Capital Punishment is that it is a mode 
 of dealing with crime which is so exceedingly 
 easy. 5 The death of the man cuts short all 
 
 5 The disposition of governments to take short cuts to their 
 objects in preference to the longer and more intricate path is a 
 great and permanent source of evil, tending perhaps more than 
 any other cause to retard the progress of human improvement. 
 In the first place it produces and fosters the mental habit 
 amongst men of satisfying themselves with superficial views of 
 questions, to the discouragement of all systematic study of 
 moral and political science, especially among the very persons 
 who, as rulers of their fellow-men, depend for the efficient dis- 
 charge of their duties upon their knowledge of those sciences. 
 Again, it produces amongst the men who constitute governing 
 bodies the habit of persuading themselves of the truth of pro- 
 positions, however doubtful, the assumption of which is neces- 
 sary as a justification of the course they are taking. It leads, 
 again, to the frequent violation of great principles on the part 
 of the very body, one of whose most important duties it is, by pre- 
 cept, legal sanction, and example, to maintain great principles 
 unimpaired. In political, as in private life, the short cut to 
 an object is generally the violent course, and, accordingly, vio-
 
 IETTEE viii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 89 
 
 difficulties. The culprit once fairly dead and 
 buried, all puzzling questions in regard to his 
 
 lence is the usual expedient of the weak and the ignorant. 
 The flogging schoolmaster of forty years ago flogged because he 
 was incompetent to control by moral means, for which it was 
 necessary to study a great variety of dispositions, capacities, 
 and temperaments. His mind was not equal to this study, 
 whereas his arm was quite equal to the caning of half-a-dozen 
 boys in a quarter of an hour. It would have been quite as rea- 
 sonable to endeavour to flog the master into a knowledge of 
 boys, as it was to flog the boys into a knowledge of Greek 
 verbs. It is the special business of a schoolmaster to know 
 boys, and Arnold and Temple, and some others, have known 
 them tolerably well. It is the special business of rulers and 
 legislators to know men, and one ruler or legislator out of a 
 hundred knows something about them. The rest neither know 
 them nor care to know them. The moment a serious difficulty 
 arrives, they remove it by the immediate application of superior 
 physical force. In nine cases out of ten the removal is only 
 temporary. The evil is postponed, and comes back again in 
 the same form, or in some other form, and in increased dimen- 
 sions in the course of a few years, or months, or days, as the 
 case may be. By the method of extermination the earth might 
 at any moment be cleared of existing malefactors on the Car- 
 lylean clean-sweep principle ; but, unfortunately, the old set 
 so swept away would be perpetually replaced by a new set. 
 Political or social disaffection may at any time be put down by 
 the easy process of killing the disaffected ; but that process, 
 unfortunately, operates as a stimulant to the seeds which, at 
 some future time, will yield a still more abundant crop of 
 disaffection. The French patriots who had the power in their 
 hands in 1792-3 thought to strengthen the cause of responsible 
 government against aristocratical opposition by murdering the 
 aristocrats. That system was very successful for a year or two ; 
 as was, for a few months or weeks, the system set on foot by
 
 90 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTEK vm 
 
 treatment disappear for ever. They trouble us 
 only so long as the man is still upon our hands, 
 and we are responsible to him and to his family 
 and to society at large for his treatment. So 
 do puzzling questions in regard to the truth or 
 falsehood of that verdict of guilry disappear, 
 when the only man who has any strong interest 
 in reopening that question has been removed 
 from this world. If we are called upon to prove 
 that our system of putting murderers to death 
 is the best possible, all we have to do is to 
 assume the truth of the following propositions 
 and who can conclusively disprove them ? 1st, 
 The fear of death is the only fear which is suffi- 
 ciently intense to deter from the commission of 
 murder. 2nd, Juries are never led by their 
 dislike of Capital Punishment to give false ver- 
 dicts. 3rd, Innocent men are never hanged. 
 4th, A week or two of professed penitence for a 
 great crime will secure the offenders pardon in 
 another world. If we can only succeed in per- 
 
 those same French rulers, of preventing dear bread by sending 
 to the guillotine the bakers who infringed the order which 
 commanded them to sell bread cheap.
 
 IETTKH vm THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 91 
 
 suading ourselves of the truth of these four 
 propositions, we may go on hanging with a safe 
 conscience and save ourselves a world of trouble 
 and perplexity. 6 
 
 It is taken for granted that depriving a man 
 of hope (by which word, be it observed, is 
 meant, in the case we are considering, only hope 
 of release from confinement) will make him 
 desperate in the sense of dangerously violent. 
 There is a great deal both of ignorance of human 
 nature and of confusion of thought in this view 
 of the matter. If a man through extinction of 
 the hope of release becomes desperate up to the 
 point of suicide, so as to be perfectly indifferent 
 to life, irritation or the desire of revenge may 
 no doubt incline him to kill or hurt the persons 
 who are the immediate instruments of his misery. 
 But if its effect upon him falls short of the 
 suicidal point, the extinction of hope is little 
 likely to lead to any such result. Extinction of 
 hope on one point, however important, does not 
 
 6 It is a curious fact that, with few exceptions, judges have 
 always contrived to persuade themselves of the truth of at least 
 the three first of these propositions.
 
 92 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vm 
 
 necessarily exclude hope on all points, and feel- 
 ings, which are very weak at first, will, through 
 the gradual change of habits arising from a new 
 mode of life, go on progressively increasing in 
 strength. There is a well-known disposition in 
 human nature to accommodate itself to a plain, 
 undoubted necessity, and to cling to all such 
 alleviations of pain as are not incompatible with 
 that necessity. It is where the necessity is not 
 absolute ; it is in cases where there is some 
 hope left of escape from the main grievance, that 
 men become restless and irritable. If the neces- 
 sity is as certain, or nearly so, as that of ultimate 
 death, ninety-nine men out of a hundred, so 
 far from becoming desperate, eagerly grasp at 
 such sources of comfort or alleviation of pain 
 as still remain to them. So long as the desire 
 for life remains, the desire remains to make life 
 as little painful as possible. There is a certain 
 analogy between the case of a man who is 
 suddenly shut up in a prison, to remain there 
 for the rest of his life, and the case of a man 
 suddenly deprived of an inherited fortune, with- 
 out the smallest prospect, either from exertions
 
 LETTEE viii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH . 93 
 
 of his own or from any other source, of obtain- 
 ing another. Such a man in the first agony of 
 his grief requires to be watched. The force and 
 suddenness of the blow may lead to suicide or to 
 some other desperate act ; but at the end of a 
 certain time, most men accommodate themselves 
 in a great degree to the new circumstances. The 
 prisoner finds that even in a prison there are 
 pleasures, or if not pleasures, degrees of pain ; 
 and the ruined man finds that even the coarse 
 daily labour required to earn his bread is not 
 altogether without enjoyment, and that it is at 
 least within his own power to make his new 
 condition more or less miserable. If either the 
 one or the other, either the ruined man or the 
 prisoner for life, finds the new life so painful 
 that death is preferable, he may commit suicide ; 
 but, if his feeling of despair falls short of this, 
 he will strive to make the new life as little 
 painful as he can. Now, at the end of a cer- 
 tain time, it is as sure as anything in human 
 nature can be, that from the mere force of habit 
 he will find the pain subside, and will discover 
 sources of pleasure which at first he never
 
 94 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTKH vin 
 
 dreamed of. If any one doubts this, let him read 
 the autobiographies of which there are several 
 of political offenders shut up in prisons. Some 
 of these men have come to take a strong and 
 lasting interest in things which, prior to the 
 commencement of the prison life, would not 
 have had power to attract their attention even 
 for a few seconds, such, for example, as the daily 
 course of life of a spider. 
 
 I quite admit that at first there would be 
 more risk of insanity, suicide, or dangerous 
 violence in a life-convict than in one under a 
 shorter sentence, because the first shock to the 
 mind of a prisoner of a life- sentence would be 
 greater than that of a sentence which should not 
 cut him off absolutely from all hope of ever 
 being restored to the only interests and pleasures 
 of which up to that time he has had any know- 
 ledge, but against that temporary risk it is easy 
 to take the proper precautions. At the end of 
 a comparatively short time, life-prisoners would 
 become more tractable than prisoners for shorter 
 sentences. Absolute irremediable necessity has 
 in the long run a tranquillising rather than an
 
 LETTER vin THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 95 
 
 irritating effect. What chiefly unsettles a man's 
 mind in a prison, as elsewhere, is the hope of 
 getting back to pleasures or interests from which 
 he has been suddenly cut off, combined with 
 uncertainty as to the time of his getting back. 
 All experience proves that men are not for any 
 considerable length of time made miserable by 
 dwelling on objects of desire which they know 
 to be hopelessly beyond their reach. A labour- 
 ing man is much more likely to be irritated by 
 the spectacle of the comparative comfort of his 
 fellow-workman who earns five shillings a week 
 more than he does than by the spectacle of 
 the grandeur and luxurious living of his rich 
 employer. There is no lack of experience to 
 guide us in this matter, for confinement in a 
 prison is not the only incident in a man's life by 
 which he may be deprived of personal freedom, 
 nor is personal freedom the only thing which 
 men intensely desire, the sudden deprivation of 
 which, therefore, causes them intense pain. A 
 man is suddenly separated by death from a wife, 
 a brother, or a friend to whom he is devotedly 
 attached, and with whom all the habits and
 
 96 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER vin 
 
 pleasures of his life are bound up. He would 
 rather live in a prison with that companion than 
 in freedom without him. A man is suddenly 
 deprived of fortune and reduced to poverty. 
 Another man is, in the prime of life, deprived of 
 his eyesight, or of the use of his limbs and left 
 without a hope of ever again leaving his couch. 
 The separation from the occupations, interests, 
 and pleasures of his former life may be almost 
 as complete and sudden as that of the life-con- 
 vict ; but experience does not show that, after 
 the first shock, such men become desperate in 
 the sense of dangerous to themselves or others. 
 The suddenness and completeness of the change 
 is for a certain time exquisitely painful, but each 
 successive day weakens the old associations and 
 strengthens the new ones. In ninety-nine cases 
 out of a hundred, if the man commits no desperate 
 act in the course of the first few months, he will 
 not do so at a later period. The only thing 
 which is likely to prevent or retard the steady 
 progress of that change in habits and interests 
 is uncertainty on the question whether the main 
 evil is absolutely irremediable or not, and whether
 
 LETTER viii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 97 
 
 the return to the old life at some time or other, 
 near or distant, is or is not utterly hopeless. It 
 is self-evident that doubt on that point must 
 tend more or less to keep up the old associations 
 and to keep down the new ones. The mind of 
 the man who has not lost all hope will be 
 frequently turned to the question of the greater 
 or less efficacy of the various causes on which an 
 ultimate cure must depend, to the exclusion of 
 that other question : What enjoyments or alle- 
 viations, how many of them and of what kind, 
 are compatible with the new life ? The pain of 
 the man who hopes for a cure is no doubt alle- 
 viated by that constant subject of interest, but 
 it is an irritating kind of alleviation ; alternate 
 fits perhaps of exaggerated confidence and ex- 
 aggerated despondency. It is a much more 
 mixed alleviation than the other, has more of 
 pleasure in it and more of pain. Of that par- 
 ticular kind of alleviation the man without hope 
 has, of course, not a particle. His alleviation is, 
 however, not the less certain because it is one 
 of a different kind, because it does not consist 
 
 H
 
 98 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH I.KTTEU vin 
 
 of the excitement inseparable from an alternation 
 of hopes and fears. His relief is that of a con- 
 stant, very slowly increasing interest in the little 
 objects which make up his new life, objects 
 which are insignificant perhaps if taken sepa- 
 rately, but which in the aggregate are important 
 in their influence on his mind and spirits from 
 the circumstance that his attention to them is 
 not distracted by other thoughts, and especially 
 not by any thought of the possibility of a cure 
 of the main evil. 7 
 
 7 Would he ever admit that impossibility into his mind ? 
 That question may of course be asked ; indeed, at page 31 of 
 the Evidence taken before the Capital Punishment Commission, 
 the Chairman suggests a doubt whether a life-convict could 
 ever be got to abandon active hopes of obtaining his liberty 
 sooner or later. ' Would he not,' says the Chairman, ' always 
 imagine that some circumstances might occur which would 
 shorten that imprisonment 1 ' and Sir George Bramwell, to 
 whom this doubt is suggested, observes that ' Prisoners are 
 like all the rest of us ; as long as we have any life in us we 
 have a hope of some change in some way or other happening.' 
 This is true : hope cannot be utterly extinguished so long as there 
 is life ; but it may be brought indefinitely near to the point of 
 extinction. That depends upon the system which is adopted 
 and acted upon. Men judge by experience, and also by what 
 they know of the state of the law ; and it is the duty of a 
 government (one which in England is very much neglected) to 
 take active measures to make the law, and the practice of its 
 administrators, where discretion is left to them, generally
 
 LETTER VIH THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 99 
 
 From the above considerations I conclude 
 that there could be no serious difficulty in 
 managing a prison for life-convicts from any 
 cause but one, namely, the existence of a doubt 
 in the minds of the prisoners whether the sen- 
 tence would really be carried out to the end. 
 In proportion as that doubt had real ground to 
 build on, would there be restlessness, irritation, 
 and disturbance in the minds of the prisoners 
 who would become in that same proportion 
 dangerous to themselves or others, at one time 
 from excitement, at another from despondency. 
 It follows that if life-imprisonment became the 
 legal punishment of great crimes, it would 
 become the duty of a government by every 
 means in its power to strengthen the belief 
 
 known. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that by English 
 law the punishment of life-imprisonment for convicted mur- 
 derers could be shortened only by a special Act of Parliament 
 in each particular case ; and suppose the fact, by systematic 
 measures of publication, to have become notorious that for the 
 fifty years preceding no such Act had ever been passed, except 
 in cases in which the innocence of the prisoner had been dis- 
 covered and established, would not the impression on the 
 mind of the criminal public in regard to the possible release of 
 a convicted murderer be one scarcely distinguishable from an 
 utter absence of hope I 
 
 H 2
 
 100 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH IETTER vm 
 
 in the public mind that there were to be no 
 exceptions to the rule. A very small num- 
 ber of exceptions would suffice so greatly to 
 weaken this belief as to produce incalculable 
 mischief.
 
 LETTEB ix THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 101 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 IN my last letter I endeavoured to show that 
 there are no substantial difficulties in the way 
 of carrying out the punishment of imprisonment 
 for life. But it has been alleged that, let that 
 question be decided as it may, Government 
 would not have firmness to carry it out ; that 
 they would never, in fact, withstand the solici- 
 tations of the relatives and friends of the prisoner, 
 backed up by the public feeling in favour of 
 the liberation of sincere penitents. I will put 
 the strongest case I can against my own view of 
 this matter. I will suppose that a young man 
 has committed a deliberate and unprovoked 
 murder. There are no circumstances tending 
 to lessen the enormity of his guilt. He is 
 accordingly sentenced to imprisonment for life. 
 At the end of a few weeks' confinement he be- 
 comes overwhelmed with remorse. This feeling
 
 102 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH MTTEH ix 
 
 continues, and finally leads to one absorbing 
 desire which is to expiate his offence by 
 exemplary conduct in his prison life. At the 
 end of twenty years of undeviating devotion to 
 this object, it becomes a matter of moral cer- 
 tainty with those who have charge of him that 
 he might be restored to the world without the 
 smallest risk of injury, so far as his individual 
 conduct is concerned. Ought he not, thereupon, 
 to be liberated ? l If society runs no risk from 
 his liberation, how can you refuse to set him 
 free ! The question lies between what is right 
 in the individual case and the necessity of main- 
 taining an important general rule. The lesser 
 consideration must give way to the greater, and, 
 in this case, it is of paramount importance to 
 do nothing to weaken the deterrent effect of the 
 punishment. A case is, of course, possible in 
 
 1 In this argument I assume that the effect of the liberation 
 of the twenty-years penitent would be to relieve him from pain ; 
 but in many cases it would certainly not be so. A continuance 
 of the prison life, with which all his thoughts and habits had 
 for so long a period been bound up, would, in a majority of 
 cases, probably be preferable (as a mere question of pain and 
 pleasure) to the entering upon a new life in the world in the 
 peculiar situation in which the fact of his great crime of twenty 
 years before would place him.
 
 T.ETTER ix THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 103 
 
 which it would be useless, so far as danger to 
 society from the individual man is concerned, to 
 detain him longer, and if so, it might seem to 
 be cruelty to do so. But it is better to be cruel 
 to an individual man, or even to an individual 
 family, than to be cruel to society by weaken- 
 ing the securities on which their safety from 
 personal violence depends. Everything turns 
 upon the greater or less degree of import- 
 ance of the rule. The evil of exceptions is 
 in this case too plain to need much argument. 
 Men under temptation to commit great crimes 
 would put the matter to themselves in this way: 
 ' What has happened in the case of A. may 
 happen in my case. I can be quiet and orderly 
 in prison as well as he. I should gain nothing 
 by being otherwise. I can as easily as he gain 
 the confidence of the governor and the chaplain. 
 If he has been released at the age of forty, after 
 twenty years' confinement. I may be released 
 after the same period, or sooner, if I play my 
 part well.' The first exception would be a 
 precedent for other exceptions, and, consider- 
 ing how difficult it is to distinguish between
 
 104 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER ix 
 
 genuine repentance and sham repentance, it 
 would not be long before some exception to the 
 rule led to disastrous consequences. It would 
 then be too late to say, ' There shall be no more 
 exceptions.' It would take a very long con- 
 tinuance of undeviating adherence to the rule 
 to re-establish the confidence of the public and 
 to destroy the other mischievous effects of those 
 first few exceptions. Supposing even that, by 
 rare good fortune, none but genuine penitents 
 should have been released, still the mischief 
 would not be much diminished. The public 
 would never know with certainty that the re- 
 pentance had been genuine, and, indeed, men 
 meditating murder would seldom or never 
 trouble themselves with that question ; would 
 seldom or never look beyond the broad fact that 
 out of twenty murderers sentenced to life-im- 
 prisonment, one, two, three, or more had been 
 released at the end of a certain number of years. 
 If, in the case of very atrocious crimes, such as 
 deliberate murder, the hope of returning into 
 society should be admitted, more would on the 
 whole be lost by weakening the deterring power
 
 LETTER ix THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 105 
 
 of the punishment than would be gained by 
 receiving back a reformed citizen into society. 
 The more this reason against the occasional 
 liberation of repentant murderers under a system 
 of perpetual imprisonment is considered, the 
 more conclusive, I believe, it will appear. If 
 relations and friends, however powerful, should 
 intercede in favour of a reformed murderer, it 
 would, of course, be necessary to turn a deaf 
 ear to their solicitations. If the general public 
 should back up these solicitations, it would be 
 necessary to do what was right in the teeth of 
 the public feeling. The unpopularity of a law, 
 of a rule, or of a course of conduct in some par- 
 ticular case, is not a conclusive reason against it. 
 If a law should be unpopular to the extent of 
 making it impossible, or in a very high degree 
 difficult, to execute it. it may be an unfortunate 
 necessity to wait until the public shall have 
 become more enlightened ; but mistaken public 
 feeling falling short of that extreme point ought, 
 of course, to be resisted. 2 If the law or rule is 
 
 - An author quoted by the Secretary of State for Justice in 
 Portugal (see page 531 of the ' Report of the Capital Punish-
 
 106 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER ix 
 
 intrinsically good, sooner or later there must be 
 plain evidence of its goodness, and that is the 
 best of all remedies for popular clamour. Ad- 
 verse public feeling is not conclusive against any 
 punishment, unless, by extending itself to juries, 
 prosecutors, or witnesses, it leads to impunity for 
 crime. If it were as undoubtedly expedient as 
 I believe it to be the contrary, that murderers 
 should be put to death, the public, however 
 adverse to that punishment they might be, 
 would ultimately be made to see that it was ex- 
 pedient. It would be the same under a system 
 of imprisonment for life. There is no permanent 
 impossibility of making plain to the public mind 
 the importance of maintaining inviolate rules 
 which, in matters of great magnitude, have been 
 
 ment Commission,' 1864-5) says : ' Legislation ought not to go 
 before society, it ought to confine itself to follow it.' This is 
 not an unfashionable doctrine with certain politicians in Eng- 
 land ; but if legislators are chosen for their superior wisdom, 
 it is almost equivalent to saying that the wiser portion of 
 society shall not go before the less wise. In one sense, and in 
 one only, is the saying true. If the moral consent and appro- 
 bation of society is indispensable to the successful working of a 
 new law, then that new law, however wise and desirable in 
 itself, must be postponed until society has been educated up to 
 the point of perceiving its wisdom.
 
 LETTER ix THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 107 
 
 made for the protection of the public. But, in 
 truth, no fear can be more fanciful than the fear 
 of a public clamour for the release of a repentant 
 murderer. The public would know nothing of 
 his repentance, and no good could be done by 
 acquainting them with it. It could only increase 
 the difficulty of administering prisons, and might 
 in other important respects be mischievous, if 
 gaolers were to take the public into their confi- 
 dence. It may be right that the general con- 
 dition and system of management of the prison 
 should from time to time be made the subject of 
 a public report, and that, when a prisoner dies, 
 the fact should be published ; but minute details 
 in regard to the particular condition, mental 
 and bodily, of each individual prisoner, especially 
 if such details were extended to his religious 
 feelings, would be worse than useless. In the 
 absence of such particular information the public 
 would be as little competent, as they would be 
 little disposed, to thrust their views and wishes 
 on the administrators of the law. 
 
 It may be said that adverse public feeling 
 might be as serious an obstacle to the adminis-
 
 108 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER ix 
 
 tration of the law in the case of perpetual im- 
 prisonment as in that of death ; that if one jury 
 will bring in a wrong verdict to save themselves 
 the pain of being instrumental in the hanging 
 of a man, another jury may bring in a wrong 
 verdict to save themselves the pain of shutting 
 him up for the remainder of his life. That con- 
 dition of public feeling is, of course, conceivable, 
 but it has certainly not hitherto, so far as we 
 can judge, had any existence. No one supposes 
 that there is any feeling against perpetual im- 
 prisonment in the case of a murderer on his trial. 
 The supposition is that the feeling would arise 
 at a much later period in the case of a repentant 
 prisoner. No failure of justice could in that 
 case arise from that mistaken popular feeling, 
 and there could, therefore, be no necessity for 
 yielding to it. 
 
 It may be said that a minister of state, acting 
 for the Sovereign in the exercise of the preroga- 
 tive of mercy, could not always be trusted to 
 resist the popular feeling in the case of a repen- 
 tant murderer ; that if one minister had suffi- 
 cient strength of judgment and of character to
 
 LETTER ix THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 109 
 
 stand firm, his successor might be a weak man, 
 morally unable to withstand solicitation, or in- 
 tellectually unable to understand the kind and 
 degree of benefit which a community derives 
 from maintaining great principles unimpaired. 
 There is, however, no more reason to apprehend 
 such dangerous weakness on the part of a 
 minister of state in the case of the punishment 
 of great crimes than there is in hundreds of 
 other cases against which it is found in practice 
 unnecessary to take precautions. If precaution 
 is necessary, it may, of course, be taken in this 
 case as in any other. The prerogative of mercy 
 in murder cases might be placed in the hands of 
 the supreme power of the State, in which case 
 a convicted murderer could be liberated only by 
 a special Act of Parliament. 
 
 There is, of course, one case which must be 
 an exception to the carrying out of all sentences 
 of imprisonment, whether for long periods or for 
 short, that case namely in which proof should 
 arise that the conviction had been erroneous, 
 that the man is innocent of the crime for which 
 he has been suffering. That would be the one
 
 1 1 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER ix 
 
 single admissible exception to the carrying out 
 of the sentence of life-imprisonment on convicted 
 murderers. Indeed, if that could be proved 
 which never can be proved, namely, that society 
 had a very strong permanent interest in retain- 
 ing in confinement to the end of his life a man 
 ascertained to be innocent of the offence which 
 first consigned him to prison, it might be right 
 to sacrifice that one innocent man for the certain 
 good of thousands of other men. The reason 
 why it never was and never will be right so 
 to do is that society can have no such interest, 
 can by no possibility have any interest plainer, 
 stronger, and more fundamental than that which 
 she has in the protection of innocence from un- 
 merited suffering. To release an innocent man 
 from an unjust imprisonment, if the cause of the 
 release is made public, can by no possibility 
 operate in any way, direct or indirect, as an 
 encouragement of the crime for which he was 
 mistakenly convicted. But the case of the peni- 
 tent criminal is entirely different. This release 
 must necessarily more or less operate as an 
 encouragement of the crime of which he was
 
 I.KTTER ix THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 1 1 1 
 
 undoubtedly guilty, and is mischievous in other 
 ways ; for, in the first place, the genuineness of 
 the penitence and the absence of all direct danger 
 to society from his release, are not capable of any 
 conclusive proof ; and, even though the penitence 
 should be real, the idea would always arise in 
 the mind of the man meditating the commission 
 of a similar crime that he also might become a 
 true penitect, or might be clever enough to pass 
 off false penitence for true.
 
 112 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 IN your reply to my last letter, you remind me 
 that at the beginning of my letter No. 8 I 
 referred to the three principal objections to im- 
 prisonment for life urged by witnesses before 
 the Capital Punishment Commission, and that 
 the first of those objections was that as a punish- 
 ment it was not severe enough to be efficacious ; 
 and you then proceed to observe that the whole 
 course of the argument contained in my two last 
 letters, in disproof of the alleged difficulty of 
 carrying out perpetual imprisonment in practice, 
 affords a strong, however unintentional, con- 
 firmation of the soundness of that objection ; 
 for that my argument in reality rests upon the 
 assumption that imprisonment without hope of 
 release is, on the whole, less painful than im- 
 prisonment (whether nominally for life or for a 
 shorter period) with hope of release, in which
 
 LETTERS THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 113 
 
 case, a fortiori, it must be less painful than death, 
 and, if less painful, then less deterrent ; and that, 
 inasmuch as the main consideration is which is 
 the most deterrent punishment for murder, if 
 death be admitted as the most deterrent, it then 
 seems scarcely worth while to go on with the 
 other arguments against it. And you then 
 refer me to an observation of Mr. Justice Byles, 
 in his evidence before the Capital Punishment 
 Commission, in confirmation of this view of the 
 matter. To Mr. Justice Byles' s observation I 
 will come presently. In the meantime I must 
 observe that what I allege with regard to im- 
 prisonment without hope of release is, not that 
 on the whole it is less painful, but that the pain, 
 be it greater or smaller, is of a different kind, is 
 less productive, on the whole, of excitement, irri- 
 tation, violent mental disturbance, less likely, 
 therefore, to lead to madness, suicide, or outrage. 
 I have not denied that during the first months 
 of life-imprisonment there might be a dangerous 
 feeling of despair arising from the sudden change 
 to a life of restraint and privation, combined 
 with the absence of all hope of relief, but I have
 
 114 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTER x 
 
 endeavoured to show that it is the tendency of 
 hopelessness on one point to stimulate hope on 
 other points, and thereby to diminish rather than 
 increase that violent mental disturbance which 
 is the forerunner of suicide, madness, or outrage ; 
 that the dangerous mental condition of a life- 
 prisoner would only be temporary ; that his 
 mind would from the necessity of the case, as 
 time went on, dwell less and less on the idea of 
 escape from the prison life as a possible event, 
 and would come to dwell more and more on the 
 means of making a prison life endurable. His 
 ultimate mental condition might be no less 
 painful, but it would not be one of dangerous 
 irritation. What I contend for is that it is the 
 element of uncertainty hi punishment that tends 
 to produce violent disturbance in the minds of 
 prisoners, which the element of certainty tends 
 to allay, and that from this cause it will always 
 be more difficult to execute sentences of life- 
 impriponment when there is uncertainty as to 
 their being carried out to the end than when 
 there is no such uncertainty. 
 
 But the chief delusion under which, in corn-
 
 LETTER x THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 115 
 
 mon with so many other persons who have 
 written and spoken on this subject, you seem to 
 me to labour, is that which lurks under your 
 words ' if less painful, then less deterrent' All 
 punishments are painful, and deterrent because 
 painful ; but the deterring force is very seldom 
 in direct and exact proportion to the pain. A 
 punishment may inflict a great deal of pain, and 
 not be very highly deterrent ; whilst another 
 may be in a much greater degree deterrent, and 
 yet inflict much less pain. Punishments are 
 deterrent in proportion as they are terrifying ; 
 but terror is the anticipation of pain, not the 
 pain itself. A man's expectation of pain from a 
 certain treatment is not always exactly borne 
 out by his subsequent experience of it. It may 
 turn out to be less severe than he had expected, 
 or more severe ; and we are sometimes able in 
 the case of a given punishment to foresee in 
 which direction a man is likely to miscalculate. 
 This is the most important point in the whole 
 controversy, and it is now, therefore, necessary 
 to go into the question of the circumstances on 
 which the deterrent effect of punishment depends. 
 
 T 2
 
 116 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER x 
 
 One thing the most important thing of all is 
 self-evident, viz. that the pain of a punishment 
 is deterrent only in so far as it is known ; in so 
 far as it can be readily and easily estimated ; in 
 so far only as it is likely to be brought home to 
 the mind or, so to speak, to be felt by anticipa- 
 tion by the man who is under temptation to 
 commit a crime. You might shut a man up 
 in a prison and exercise all the ingenuity you 
 possess to make his life wretched ; you might 
 heap upon him everything that could give him 
 uneasiness, and withhold from him everything 
 that could give him relief ; but if you either 
 could not or did not take effectual steps to bring 
 this system of prolonged torture under the notice 
 of the public, in such a way as to enable a man 
 to understand and appreciate the real sufferings 
 of your victim, you would not by all your 
 ingenuity be increasing the deterrent effect of 
 his punishment by one iota. So you might 
 shut up a man in a prison and make his life as 
 comfortable and pleasant as is compatible with the 
 safe custody of his person, without diminishing 
 by one iota the deterrent effect of his punish-
 
 LETTER x THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 117 
 
 ment, if you kept the public ignorant of this 
 your particular mode of treating your prisoners. 
 Practically, in a civilised country in the nine- 
 teenth century, imprisoned criminals are neither 
 pampered nor tortured. The knowledge how 
 little or how much they really suffer is derived 
 in some degree from the report of released 
 convicts ; but nothing either that the released 
 convict or the gaoler can tell in regard to what 
 goes on in the inside of the prison adds much 
 to the sort of general idea which exists in the 
 public mind in regard to the kind and degree of 
 that suffering. The deterrent effect of a punish- 
 ment is identical with that sort of general picture 
 of suffering which the men who meditate the 
 commission of crimes form in their own minds. 
 When the punishment consists of imprisonment, 
 the governor of a prison can say little that shall 
 add to the effect of that picture. Every man 
 knows what it is in its leading characteristics. 
 He knows that imprisonment is loss of liberty, 
 forced labour, coarse food, subjection to the will 
 of other men, and absolute deprivation of the 
 pleasures of his present life. Each man, accord-
 
 118 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER 
 
 ing to his character, habits, and temperament, 
 will form a different estimate of the degree in 
 which such a punishment will be painful to him. 
 If we wish to estimate correctly the deterrent 
 effect of imprisonment as the punishment of 
 murder, we must look first to the kind of men 
 who are likely to commit murders, and we must 
 consider how far the general idea, which I have 
 stated, of that punishment, with that important 
 element of life-duration added to it, is likely 
 to affect their imaginations ; we must begin by 
 remembering that that element of life- duration 
 will go far to render of no effect any reports 
 throwing doubt on the supposed severity of the 
 punishment, which they may receive directly or 
 indirectly from released convicts, whose testi- 
 mony in regard to the pain of the prison life will, 
 as I have shown, be modified in a great degree 
 by that particular kind of alleviation which 
 is derived from the prospect and the fact of 
 ultimate release, and in a much less degree by 
 that other kind of alleviation which is derived 
 from the effect of habit in reconciling a man to 
 a life which was at first intensely painful. 1 
 
 1 * What chance is there of this prison life ever becoming
 
 LETTER x THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 119 
 
 Now, murderers in England may be divided 
 into three classes according to the nature of the 
 motive which has impelled them to the crime. 
 There are, first, the murderers for gain. They 
 are the most deeply depraved, the most habitu- 
 ally wicked, and if not professional criminals 
 whose business in life it is to prey upon society, 
 yet partaking a good deal of the character of that 
 class. There are, secondly, those who have been 
 impelled to murder by the passion of anger in 
 some form or other, including most of the men 
 who murder their wives ; and there are, lastly, 
 those whose crime is closely connected with the 
 sexual passion. In one or more of these classes 
 a murderer in England may, with few exceptions, 
 be placed. Now, there are some important cha- 
 racteristics which are more or less common to 
 them all. They are for the most part eager in 
 the pursuit of their objects, most of them hate 
 hard, regular labour, many of them indulge 
 
 endurable ? ' is the question which the man who is on the verge 
 of a great crime might be disposed to ask of the released convict. 
 The answer he would get would be this, ' I don't know. It became 
 endurable to me because I knew I was to be let out sooner or 
 later, and I am very glad to be where I am, and have no wish 
 to go in again.'
 
 120 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTEE x 
 
 habitually in exciting pleasures, all of them 
 intensely hate restraint or subjection to the will 
 of other persons, and they are all deficient in 
 that particular kind of patient courage which 
 bears up against physical privation. Now, the 
 life of a prison is, as I have said, a life of 
 restraint, of forced labour, of the privation of 
 exciting pleasures, of subjection to the will of 
 others, and the men whom I have just described 
 know that it is and' must be so. It cannot, 
 therefore, be otherwise than in a very high 
 degree terrifying to them. On entering the 
 prison, they know that they will find themselves 
 deprived of all hope of getting their own will in 
 opposition to the will of another man ; of enjoy- 
 ing pleasures or comforts which another man 
 has determined that they shall not enjoy ; of 
 being relieved from tasks which another man 
 has set them ; of ever, soon or late, being de- 
 livered from this state of insufferable thraldom. 
 This is the idea which they will form of impri- 
 sonment for life : and the last idea which is 
 likely to suggest itself to them is that constant 
 subjection to the will of other men will, by lapse
 
 LETTER x THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 121 
 
 of time, lose a good deal of its bitterness, that 
 pleasures which are now all in all to ^heni will, 
 by lapse of time, cease to have any power over 
 their imagination ; that the allotted task which 
 now they loathe will end by becoming a relief 
 to them ; that by mere force of habit, and by 
 the mere effect upon their minds of a palpable 
 necessity from which there is no escape except 
 in death a course of ' life which at first pre- 
 sented itself to their imaginations, and which 
 for a certain time was in fact almost unbearable, 
 will ultimately become not only bearable, but 
 not devoid of a certain class of real, although 
 unexciting, enjoyments. 
 
 This progressive change of feeling, the 
 consequence of a corresponding change of habits, 
 is one which, to a person who has reflected 
 much on the constitution of the human mind, 
 presents itself as in a considerable degree a 
 matter of certainty ; whilst to the mind of the 
 man who is capable of meditating the commis- 
 sion of a great crime (one who by that very 
 supposition is of a low order of intellect, habitu- 
 ally under the influence of the feeling and pas-
 
 1 22 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER x 
 
 sion of the moment, and very little capable of 
 drawing remote inferences from circumstances of 
 which he has no experienced, it will be utterly 
 unintelligible. 
 
 If this view of the matter is correct, we have 
 in imprisonment for life the two qualities which 
 are most to be desired in punishment, viz. a 
 great power of terrifying in the prospect, and a 
 gradually diminishing infliction of pain in the 
 reality. The man who is meditating a murder 
 will look upon it as a condition of life which no 
 lapse of time can make otherwise than a tor- 
 ment, whilst the man who has had a long expe- 
 rience of it will know that the alleviations of 
 the torment have been becoming year by year 
 greater and more numerous. The supposition 
 that the pain actually endured may be taken as 
 the correct measure of the deterrent force of a 
 punishment must disappear from the minds of 
 judges and legislators before there can be sound 
 legislation on this subject. Mr. Justice Byles 
 (page 626 of the ' Report of the Capital Punish- 
 ment Commission ') puts the argument against 
 imprisonment for life in the shape of a dilemma.
 
 LETTEE x THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 123 
 
 You must either preserve the prisoner's health 
 in mind and body, he says, or you must de- 
 stroy it. 2 If you destroy it the punishment is 
 
 2 Mr. Mill (in his speech of April 21, 1868, on Capital 
 Punishment) observes that ' few would venture to propose as a 
 punishment for aggravated murder less than imprisonment with 
 hard labour for life.' This would, of course, be the sentence 
 passed upon the convicted murderer ; but there might be cases 
 in which, when the prison treatment came to be applied to a 
 particular man, it would be found necessary to modify that 
 treatment on certain points, especially on the point of hard 
 labour. To require from a particular prisoner the same amount 
 of daily labour as from his fellow-prisoners indeed, to require 
 from him any amount, however small, of hard labour might 
 in its effect be to kill him by slow torture, and that, as Mr. 
 Justice Byles truly observes, is not to be tolerated in a civilised 
 country. It is imperative to leave some discretion on points of 
 this kind, as on many others, to the governors of prisons ; im- 
 perative also to subject the exercise of that discretion to official 
 supervision and control. The difficulty is not one peculiar to 
 the case of imprisonment for life. A man sentenced to a 
 twelve months' imprisonment might, at the tune of entering the 
 prison, be of a bodily constitution such as to be killed by slow 
 torture before the expiration of his term if he were subjected, 
 in all its rigour, to the ordinary prison routine. These are cases 
 of rare occurrence, which present no difficulty other than that 
 which attaches to the exercise of discretion on all important sub- 
 jects by beings of fallible judgment and imperfect goodness. 
 Governments must take the trouble (and I admit that the 
 trouble is not small) to obtain adequate securities for a skilful 
 exercise of discretion in such matters, a discretion which shall 
 hold an even hand between cruelty on the one side and weak- 
 ness on the other, cruelty in inflicting a worse pain and a diffe- 
 rent pain from that which the law intended, weakness in losing
 
 124 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER x 
 
 death by slow torture, and therefore not to be 
 tolerated in a civilised country ; if you preserve 
 it, then ' such is the power of the human consti- 
 tution to adapt itself to circumstances, that the 
 longer the imprisonment the easier the prisoner 
 bears his hardships and privations, till at length 
 imprisonment, with all its miseries, becomes 
 tolerable if not agreeable.' 
 
 In the very next sentence Mr. Justice 
 Byles makes another observation, a very true 
 one, which I think altogether destroys the force 
 of this argument, for he observes that the 
 slow torture system would fail to deter, ' be- 
 cause the uninformed and unthinking masses 
 
 sight altogether of the fact that the prisoner is there as a 
 recipient of punishment, and not as a subject for the applica- 
 tion of science to the maintenance of the most perfect and 
 durable state of physical health. There must be no miserable 
 sacrificing of objects affecting so deeply the welfare and im- 
 provement of mankind, to questions of a few thousands of 
 pounds sterling more or less of national expenditure. If 
 governments are wanting in the requisite degree of skill and 
 industry, and peoples in the art of obtaining better govern- 
 ments, there is, of course, nothing to be done, and mankind 
 must go rubbing on as they are for a few centuries longer. 
 
 I need not add that the deterrent power of life-imprisonment 
 would not be impaired by such exceptional relaxations of 
 rigorous treatment, for the public would know, and ought to 
 know, nothing of them.
 
 LBTTEB x THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 125 
 
 do not witness, and therefore do not imagine 
 or dread, the sufferings endured by a prisoner.' 
 But surely the same want of thought and in- 
 formation on the part of the masses which would 
 operate to prevent any enhancement of the deter- 
 ring force of the punishment if pains were taken 
 to increase its severity, would operate to prevent 
 the deterring force of the punishment from being 
 impaired if from a cause so obviously beyond 
 the appreciation of uninformed and unthinking 
 men as the effect of changed habits upon the 
 feelings the severity of the punishment should, 
 in fact, be diminished. 
 
 Nothing can be more just and more in 
 conformity with experience than both the ob- 
 servations of Mr. Justice Byles which I have 
 quoted ; the first, as to the force of habit in 
 reconciling men to a mode of life which in the 
 first instance was intensely painful to them ; the 
 second, as to men not being influenced by suffer- 
 ings which they do not witness or which are not 
 in some shape or another made apparent to 
 them ; but the second observation is as true of 
 mitigations as of aggravations of suffering. Jt
 
 126 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LBTTBB x 
 
 is equally true whether the pain is found on trial 
 to be greater or to be less than the man whom it 
 is sought to influence believed it to be. Nothing 
 can be more certain than these two things. 
 First, that in the nineteenth century, in a civilised 
 country, tolerably well governed, prisoners for 
 life will neither be tortured nor pampered ; and 
 secondly, that under a reasonable system of 
 prison discipline, falling neither into cruelty on 
 the one hand nor weakness on the other, the suf- 
 ferings of life-prisoners whatever the governor 
 of the prison may wish or intend will, in fact 
 especially if there should be no hope of release 
 be mitigated to a very considerable extent by 
 the mere lapse of time, giving constantly increas- 
 ing effect to a new set of habits. Such mitigation 
 is not merely a probable, it is a certain concomi- 
 tant of imprisonment for life, and so far from 
 being an objection to that punishment it is a 
 recommendation of it. It is a saving of pain 
 without any weakening of the force of the 
 example.
 
 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 127 
 
 LETTER XL 
 
 AMONGST the objections to the punishment of 
 death urged by Jeremy Bentham in his address 
 to the French people in 1830, there is one which 
 he designates ' Tendency to produce Crime J but 
 these words do not sufficiently explain the na- 
 ture of this objection, and it can scarcely, with- 
 out an illustration, be made intelligible. One or 
 more persons (let me say A. and B.), having 
 perpetrated some great crime, are exposed to the 
 risk of detection through the evidence of C., 
 who is cognisant of the circumstances of that 
 criminal act of theirs. They are of course under 
 strong temptation to extinguish for ever this 
 risk by the death of C. To compass his death 
 by a false accusation is immeasurably less dan- 
 gerous to them than to murder him, and if they 
 play their game well any denunciation by him
 
 128 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xi 
 
 of their wicked conspiracy against his life may 
 be made to appear as revenge, or as the last 
 resource of a desperate man who has no sub- 
 stantial answer to the accusation preferred against 
 him. The man once convicted and executed, 
 they are safe from the danger which pressed 
 upon them. It is a fearful thing to reflect upon 
 the opportunity which capital punishment may 
 give to malefactors to destroy with impunity the 
 life of an innocent man who happens to stand 
 towards them in some relation which threatens 
 their safety, or who, without standing towards 
 them in any such relation, may yet by a skilful 
 arrangement of circumstances, some or all of 
 them established by perjured testimony on their 
 part, be involved in an inextricable web of 
 circumstantial evidence which shall fix upon 
 him guilt which is in truth theirs. Englishmen 
 are very apt to overrate the collusiveness of 
 circumstantial evidence ; they are apt to forget 
 that the reality or significance of the circum- 
 stances rests upon testimony, and that testimony 
 may be false ; false in two ways : 1st, by the 
 invention of facts which had no real existence ;
 
 LETTER xi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 129 
 
 2ndly, by the suppression of facts which, if known, 
 would materially alter the conclusions derivable 
 from other facts. A knife, a comb, a handker- 
 chief, or some other article which C. was in the 
 habit of carrying about with him, is found close 
 to the spot where lies the body of a murdered 
 man, and C. is sworn to as having been seen in 
 the near proximity of that spot about the time 
 when the murder was committed. In C.'s house, 
 too, is found some article of value which is known 
 to have belonged to the murdered man. But 
 the story as to proximity may have been in- 
 vented, and the articles stolen for the express 
 purpose of being so disposed of, by the real 
 authors of the murder, in order to throw sus- 
 picion upon an innocent man and thereby divert 
 it from themselves. What it is important to 
 point out in regard to such a supposed conspi- 
 racy is this, that if it succeeds on the trial the 
 real authors of the crime are made safe in the 
 course of a few weeks by the death of their 
 victim. It may easily have a temporary success, 
 and the only chance for its ultimate exposure is 
 the continuance in life of the man who alone has 
 
 K
 
 130 , THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xi 
 
 any very strong interest in its detection, and 
 who is best able, if time is given him, to throw 
 new light on some or all of the circumstances on 
 which the false conclusion rests. In the short 
 interval which elapses between conviction and 
 execution, what chance has an innocent man of 
 convincing any one of his innocence by simple 
 asseveration ? What chance of proving it when 
 the very first step in the process of proof must 
 be to set on foot a systematic and elaborate 
 search for evidence ? Give a man who has an 
 overpowering interest in the success of his search 
 sufficient time, and he may succeed ; but hang 
 him in three weeks from the day of the sentence, 
 treat his protestations of innocence as the last 
 vain struggles of a desperate man to escape from 
 punishment, make no response to them but by a 
 proffer of religious aid ; do this, and the final, 
 complete, and permanent success of the conspi- 
 racy is established ; its authors are at ease, with 
 nothing to disturb their peace, except the con- 
 sciousness that an innocent man has by their 
 villany suffered death for their crime. The 
 execution over, if their remorse does not lead to
 
 LETTER xi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 131 
 
 the detection of the conspiracy, nothing else is 
 likeiy to do so. 
 
 It will be said that a conspiracy against the 
 life of an innocent man is an event so rare as to 
 lose all significance as an argument in the dis- 
 cussion of the question of Capital Punishment, 
 but it must be remembered that, although abso- 
 lutely very rare, it may not be so relatively to 
 the sum total of trials for murder in a civilised 
 country, and that the relative, not the absolute 
 number of cases is what it is material in this 
 discussion to consider. That the number of such 
 cases should be underrated is almost certain. 
 Assuming the existence of such a conspiracy, its 
 temporary success is by no means a very im- 
 probable event, and, if successful at first, it is 
 almost sure, through the death of the one only 
 person who has a very strong interest in its 
 detection, to be successful to the end, and thus 
 to remain, as a matter of fact, for ever unknown, 
 The maxim ' de non apparentibus et non exist- 
 entibus eadem est ratio ' is a very deceptive one 
 in cases of this kind, and the number of persons 
 who- have suffered death on the scaffold, whether
 
 132 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xi 
 
 victims of a conspiracy having for its object to 
 divert suspicion from the real criminals or vic- 
 tims of the innumerable aberrations of human 
 judgment, is probably much larger than it is 
 supposed to be. When a trial for a capital 
 otfence has been concluded by a verdict of guilty 
 acquiesced in by the judge, it is quite certain 
 that all parties directly or indirectly connected 
 with the matter, from the judge down to the 
 general public the supposed criminal alone ex- 
 cepted would be strongly averse to a reopening 
 of the question of fact in any shape or in any 
 degree. This, so far from implying blame to 
 any one, is inevitable, and on the whole desirable ; 
 at least, it is better that no cases should be 
 reopened than that all cases should be reopened. 
 Nevertheless, inevitable and right on the whole 
 though it may be, it is a state of things which, 
 when taken in connection with the subsequent 
 death of the supposed criminal in the course of a 
 few weeks, is almost fatal to the chance of his 
 innocence if innocent he was ever becoming 
 known to the world. It is not in human nature 
 that when a juiy have satisfied themselves that
 
 LETTER xi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 133 
 
 the evidence is sufficient to warrant a conviction, 
 and when the judge has concurred in that view, 
 they should not both judge and jury feel the 
 strongest reluctance to admit into their minds 
 any, the very smallest particle, of doubt of the 
 prisoner's guilt ; and indeed any public expres- 
 sion of a doubt, however small, would be fatal 
 to the possibility of putting the convicted man 
 to death. Accordingly, in passing sentence, 
 judges almost invariably and I cannot say im- 
 properly refer to the prisoner's guilt in terms 
 which imply a certainty not inferior in degree to 
 that which a man has of an event of the reality 
 of which he has had within the last half-hour the 
 evidence of his own senses. The feeling of the 
 general public is one of strong alarm and horror 
 at the bare idea of a murder appearing to remain 
 unpunished ; the public therefore is also in a 
 strong degree reluctant to admit doubt into their 
 minds when a verdict of guilty has been pro- 
 nounced, and (the man once executed and all 
 possibility of reparation, if a mistake has been 
 committed, at an end) that reluctance is of 
 course increased tenfold. After the final cata-
 
 134 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xi 
 
 strophe, any defect in the evidence must be 
 flagrant indeed which is likely to be followed by 
 a wish to subject that evidence to further and 
 more searching tests. No blame attaches to any 
 one in all this : it is inevitable and right. The 
 fault lies with the law of Capital Punishment, 
 not with the administrators of the law. Upon a 
 probability of guilt in a greater or less degree 
 removed from certainty, men are and must be 
 punished. If absolute certainty were required, 
 Criminal justice must come to an end and 
 society fall to pieces. But, although the public 
 conscience is and must be satisfied to punish 
 upon a probability, it need not, and I think it 
 ought not to, be satisfied to kill upon a proba- 
 bility. One serious objection (and I wish it were 
 the only or the most serious objection) to the 
 killing is that it for ever shuts the mouth of the 
 man who, in reply to your verdict of guilty 
 founded on evidence under which, in many 
 cases, you cannot deny that there may lurk mis- 
 conception, inconclusiveness, or perjury, still 
 protests that he is innocent, and that, if time 
 were given to him, it might be possible for him
 
 LETTER xi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 135 
 
 to prove it. But, it will be said, if cases once 
 disposed of in criminal courts are not to be re- 
 opened, what greater chance would an innocent 
 man have of bringing out the truth from his 
 prison cell than from his grave ? The reply 
 is that the reasons against reopening the case 
 are far stronger in the latter case than in the 
 former. The prisoner dead and reparation im- 
 possible, the principal object of reopening the 
 case is at an end. All proper precautions may 
 be taken in deciding for or against reopening a 
 case. It is precisely where the innocence of the 
 convict is a fact that his personal representations 
 laid before a proper officer are likely to bear upon 
 them such marks of truth as to warrant a further 
 investigation. Any public proceeding founded 
 on the result of such investigation would of 
 course be contingent upon a competent person 
 on whom that duty would officially devolve 
 being satisfied of its propriety. 
 
 Mr. Mill, in his speech of April 21, 1868, 
 in the House of Commons, admits that the ob- 
 jection to the punishment of death arising from 
 the impossibility of making reparation to a con-
 
 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xi 
 
 demned person who should afterwards be proved 
 to be innocent, cannot entirely be got rid of ; 
 but he thinks that in England our rules of 
 evidence and the feeling in the minds of all 
 persons connected with a criminal trial are so 
 favourable to the admission and thorough inves- 
 tigation of all doubts, however trifling, which 
 may arise in regard to the prisoner's guilt ; he 
 thinks too that this feeling is so exceptionally 
 strong in the minds of judges and juries when 
 the case is one which involves an irreparable 
 punishment so shocking to the imagination as 
 that of death, as to take away much of the weight 
 which would otherwise attach to the objection. 
 This is substantially true, but I think Mr. Mill 
 in some degree overrates the excellence of our 
 system of Criminal procedure, and thereby in 
 some degree underrates the risk which an inno- 
 cent man runs upon a trial for his life. I grant 
 that the innocent man has nothing to fear from 
 our procedure except in so far as it is an imper- 
 fect process for the discovery of the truth ; but 
 in this point of view he has a good deal to fear, 
 for errors in criminal trials arising out of the
 
 LETTER xi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 137 
 
 mere imperfection of human judgment and 
 human systems will probably be as often adverse 
 to innocence as favourable to guilt. A criminal 
 trial in England is often spoken of as tbe nearest 
 approach to perfection which the infirmity of man 
 admits of, but I cannot look upon it in that 
 light ; for it seems to me to labour under a grave 
 and obvious defect at its very foundation. Its 
 imperfection as a process for the discovery of 
 the truth does not arise from its not providing 
 sufficiently searching tests of the trustworthiness 
 of the evidence which is brought before the 
 court, nor from partiality or defective judgment 
 on the part of judge or jury, but from the want 
 of any sufficient machinery for bringing before 
 the court the whole of the evidence which is 
 really accessible, and which would be forthcom- 
 ing, if there were any one whose special business 
 and duty it was to call for it. That there is 
 no sufficient machinery for this purpose must 
 be evident to any one who considers the theory 
 of a criminal trial in England. The parties 
 concerned in it are four in number : 1st, the 
 conductors of the prosecution ; 2nd, the con-
 
 138 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xi 
 
 ductors of the defence; 3rd, the judge and jury; 
 and 4th, the prisoner. 
 
 The business of the first is to prove the 
 guilt of the prisoner, and of the second to prove 
 his innocence ; the business of the third that is, 
 of the judge and jury, and in practice it seems 
 to be limited to this is to see fair play between 
 these two and to decide impartially and intel- 
 ligently between the two opposing cas2S presented 
 to them. Xow, upon the face of it this is not 
 as perfect a machinery for the discovery of the 
 truth as it might be, for in all enquiries the 
 best chance of truth is to be found in an exami- 
 nation of the whole of the material evidence, 
 and this system neither does all it might do in 
 the search for evidence, nor all it might do to 
 bring it into court when it has been found. In 
 reply to this it may be said that all material 
 evidence must either be adverse to the prisoner, 
 in which case it is morally certain to be brought 
 before the court by the conductors of the 
 prosecution, or favourable to the prisoner, in 
 which case it is equally certain to be brought 
 before the court by the conductors of the
 
 LETTER xi THE PLTflSHilENT OF DEATH 139 
 
 defence. But in practice this is not so. Facts 
 favourable to the prisoner, known to the con- 
 ductors of the prosecution, are not always known 
 to the conductors of the defence, and vice versa. 
 Evidence which bears upon the case is some- 
 times withheld. The question what evidence 
 shall and what evidence shall not be brought 
 forward rests entirely with the official or pro- 
 fessional persons conducting the case for or 
 against the prisoner. Their discretion in that 
 respect is seldom interfered with by judge 
 or jury. But inasmuch as the object of these 
 persons is to make good ehher the affirmative 
 or the negative of a particular proposition, and 
 not merely to ascertain the truth, and inasmuch 
 as they do not always know beforehand what 
 will be the practical effect of the testimony to 
 be given by a particular witness, the exercise of 
 that discretion does and must often lead them 
 to the conclusion that as a matter of prudence 
 or convenience it will be wiser to keep a par- 
 ticular witness out of court altogether. Quite 
 right perhaps in the interest of their case, but 
 not at all right in the interest of truth and
 
 140 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xi 
 
 justice. This is more particularly the case with 
 the conductors of the defence. It might have 
 been supposed that evidence favourable to the 
 prisoner would never be withheld ; but this is 
 not so ; for it is not only certain that counsel 
 for the defence do occasionally injure their 
 clients by a mistaken fear that certain evidence 
 is dangerous and had better be kept back, but it 
 is scarcely possible that it should be otherwise, 
 and that mistakes should not from time to time 
 be made. For it must not be forgotten that the 
 prisoner's counsel may be quite as ignorant of 
 the truth on the question of his client's guilt 
 or innocence as the rest of the world, in which 
 case he almost necessarily forms some theory of 
 his own on the subject, which, if unfounded, 
 may entirely mislead him in regard to the pro- 
 bable effect of certain testimony on the case 
 which he is conducting. 
 
 Three important things have to be done 
 before a jury can be called upon to say whether 
 A. is guilty or innocent of the crime laid to 
 his charge : 1st, the evidence has to be sought 
 for ; 2nd]y, it has to be arranged and brought
 
 LETTER xi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 141 
 
 into court ; and 3rdly, it has to be dealt with 
 when in court. I believe tlie last of these things 
 to be nearly as well done under our Criminal 
 system as it is possible to do it, but of the two 
 first the same thing can certainly not be said. 
 The search for evidence in a murder case is 
 conducted by persons who cannot be trusted to 
 take a very high view of the great principle or 
 purpose of the duty entrusted to them. They 
 are persons not unapt to jump to conclusions 
 on insufficient grounds, more anxious that no 
 murder shall be committed without some one 
 being found by the verdict of a jury to have 
 committed it, than that guilt should always be 
 laid bare and innocence always protected ; very 
 much indisposed, after having taken a great deal 
 of trouble in following up one clue, to admit 
 into their minds any proof that it is leading 
 them in a wrong direction and that they must 
 abandon it and take to another ; and again, 
 when they believe that they have collected 
 enough of evidence to prove their case against 
 a particular person, very little disposed to pursue
 
 142 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER XT 
 
 their enquiries any further. 1 But if the secu- 
 rities against innocent men suffering, guilty men 
 escaping, and the truth remaining undiscovered, 
 are to be made as perfect as possible, it is plain 
 that this is not exactly the spirit in which 
 evidence must be sought for. More effectual 
 means must be taken than any which now exist, 
 that no evidence bearing on the case shall remain 
 undiscovered, and that all such evidence when 
 discovered shall be brought before the court. 
 An ordinary police force cannot be safely trusted 
 with the performance of so important a duty, 
 except under the immediate and constant direc- 
 tion of an officer of a very high order of 
 intelligence and character, specially appointed 
 
 1 Those who call to mind the case of Pelizzioni, who, but 
 for the interposition of a highly intelligent and public-spirited 
 fellow-countryman, would have been hanged for an act which 
 he did not commit, the mass of material evidence which was after- 
 wards forthcoming, and which ought to have been obtained before 
 the man was put upon his trial at all events, before a jury was 
 called upon for a verdict ; those also who remember the case of 
 a woman murdered, some years ago, in a house of ill-fame in 
 George Street, St. Giles's, and the more recent case of the 
 murder of a housekeeper in Farringdon Street, will scarcely, I 
 should think, resist the conclusion that our Criminal system, in 
 so far as regards its two first important elements, the search for 
 evidence and its production in court, is lamentably defective.
 
 LETTBB xi THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 143 
 
 for that purpose, and so appointed as to make 
 it a matter of certainty that his object shall be 
 strictly identical with that of the judge, bring- 
 ing the case before the court in its entirety. 
 So long as this is left in any material degree 
 dependent upon the discretion of police officers, 
 solicitors, and advocates, a criminal trial in 
 England, when all has been said for it that can 
 be said, will still be very far removed from 
 what it ought to be, a much less effective 
 process for the discovery of the truth than it 
 might be made.
 
 1 44 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xn 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 IN some cases there is, over and above the 
 objections to capital punishment which apply to 
 all cases, a special objection arising from this, 
 that the fear of death is not the kind of motive 
 which operates with any force on the class of 
 persons whom you wish to deter. One of the 
 greatest impediments to a sound system of 
 Criminal jurisprudence is the prevalent notion 
 that offences, in the very highest degree injurious 
 to society, should, as a matter of course, receive 
 the severest punishment known to the law. 
 But suppose that severest punishment should be 
 of a kind which we have found by experience 
 not to be very much dreaded by the kind of men 
 who are likely to commit the offence. We 
 ought,- then, clearly to seek for some other. 
 Mr. Lawson, in his examination before the 
 Capital Punishment Commission of 1865, having
 
 LETTER xn THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 145 
 
 stated it as his opinion that the punishment 
 of death should be totally abolished, is asked 
 (Question No. 3104), whether it would be 
 possible to abolish the punishment of death for 
 high treason ; for the murder of the Sovereign, 
 for instance ? He replies, ' I certainly would 
 abolish it in cases of treason also ; ' but after- 
 wards (in reply to Question No. 3105) he says, 
 ' you might except that if you thought proper/ 
 and (at No. 3106) 'I should not object to ex- 
 cepting it ; but it would rarely, if ever, occur.' 
 But why not object to it, if it is the wrong kind 
 of punishment? The one conclusive reason 
 against punishing the murder of a Sovereign 
 with death, is that the murderers of Sovereigns 
 are almost invariably persons who are little, if 
 at all, affected by the fear of death. They are 
 either insane, or belong to the class of men who 
 are prepared to devote their lives to what they 
 truly or falsely believe to be a great cause. 
 In either case they have in them much of the 
 spirit of martyrs. Contempt is the thing they 
 fear. If you wish to prevent the assassination 
 of Sovereigns, treat the assassin as a madman 
 
 L
 
 146 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH IETTEE xn 
 
 which in many cases he really is, consign him 
 to a lunatic asylum, or sentence him to imprison- 
 ment for life as a criminal having dangerous 
 morbid proclivities, requiring a treatment similar 
 to that of a lunatic, and you will do much 
 more to prevent political murders than by 
 hanging him, or even by torturing him first and 
 hanging him afterwards. The men who are 
 led by some intense paroxysm of the sexual 
 passion, to commit a murder such men as 
 Townley, for example would have more dread 
 of life imprisonment than of death. Such men, 
 when their desire cannot be gratified, are con- 
 stantly seen to court death. Their crime is in 
 the very highest degree atrocious, but death is 
 not the appropriate punishment for it. 
 
 A special study should be made by legislators 
 and rulers of the cases in which men commit 
 murders and immediately give themselves up. 
 Such men are not always proof against the 
 terror of death, when the last scene on the scaf- 
 fold draws near, but the act of giving themselves 
 up proves conclusively that the fear of death is 
 inadequate to deter them from the commission of
 
 LETTER xii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 147 
 
 the crime. What kind of punishment would 
 deter them ? That is what we should endeavour 
 to discover. Enthusiasts, religious or political, 
 and the slaves to violent passion, whether of 
 anger or of love, are generally but little acted on 
 by the fear of death. To the latter, life is often 
 felt as a burden so long as they are deprived of the 
 object of their desire, or are unable to liberate 
 themselves from some overpowering cause of con- 
 stant, intense personal annoyance or irritation. 
 In the character of enthusiasts there is often 
 a mixture of strong conviction with personal 
 .vanity, and they are apt to look upon that death 
 upon the scaffold as the last and greatest proof 
 which they can give to their own conscience and 
 to the world, of their devotion to a great cause. 
 
 In November 1867, three men, by name 
 Allen, Larkin, and Gould, were executed at 
 Manchester for murder. They were Fenians, 
 and had been engaged in a forcible rescue of two 
 men, also Fenians, who were being removed in 
 the prison van to the Manchester gaol. Armed 
 with pistols, they had taken an active part in 
 the rescue, and one of them was sworn to as 
 
 L 2
 
 148 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER XH 
 
 having fired the shot which resulted in the death 
 of one of the police officers. This is murder by 
 English law, which, when the prisoner is en- 
 gaged in some illegal act, does not require any 
 proof of malice towards the particular man who 
 has been killed, or indeed any deliberate in- 
 tention of taking away life at all. Some efforts 
 were made to save the lives of the prisoners, 
 but they were unsuccessful. But the effect of 
 putting these men to death, instead of sending 
 them to prison, was very lamentable, and very 
 much what might have been expected. In Ire- 
 land they were looked upon as political martyrs, 
 dying for their country ; as victims of political 
 vengeance, not as victims of what the ' Daily 
 News ' very properly called the ' cause of or- 
 ganised society.' The feeling, even in England, 
 which, when the offence was committed, was one 
 of unmixed indignation at so gross and open an 
 outrage upon the very principle of civil govern- 
 ment, was, of course in some degree, diverted 
 by that feeling of compassion mixed with horror 
 which is inseparable from the taking of human 
 life, where the offence is not one which is indi-
 
 I.KTTEH xu THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 149 
 
 cative of any very profound depth of moral 
 depravity. The disaffection in Ireland was, of 
 course, increased, and the disposition in England, 
 such as it was, to sympathise with Fenianism, 
 certainly not diminished. A lady of high rank, 
 of the Catholic persuasion, sent 100/. for the 
 use of the surviving relatives of the three 
 men, accompanied by a letter full of tender and 
 almost respectful expressions of sympathy. The 
 entire want of sympathy with the cause of 
 Fenianism on the part of the Catholic clergy 
 was, of course, diminished. Here again death 
 does not seem to be the right punishment. It 
 is not a punishment appropriate to the case of 
 persons whose offence is mixed up with objects 
 with which any considerable fraction of a com- 
 munity sympathise, especially where the sym- 
 pathisers are separated in territory, religion, race, 
 and traditional political feeling from the rest of 
 the nation. The feeling of that disaffected 
 portion of the community is already not so 
 much the salutary fear of subjects, as the bitter 
 hatred of enemies, a feeling which a govern- 
 ment should make every effort to extirpate.
 
 1 50 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xn 
 
 Death by violence, not deliberate executions 
 after trial by the ordinary law, is the appropriate 
 and ordinary incident of a state of open warfare ; 
 such executions will, therefore, by the mere 
 force of association, be looked upon by the dis- 
 affected rather as acts of vengeance to be met, 
 when opportunity offers, by retaliation, than as 
 acts intended for example arising out of the 
 ordinary administration of justice. I admit 
 that the administration of justice is not to be 
 left at the mercy of the angry feeling of unreason- 
 ing disaffection, but I contend that the policy of 
 a wise government in such a case would be 
 especially when the offence to be punished was 
 itself one of violence to dissociate their admin- 
 istration of the law as much as possible with 
 violence and bloodshed. If, too, example be the 
 main object of punishment, a government should 
 bear in mind that they are dealing with men 
 who, by joining in an enterprise full of personal 
 danger, have given proof how little they are 
 acted on by the fear of death.
 
 LBPTEB xm THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 151 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 I WISH to say a few words to you on the subject 
 of insanity in connection with Criminal law. 
 It is unfortunate that the various modifications 
 of sense in which the word ' unsound ' may be 
 applied to a man's mind have thrown a good 
 deal of confusion into this matter. In a purely 
 moral sense all men who commit murders or 
 other atrocious crimes may be said to be' of 
 unsound mind, but the perpetrators of such 
 crimes who are of unsound mind hi such a sense 
 as to make it unjust or impolitic to punish 
 them are very few in number. The question of 
 insanity is, in courts of Criminal j ustice, usually 
 submitted to this test : ' When the prisoner per- 
 petrated his crime was he morally responsible 
 for his actions ? did he understand the difference 
 between right and wrong ? If not, then he is
 
 152 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xm 
 
 a madman. If he did, then he is of sound mind 
 and must be punished.' But the question of 
 knowledge of right and wrong in Criminal 
 courts is as full of difficulty as that of sane or 
 insane. Suppose the case of a man who is an 
 absolute slave to his passions, perfectly indif- 
 ferent to the good of others, utterly insensible 
 to all feelings of horror or compassion at the 
 sight of human suffering. Such a man is in a 
 moral sense a monster, and might be capable of 
 committing a barbarous murder on a very trifling 
 provocation, or to obtain some very trifling 
 enjoyment ; and unfortunately such cases are 
 not entirely without precedent. It might be 
 perfectly true, in a certain sense, to say of such 
 a man that he is a madman, for he certainly does 
 not know the difference between right and wrong 
 in any practical sense ; but he knew as well as 
 you or I could have done, when he committed 
 that barbarous murder, that it was an act 
 punishable by the laws of his country. In that 
 sense he knew it to be wrong and would have 
 abstained from committing it had he not hoped 
 to escape detection. Such a man is not at all
 
 LFTTBE xin THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 153 
 
 insensible to the dread of punishment : on the 
 contrary, there is no man whom you might so 
 certainly act upon by the fear of pain, and there- 
 fore sane or insane as you may choose to call 
 him there is no kind of man whom it would be 
 so necessary for the good of society to punish ; 
 for. make what supposition you please with regard 
 to the force with which violent and habitually 
 uncontrolled passion may pull him in the direc- 
 tion of the crime, it is clear since pain is his one 
 great evil and pleasure his one great good that 
 the fear of punishment will in a greater or less 
 degree pull him in the opposite direction, that is, 
 away from the crime. This is all that is needed 
 to prove the necessity of punishing him ; for, 
 although the force of the example would fail of 
 its effect in some cases, it is absolutely certain 
 that it would succeed in others. 
 
 Another man murders his children and 
 maintains that it was not wrong to do so. He 
 does not deny that as a general rule it is wrong 
 to kill one's fellow-creatures, but he affirms that 
 there are exceptions to the rule, and that this is 
 one of them ; that it is better to destroy the life
 
 154 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xm 
 
 of your children than to leave them in a world 
 where there seems to be no means of maintaining 
 them in reasonable comfort. You know that 
 the man's reasoning is utterly fallacious, and 
 
 / 
 
 that his practical conclusion would lead to corf* 
 sequences fatal to the very existence of civil 
 society ; but you also know him to be perfectly 
 sincere. You might therefore be justified in 
 pronouncing that he did not know the difference 
 between right and wrong, and was of unsound 
 mind ; but this man, like the last, is not insen- 
 sible to the fear of punishment, and you would 
 not be justified in leaving him unpunished. 
 
 A third man plainly labours under mono- 
 mania. He is persuaded, for example, that he 
 is commissioned by God to destroy all persons 
 who hold some particular religious opinion ; 
 who deny, for instance, the doctrine of the Atone- 
 ment. In pursuance of his supposed commission 
 he kills A. B. There is no evidence indicating 
 unsoundness of mind on any other point, and 
 nothing to show that he labours under any 
 delusion in regard to the fact that murder is 
 an act punishable by the laws of the country.
 
 LBTTEE xiii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 155 
 
 You would of course punish him as a mur- 
 derer. 
 
 A fourth man maintains that he lies under 
 the strongest moral obligation to kill all people 
 who by leading an immoral life are giving a bad 
 example to their neighbours. This is another 
 form of monomania, not indicating that the man 
 deceives himself in regard to the legal prohibition 
 of murder. He would of course be punished 
 like the rest. 
 
 Now this question arises : Is there any case 
 whatever in which a man, having committed a 
 murder and being, at the time he did so, perfectly 
 capable of understanding (and with respect to 
 whom, therefore, it may fairly be assumed that 
 he did in fact understand) that he was violating 
 the law, ought to be relieved from punishment, 
 either on the ground that his apparent motives 
 are unintelligible, indicative therefore of an un- 
 sound mind, or on the ground that one or more 
 medical men have pronounced him to be mad ? 
 It seems to me that there is no such case, and 
 that the only safe test of insanity in courts of 
 Criminal justice is the capability or otherwise in
 
 156 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xm 
 
 the mind of the offender to understand that the 
 offence is illegal and punishable. 1 There are 
 men who are wholly incapable of understanding 
 this or of making any reasonable calculation of 
 the probable consequences of their actions in the 
 way of pleasure or pain to themselves. 2 Such 
 
 1 In 1858 James Atkinson was tried at the York Assizes for 
 the nmrder of a young girl to whom he was attached. He 
 stated on his trial that ' he murdered her because she would 
 not have him.' He was acquitted as insane on the evidence of 
 three medical gentlemen who had had an interview of two hours 
 with him. Seven years later, in 1865, Dr. Hood, Resident 
 Physician to Bethlehem Hospital, under whose care Atkinson re- 
 mained for upwards of five years after his acquittal, stated 
 (Capital Punishment Commission, 2817) that he showed no one 
 symptom of insanity during the whole of that time. If, on the 
 face of the matter, a prisoner has acted, as in this instance, on 
 one of the commonest of the motives which impel to murderous 
 outrage (disappointment of the sexual passion, for example), it 
 seems difficult to resist the conclusion that he was capable of 
 being influenced by the fear of punishment. Accordingly no- 
 thing can be more dangerous than acquittals on the ground of 
 insanity in such cases as that of Atkinson. 
 
 2 Incapability of that kind may, of course, be permanent, 
 or it may be only temporary. In a fit of delirium tremens, or 
 of drunkenness, a man may for a short time be utterly incapable 
 of any reasonable perception of the nature and consequences of 
 his actions. Nevertheless there are some such cases (that of 
 the drunkard, for example) in which it may be a question 
 whether punishment ought not to be inflicted, for the outrage 
 may have been the direct and speedy consequence of indulgence 
 in stimulating pleasures by one who was perfectly sensible of
 
 LETT-BE xiii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 157 
 
 men are of unsound mind in the extreme sense 
 of the word, and being wholly impervious to 
 fear of punishment or hope of reward, are not 
 to be influenced by example. To punish one 
 such man who has committed a murder will 
 not deter another such man from committing a 
 similar act ; but amongst the men who, being 
 insane up to a certain point, are not insane up 
 to the point of incapacity to apprehend the fact 
 that certain acts are punishable by law, the 
 actual punishment of one will act as a deterrent 
 on the others. Let the test of insanity in 
 Criminal courts be what it may, however, there 
 will of course in practice be doubtful cases, and 
 the substitution of life-imprisonment for death 
 as the punishment of murder would have this 
 advantage, that it would put an end at once and 
 for ever to all the difficulty which is now felt in 
 those numerous cases in which doubt arises of 
 the prisoner's sanity. A medical witness thinks 
 he sees something in the man's conduct when he 
 
 the probable consequences of such indulgence. In this case, as 
 in others, the punishment of one deters others at the right 
 moment.
 
 158 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xm 
 
 perpetrated the crime, or afterwards, to indicate 
 unsoundness of mind ; or it may be that the 
 extreme barbarity of the murder seems to be 
 out of all proportion to any conceivable motive 
 for its perpetration, and insanity is inferred from 
 that. It may be very difficult during the short 
 interval which intervenes between the man's 
 apprehension and his execution to set that 
 question of insanity entirely at rest. Accord- 
 ingly, it is not surprising that a humane 
 physician, or a humane jury, where they think 
 the sanity of the man is in any degree doubtful, 
 should shrink from sending him to the scaffold 
 within a fortnight or three weeks from the day 
 of his sentence. They could by no possibility 
 shrink from sending him to a prison ; for, if 
 sufficient time were allowed, all doubt in regard 
 to his mental condition would be removed. 
 Once within the prison walls, at the end of a 
 certain time, one of three things would happen. 
 Either all doubt of his insanity would disappear, 
 in which case he would be removed to a lunatic 
 asylum ; or his sanity would be made apparent,
 
 LETTER xiii THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 159 
 
 in which case he would undergo his sentence 
 to the end ; or the question would still remain 
 doubtful, in which case he would still be retained 
 in the prison, his treatment there being so far 
 modified as to meet that case of doubt.
 
 160 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xiv 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 You tell me that as a matter of strict argument 
 my last letter 1 is not perfectly clear to you. I 
 will therefore put the question before you again 
 in a more condensed and, therefore, perhaps in a 
 clearer form. In a community of Christians, 
 who believe in a future state of reward and 
 punishment, to be determined by conduct in this 
 world, it is morally impossible that the adminis- 
 trators of the law, when they are about deliber- 
 ately to put a man to death, should be indifferent 
 to his fate in the next world, should look upon 
 that question otherwise than with deep anxiety. 
 For, on the face of the matter, it would appear 
 that a murder, if it is so bad a crime as to make 
 the man who has committed it unfit to remain 
 longer in this world, will be punished in a world 
 to come. Hence necessarily arises an intense 
 
 1 See Letter VII.
 
 LETTER xiv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 161 
 
 desire on the part of judges, gaolers, ministers 
 of religion, &c., to obtain from a murderer under 
 sentence of death, expressions of sorrow for his 
 crime, of penitence, of supplication for pardon 
 addressed to God, such as to afford some par- 
 ticular ground of hope to be set against the 
 opposite presumption tending to exclude hope. 
 This feeling, when superadded to that instinctive 
 feeling of compassion produced by mere inter- 
 course with a man who is to be deliberately 
 removed from this world in the course of a few 
 weeks or days, must of necessity lead to such 
 tenderness of treatment of a convicted murderer, 
 and to so strong an indisposition to discourage 
 in his mind the hope of Divine pardon, as to lead 
 frequently, if not generally, to absolute expres- 
 sions of confident belief on the part of the 
 convict of his being admitted to happiness in 
 another world. It is plain that all this runs 
 entirely counter to the main object of all Criminal 
 law, that of deterring from crime ; in so far at 
 least as it is known to the public. But in the 
 present age of publicity in regard to all matters 
 of social interest, it must be known to the public, 
 
 M
 
 1 62 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xiv 
 
 unless the administrators of the law set up a 
 system of profound secrecy in their treatment of 
 murderers under sentence of death, which would 
 be attended by evils of another kind, and would 
 not after all prevent individual expressions of 
 confident belief of the man's pardon in another 
 world. Indeed there is, under all circumstances, 
 a predisposition to that belief ; because the idea 
 of depriving a man at one blow both of life in 
 this world and of all hope of anything but 
 misery in a world to come, the idea of killing 
 both body and soul together, is too painful to be 
 endurable. I blame no one for all this gentleness 
 and care and tenderness, for all this anxiety to 
 prevent the perpetrator of some diabolical crime 
 which makes the blood run cold with horror, 
 from despairing of his prospects in another 
 world ; on the contrary, I should think judges, 
 chaplains, and gaolers deserving of great blame 
 if they acted otherwise. They act according to 
 the true instinct of a good man who cannot, 
 if he would, be indifferent to the eternal fate of 
 his fellow-man. I blame only the law inflicting 
 death, which places its administrators in the
 
 LETTER xiv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 1 63 
 
 unavoidable position of so acting as seriously to 
 impair that great social purpose for which they 
 have been placed in situations of grave trust ; 
 that purpose being the prevention of crime. 2 
 
 * In August 1869 a man named Jonah Dethridge was ex- 
 ecuted at Dorchester, for the brutal and deliberate murder of a 
 warder at the Portland convict establishment, where he was 
 undergoing a sentence of seven years' penal servitude for felony. 
 In the account of the execution given by the Daily News, it is 
 stated that the convict on his trial and sentence treated the 
 whole affair with the utmost indifference, preserved a dogged 
 silence in gaol up to the last moment, persistently refused to 
 accept the consolation and advice offered to him by the ministers 
 of religion, slept well on the night, and ate a hearty breakfast 
 on the morning immediately prior to the execution, and main- 
 tained a sullen, undaunted self-possession up to the very last 
 moment of life. On the scaffold the following scene took place : 
 
 The Rev. J. Mann ascended the scaffold quickly, took Deth- 
 ridge by the hand, and in an earnest tone said, ' Try to pray ; 
 pray to the Lord to have mercy on you.' 
 
 The cap was not low enough to obstruct Dethridge's utter- 
 ance, and he exclaimed, in a rather fierce tone, ' Who must I 
 pray to ? Who has brought me here 1 That is what I want to 
 know. Has God brought me here ? ' 
 
 Mr. Mann, imploringly 'I want you to try to be saved. 
 The Lord have mercy upon you.' 
 
 Calcraft then pulled the cap entirely over his face, and 
 Dethridge exclaimed, ' What are these men here now, and what 
 are they come for ? ' 
 
 Mr. Mann ' Try to pray ! try to pray ! ' 
 
 The rev. gentleman then shook hands with him, and said, 
 ' Good bye, God bless you,' and left the scaffold. 
 
 To Calcraft the convict muttered, ' What does he say ? ' 
 
 Calcraft ' Pray to the Lord to save you.' 
 
 M2
 
 164 TBE PUNISHMENT OF "DEATH LETTER xiv 
 
 The injury produced is twofold. First, 
 injury to society in the shape of encouragement 
 
 Dethridge, in a scornful tone 'Pray to the Lord to save 
 me!' 
 
 Calcraft shook Dethridge's hand, while doing which he gave 
 a professional glance to see that the rope was properly adjusted, 
 &c., &c. 
 
 The chaplain performed his duty, and could not have spoken 
 differently to this horrible ruffian ; but why should a minister 
 of the Gospel be placed by the law in such a position as to be 
 compelled publicly to use language which implies the possibility 
 of a life of immorality, irreligion, and crime of the very worst 
 kind, being atoned for, in the eyes of a perfectly wise and just 
 Judge, by half a dozen words of supplication forced from him 
 by the urgent entreaties of a clergyman during the one or two 
 minutes immediately preceding his being suddenly deprived of 
 life ? Those words, if they had been uttered, could not, in the case 
 of Dethridge, represent any real repentance existing within his 
 breast. If to be the victim of the most deadly injury which one 
 human being can suffer at the hands of others, could entitle 
 Dethridge to Divine forgiveness for his own crimes, he might 
 have urged that plea, but it would then have taken the form, 
 not of a prayer, but of a protest, a protest against the cruelty 
 of cutting him oft from all possibility of atoning for his crimes, 
 except by a short, unmeaning form of words (unmeaning under 
 such circumstances), having none of the reality of penitence. 
 But you may ask this question, ' When, in the course of nature, 
 men who in their lives have not scrupled to set at defiance all 
 laws, human and Divine, which interfered with their pleasures, 
 lie upon their death-beds, do not clergymen address to them 
 words similar to those which the Wesleyan minister at Dor- 
 chester addressed to Dethridge 1 ' I cannot say. We know but 
 little of what takes place on such occasions ; but we do know, 
 in its most minute details (even under the present system of di- 
 minished publicity at executions), all that is said and done by the
 
 LETTER xiv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 165 
 
 to great crimes by suggesting to the public mind 
 that the perpetration of a great crime is by no 
 means an insurmountable bar to happiness in a 
 future life. Secondly, gratuitous injury to the 
 criminal by suggesting to him hopes of pardon 
 in another world, on grounds which, judged by 
 the fundamental doctrines of our religion, we 
 can scarcely deny to be delusive, at the same 
 time that we deprive him of the opportunity 
 of establishing that hope on grounds which, 
 judged by the same doctrines, we believe to 
 be effectual. 
 
 Mr. Visscher, a member of the council of 
 state in Belgium, in the course of his examina- 
 
 sufferer and by each of the actors at the putting to death of a 
 criminal, and this at least is certain, that the effect on the public 
 mind, of words which, whether spoken by the bed-side or on the 
 scaffold, seem to give some warrant to the doctrine that crimes 
 which are too bad to be forgiven by men may not be too bad to 
 be forgiven by God, can only, in their effect on the public mind, 
 weaken the force of the motives which deter men from sin. 
 There is, too, a plain inconsistency between the words of grave 
 doubt which we so often hear from the pulpit in regard to 
 the prospects in another world of moderately good men, and the 
 strong assurance of the impossibility of assigning limits to the 
 Divine mercy, which are made to the very worst men upon the 
 scaffold, an inconsistency which, in its effect on those who re- 
 flect upon it in connection with human conduct, can scarcely be 
 otherwise than dangerously perplexing.
 
 166 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xiv 
 
 tion before the Capital Punishment Commission 
 of 1865, observes, 'it is worthy of a civilised 
 nation to require a system which, while it pro- 
 tects society, looks to the improvement of the 
 criminal.' True; and capital punishment not 
 only refuses to do anything to assist in the 
 improvement of the criminal, but it says to the 
 criminal, ' we will prevent you from doing any- 
 thing for your own improvement. You might 
 perhaps repent and prove by a life of virtue 
 (for a good life is possible everywhere, within 
 or without the walls of a prison) the sincerity 
 of your repentance ; but we will prevent that. 
 You may make a death-bed repentance, if you 
 like, but nothing more. Whether a death-bed 
 repentance will avail you anything in another 
 world we do not know ; but this we do know, that 
 if our religion is true, it is immeasurably less 
 likely to avail you than a repentance proved by 
 years of amended life and sorrow for past sin. 
 The real, genuine, tried repentance would be 
 possible if life were left you, but it is not pos- 
 sible, because we are going to deprive you of 
 life.'
 
 LETTER xiv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 167 
 
 If it is a necessity of society that a Christian 
 legislature should virtually hold such language 
 as this to convicted murderers, we must submit 
 to it ; but the necessity ought at least to be 
 proved beyond all possibility of doubt.
 
 1 68 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 IN your last letter you ask me whether I have 
 read Mr. Mill's speech in the House of Commons 
 in opposition to the Abolition of the Death-pun- 
 ishment, and whether I do not think there is 
 great force in his arguments ? The most useful 
 answer I can make to your question is to quote 
 those passages of the speech which seem to me 
 to have most argumentative weight, and to make 
 such observations upon them as occur to me ; 
 but in so doing I fear it will be impossible for 
 me to avoid to some extent repeating in substance 
 what I have already said in former letters. 1 
 The first passage I will quote is 
 
 I defend this penalty when confined to atrocious 
 cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly 
 attacked on that of humanity to the criminal ; as 
 beyond comparison, the least cruel mode in which it is 
 
 1 See Letter III.
 
 LETTEB XT THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 169 
 
 possible adequately to deter from the crime. If, in our 
 horror of inflicting death, we endeavour to devise some 
 punishment for the living criminal, which shall act upon 
 the human mind with a deterrent force at all compar- 
 able to that of death, we are driven to inflictions less 
 severe indeed in appearance, and therefore less effica- 
 cious, but far more cruel in reality. Few, I think, 
 would venture to propose, as a punishment for aggra- 
 vated murder, less than imprisonment with hard labour 
 for life. That is the fate to which a murderer would 
 be consigned by the mercy which shrinks from putting 
 him to death. But has it been sufficiently considered 
 what sort of a mercy this is, and what kind of life it 
 leaves to him ? If, indeed, the punishment is not 
 really inflicted, if it becomes the sham which a few 
 years ago such punishments were rapidly becoming, 
 then, indeed, its adoption would be almost tantamount 
 to giving up the attempt to repress murder altogether. 
 But if it really is what it professes to be, and if it is 
 realised in all its rigour by the popular imagination as 
 it very probably would not be, but as it must be if it 
 is to be efficacious it will be so shocking, that, when 
 the memory of the crime is no longer fresh, there will 
 be almost insuperable difficulty in executing it. What 
 comparison can there really be, in point of severity, be- 
 tween consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death 
 and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out 
 what may be a long life in the hardest and most mono- 
 tonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards, 
 debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut 
 off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of 
 bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet ? Yet
 
 170 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 even such a lot as this, because there is no one moment at 
 which the suffering is of terrifying intensity, and, above 
 all, because it does not contain the element, so imposing 
 to the imagination, of the unknown, is universally re- 
 puted a milder punishment than death, stands in all 
 codes as a mitigation of the capital penalty, and is 
 thankfully accepted as such. For it is characteristic 
 of all punishments which depend on duration for their 
 efficacy all, therefore, which are not corporal or pecu- 
 niary that they are more rigorous than they seem ; 
 while it is, on the contrary, one of the strongest recom- 
 mendations a punishment can have that it should seem 
 more rigorous than it is ; for its practical power depends 
 far less on what it is than on what it seems. There is 
 not, I should think, any human infliction which makes 
 an impression on the imagination so entirely out of pro- 
 portion to its real severity as the punishment of death. 
 The punishment must be mild indeed which does not 
 add more to the sum of human misery than is neces- 
 sarily or directly added by the execution of a criminal. 
 As my honourable friend has himself remarked, the 
 most that human laws can do to any one in the matter 
 of death is to hasten it ; the man would have died at 
 any rate not so very much later, and on the average, I 
 fear, with a considerably greater amount of bodily 
 suffering. Society is asked, then, to denude itself of 
 an instrument of punishment which, in the grave cases 
 to which alone it is suitable, effects its purpose at a less 
 cost of human suffering than any other, which, while it 
 inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than 
 any punishment that we should think of substituting 
 for it.
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 171 
 
 Mr. Mill's argument in this passage seems to 
 me to require more explanation than he has given 
 to it ; for he assumes that men are intensely 
 terrified by a punishment which he declares to 
 be comparatively mild, and much less strongly 
 affected by a punishment which he declares to 
 be comparatively cruel. The statement is not 
 necessarily untrue because it is a paradox, but it 
 must be followed out into all its particulars before 
 it can be ascertained how far it is true in any 
 sense which materially affects this question, the 
 question I mean of tte deterrent efficacy of death 
 on the scaffold when compared with life-impri- 
 sonment as the punishment of gr^at crimes, and 
 no doubt a debate in the House of Commons is 
 not a very convenient occasion for the discussion 
 of a question of which the solution lies so little 
 upon the surface. If death is at once the most 
 terrifying and the mildest of punishments (the 
 fear-producing impression on the imagination 
 being out of all proportion great as compared 
 with the real pain inflicted on the criminal), it 
 follows that it is the best of punishments for 
 great crimes, for it is the object of a wise legislator
 
 172 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 to deter from crime as effectually as possible at 
 the least possible cost of pain. But Mr. Mill has 
 omitted from his argument two considerations, 
 which if included would, I think, materially alter, 
 if not reverse, both his conclusions ; for in esti- 
 mating the real pain, he seems to me to have 
 overlooked the one thing which constitutes the 
 severity of the death-punishment, and in esti- 
 mating the effect upon the imagination, to have 
 overlooked the fact that the fear of death varies 
 in intensity under different circumstances ; varies 
 so greatly as to be overpowering at one time and 
 almost non-existent at another. Mr. Mill speaks 
 of the death-punishment in terms which would 
 lead us to suppose that his conception of its 
 pain is confined to the mere deprivation of life 
 by a process which, at the end of a few seconds, 
 produces insensibility. He speaks of it as the 
 ' short pang of a rapid death.' 2 But the real pain 
 
 2 Nothing can be more expressive than this short description 
 of death on the scaffold, except, perhaps, that other description 
 of life-imprisonment as ' the immuring of a man in a living 
 tomb,' but, as applied to the present question, both descriptions 
 are, I think, misleading. The first is true only of the final 
 minute or two minutes of the transaction on the scaffold ; the 
 other is more likely, I think, to be true as descriptive of the
 
 LKTTER XT THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 173 
 
 of the death-punishment is not to be found upon 
 the scaffold ; it is to be found within the prison 
 walls, in anticipation of the scaffold ; in that 
 mixture of anxiety and terror which goes far to 
 absorb all the other faculties of the mind during 
 that terrible interval between arrest and trial, 
 and that still more terrible interval between 
 sentence and execution. Of that prolonged agony, 
 in which minutes pass like hours, no one can 
 form a true estimate but the man who has en- 
 dured it. No doubt it is possible to imagine it ; 
 but it does not belong to that class of pains 
 which easily present themselves to the imagina- 
 tion of a man when the case is not his own. 
 His mind fixes itself rather upon the event itself 
 than upon that terrible three weeks of agitation 
 and restlessness preceding the event. He thinks 
 a great deal of the approaching scene upon the 
 scaffold, and very little of those long, weary hours 
 within the prison cell. The death of the scaffold 
 
 mental anticipation of a prison life as contrasted with a present 
 life of excitement, liberty, and hope, than of a prison life pre- 
 senting itself to the memory of a man who has known it long 
 enough to have become in some degree reconciled to its hard, 
 unexciting, monotonous routine.
 
 174 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 is in truth, to most criminals, a long torture, not 
 the less real because some of those who endure it 
 have enough of pride and command over them- 
 selves to repress their feelings in the presence of 
 witnesses ; or, by a certain dignity of demeanour 
 at the last scene of all, are able to keep up for a 
 few minutes the appearance of courage or indiffer- 
 ence. You may tell me perhaps that this is an 
 exaggerated view of the intensity of the fear of 
 death, and you may remind me of the numerous 
 cases in which men lie upon their death-beds 
 without any apparent dread of the event which 
 they know to be close at hand ; but in those 
 cases there is generally either acute physical pain, 
 or strong religious faith, or prostration of the 
 powers, bodily or mental or both, the effect of 
 disease ; whereas in the case of the criminal there 
 is nothing either in body or mind to weaken 
 sensibility or to divert attention from the im- 
 pending fate. 3 
 
 3 I extract the following passage from the Rav. Lord Sydney 
 Godolphin Osborne's evidence before the Capital Punishment 
 Commission of 1865 (No. 3261) : ' When death is inevitable and 
 close at hand, it is usually met without the slightest exhibition 
 of fear. 1 have, from circumstances, been present at the death-
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 175 
 
 If, by underrating the real pain, Mr. Mill had 
 underrated the terrifying power on the public 
 inind the efficacy therefore in deterring from 
 crime the force of his reasoning in favour of the 
 death-punishment might have remained undimi- 
 
 hour of a very large number of my fellow-creatures ; only in one 
 case did I ever see fear of death.' 
 
 This statement does not seem to have been intended indeed 
 could not have been intended to apply exclusively to criminals 
 dying on the scaffold, for the alleged fact, so limited, would 
 have been disproved by the history of executions, which furnish 
 us with many examples of both kinds, of criminals dying with- 
 out any signs of fear, and of others dying with unmistakable 
 signs of intense fear. The firmness on the scaffold is, no doubt, 
 in most cases that of a man who intensely dreads the contempt 
 of the class with whom he has been associated during his life, a 
 class of men who, as Lord S. G. Osborne observes, ' admire in 
 a fellow-creature what they prize in a bull-dog or fighting 
 cock, pluck.' ('They would despise the man who does not die 
 game, and the man about to die knows it.') That kind of self- 
 love which dreads the contempt of those with whom we habitu- 
 ally live, or have lived, is perhaps the very strongest and most 
 durable passion in the human breast. It sheds no ray of light 
 on the thoughts of the criminal in the solitude of his cell ; but 
 not unfrequently it carries him with eclat through the last im- 
 posing scene on the scaffold. That it should do so, that a few 
 minutes only before a man leaves this world for ever, his conduct 
 should be capable of being influenced by the thought of the im- 
 pression to be produced by that conduct on the survivors, is one 
 of those facts in human character which (on whatever principles 
 we may endeavour to account for it) is too well established by 
 direct experience to be controverted.
 
 176 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 nished ; but this is not so. For those pains of 
 terror and anxiety which he has omitted from 
 his estimate, pains inseparable from the death- 
 punishment, and of overpowering effect upon the 
 man who is waiting in his cell for the day of his 
 execution, may almost be said to be non-existent 
 in the man who is meditating the commission of 
 the crime. This last man knows nothing from 
 his own experience, nothing from the report of 
 others, of those pains of terror and anxiety, for 
 they have no external signs indicating their real 
 intensity. They are such as in a great degree 
 to elude the observation even of the persons who 
 are in close attendance upon a prisoner, and to 
 the outside world, including all those whom it is 
 the special object of society to frighten by that 
 death-punishment, they remain a closed book. 
 The pain of the fear of death to a man meditating 
 the commission of a murder is the pain which 
 he himself endures at the moment when the idea 
 of that punishment as a possible consequence of 
 his crime rises up in his mind. It does not 
 occur to him at such a moment that the vague 
 feeling of uneasiness of which he is actually con-
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 177 
 
 scious might, through proximity and certainty 4 
 of the dreaded event, rise to the point of unen- 
 durable torture. In short, to the man who is 
 meditating the commission of the crime, the fear 
 of death has scarcely a particle of that deep, 
 pungent, gnawing, incessant pain which it has to 
 the man who, having been convicted of the crime, 
 is to be executed at a certain hour, on a certain 
 morning, ten days or a fortnight hence. In so 
 far as the real pain of the death-punishment 
 consists of anxiety and terror, those only will 
 estimate it at its full value to whom it comes 
 
 4 It would be more correct to say ' probability very nearly 
 approaching to certainty.' As long as there is life there is hope, 
 more or less, and even the murderer who has been sentenced to 
 death without any recommendation to mercy by the jury does 
 probably not utterly abandon hope till the sad procession from 
 the prison to the scaffold moves forward. Anxiety implies 
 some degree of uncertainty of the dreaded event. When doubt 
 ceases, anxiety ceases, and when anxiety ceases it is often re- 
 placed by a spasmodic effort of courage, which, when sustained 
 by the spectacle of that dense mass of absorbed spectators, 
 enables so many bad men, and even weak men, to die with all 
 the imposing fortitude of martyrs in the best of causes. The 
 Duke of Monmouth, of whom Macaulay tells us that he crawled, 
 and wept, and begged for life at the feet of his uncle, life at 
 any price, at the price even of his religion, betrayed no dis- 
 honouring signs of fear at the last scene of all, when all hope 
 was at an end. 
 
 N
 
 178 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTEE XT 
 
 too late to prevent the perpetration of the 
 offence. 
 
 There is, I think, less of truth in the rule 
 laid down by Mr. Mill that punishments which 
 depend upon duration for their efficacy are more 
 rigorous than they seem to be, than there is in a 
 rule which should lay down the exact reverse of 
 that proposition. The pains of life -imprisonment 
 depend upon duration for their efficacy. I have 
 stated in a former letter what those pains are. 
 They may be summed up as follows : 1st, hard, 
 regular labour ; 2nd, coarse food ; 3rd, depriva- 
 tion of all exciting pleasures ; 4th, absolute 
 subjection to the will of another man ; 5th, an 
 entire want of variety in the events of their life. 
 To every man the bare idea of such a life must 
 be painful ; specially painful to the habitual 
 criminal whose mode of life has been, by his own 
 choice, as much as possible the opposite of all 
 this. The idea of one day of such a life, however, 
 would have no terror for a man ; of one month, 
 not much ; of ten years, great terror ; of the 
 whole remainder of life without hope of relief, 
 terror of the greatest intensity. The terror
 
 LETTKR xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 179 
 
 would be very much in proportion to the duration, 
 and would be immensely aggravated if it were 
 clearly understood that, whether long or short, it 
 was to be a life-duration. Mr. Mill would not, 
 I suppose, disagree with this, but he would say, 
 let the duration be what it may ten years, or 
 twenty, or the remainder of the natural life the 
 real pain would be greater than the expected 
 pain. I dare say that, at first, the reality would 
 come quite up to the anticipation, but I 
 very much doubt whether it would go beyond 
 it. With ninety-nine men out of a hundred 
 I believe the anticipation would be substan- 
 tially accurate ; for although the criminal should 
 have had no direct experience of a prison life, 
 what he does know, from direct experience^ are 
 the comforts, pleasures, indulgences of the life 
 he has been leading, and he cannot but know 
 that the entire deprivation of these is what con- 
 stitutes the wretchedness of a prison. Stimu- 
 lating food, stimulating drink, tobacco, sensual 
 pleasures of another kind, the pleasure of indo- 
 lence, the pleasure arising from the power of 
 gratifying desires as they arise, the pleasure of 
 
 K2
 
 180 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTEE xv 
 
 unrestricted intercourse with persons of similar 
 tastes and habits, the pleasure of variety in the 
 incidents of life, the pleasure arising from freedom 
 in the prosecution of his objects (which unfor- 
 tunately is not always less of a pleasure because 
 the object is low and unworthy) ; 5 all these will 
 be cut off wholly and at one blow on entering 
 the prison gates. There can be no misconception 
 on the subject. Life-imprisonment ! Not one 
 man in a hundred will have power to shut his 
 eyes to the wretched prospect suggested by those 
 words ; but it is equally true that not one man 
 in a hundred will be capable of foreseeing that 
 as years roll on the terrible reality will become 
 progressively less and less painful and irritating, 
 not because the lost pleasures will come back, 
 but because the mere lapse of time will gradually 
 bring forth such small alleviations and comforts 
 as are not incompatible with hard, regular, 
 
 5 I do not, of course, mean to say that all the persons whom 
 it is specially desirable to deter from crime by the fear of 
 punishment are indolent, smoke tobacco, drink spirits, and are 
 sensualists in other ways, but I mean that, as a rule, the 
 pleasures I have enumerated are in different degrees, and in 
 different combinations, the special pleasures of that class of 
 persons.
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 181 
 
 compulsory labour, and will also slowly weaken 
 the power of lost pleasures over the imagination. 
 I do not mean to say that a gaoler, who should 
 have a prisoner handed over to him with instruc- 
 tions to make the remainder of his life as painful 
 as possible, might not, by frequent changes of 
 irritating treatment, succeed in keeping up the 
 misery of his victim at, or even above, the point 
 at which it stood in the first years of his con- 
 finement, but that supposition has no practical 
 bearing upon the question we are discussing, for 
 the treatment of the inmates of a prison is to a 
 great extent one of prescribed routine. However 
 painful that treatment may be at first, unless 
 ingenuity is exercised to prevent the natural 
 effect on mind and body of constant repetition, 
 routine will necessarily bring with it mitigation 
 of pain, very slow I admit in some cases, but 
 in almost all cases sure. There can be no doubt 
 that if you were to question a man in regard 
 to his feelings and sensations, whose life from 
 having been one of indolent freedom and habitual 
 indulgence in exciting pleasures had, in conse- 
 quence of a sentence of life-imprisonment,, become
 
 182 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTEE xv 
 
 one of restraint, coarse food, hard labour, and 
 deprivation of exciting pleasures, you would, 
 ceteris paribus, find him in a much less acute 
 condition of depression, irritation, and physical 
 suffering in the tenth than he had been in the 
 first year of his confinement. 
 
 Life-imprisonment is, 1 admit, entirely want- 
 ing in that one moment at which the suffering 
 is of ' terrifying intensity and in that element of 
 the unknown so imposing to the imagination,' 
 which Mr. Mill speaks of as being the chief 
 characteristics of the punishment of death ; and 
 if these could be transferred from the imagination 
 of the convict in his cell to that of the free man 
 meditating the commission of the crime, the 
 punishment of death would in its deterrent 
 efficacy be all, or nearly all, Mr. Mill believes it 
 to be ; but to this, all experience and all know- 
 ledge of human nature is opposed. Mr. Mill 
 seems to me to have overlooked in his argument 
 that peculiarity of the idea of death arising from 
 its familiarity to the mind as that of an event 
 inevitable and yet uncertain as regards the time 
 of its occurrence, which has been so well illus-
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 183 
 
 trated in the well-known fable of La Fon- 
 taine. 
 
 Un malheureux appelloit tous les jours 
 
 La Mort a son secours. 
 
 Mort ! lui disoit-il, que tu me sembles belle, 
 Viens vite, viens finir ma fortune cruelle ! 
 La Mort crut, en venant, 1'obliger en eifet. 
 Elle frappe a sa porte, elle entre, et se montre. 
 Que vois-je ! cria-t-il ; otez-moi cet objet ! 
 
 Qu'il est hideux ! que sa rencontre 
 
 Me cause d'horreur et d'effroi ! 
 N'approche pas, 6 Mort ! 6 Mort, retire-toi ! 
 
 Nothing can be more true than this picture 
 of the complacency with which death may be 
 contemplated or even invoked when at a distance, 
 and of the horror which it inspires when near at 
 hand. 
 
 I will now quote another passage from Mr. 
 Mill's speech. 
 
 For what else than effeminacy is it to be so much 
 more shocked by taking a man's life than by depriving 
 him of all that makes life desirable or valuable ? Is 
 death, then, the greatest of all earthly ills? Is it 
 indeed so dreadful a thing to die ? Has it not been 
 from of old one chief part of a manly education to make 
 us despise death ? teaching us to account it, if an evil 
 at all, by no means high in the list of evils, at all events,
 
 184 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 as an inevitable one ; and to hold, as it were, our lives 
 in our hands, ready to be given or risked at any moment 
 for a sufficiently worthy object. ... I cannot think 
 that the cultivating of a peculiar sensitiveness of con- 
 science on this one point, over and above what results 
 from the general cultivation of the moral sentiments, is 
 permanently consistent with assigning in our own minds 
 to the fact of death no more than the degree of relative 
 importance which belongs to it, among the other inci- 
 dents of our humanity. The men of old cared too little 
 about death, and gave their own lives and those of 
 others with equal recklessness. Our danger is of the 
 opposite kind, lest we should be so much shocked by 
 death in general, and in the abstract, as to care too 
 much about it in those individual cases, both other 
 people's and our own, which call for its being risked. 
 
 In this passage Mr. Mill seems to me not to 
 have made that very necessary distinction be- 
 tween sensitiveness in regard to our own lives 
 and sensitiveness in regard to the lives of others. 
 ' Has it not been,' he says, ' from of old one chief 
 part of a manly education to make us despise 
 death, teaching us to account it, if an evil at all, 
 by no means high in the list of evils? Ought 
 we not to be ready/ he says, ' to give or risk our 
 lives at any moment for a sufficiently worthy 
 object ? ' ' Yes/ will be the universal answer,
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 185 
 
 ' this is one of the first and greatest of the 
 lessons of a manly education ; ' but men who 
 can be trusted not to overrate the suificiency 
 of the occasion on which their own lives may 
 properly be given or risked, cannot be trusted, 
 when a judgment has to be formed in a case 
 which involves the lives of others. No one 
 who knows anything of the history of the 
 French revolution will say that Danton was 
 naturally a cruel man, or that he was other- 
 wise than sincere in his devotion to the one 
 great object which he professed, the good of his 
 country. In September 1792 he and his fellow- 
 patriots connived at if they did not perpetrate 
 the murder of some thousands of innocent 
 persons, to save the cause of good government in 
 France, as they believed ; in 1572 the great Catholic 
 leaders made a grand slaughter of French Pro- 
 testants, to save what they believed to be the cause 
 of true religion ; but who is there at this day who 
 believes that, if the price to be paid had been 
 their own lives instead of being the lives of 
 others, the judgment of these men, as to what 
 the salvation of their country or the cause of
 
 186 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 true religion required, would not have been very 
 different ? 
 
 Indomitable courage in risking his own life 
 is perfectly compatible in every man with the 
 most sensitive tenderness in regard to the lives 
 of others. Take up an English newspaper on 
 the occasion of one of those terrible explosions 
 in coal mines, which have become so frequent. 
 It will tell you in what sense an English miner 
 of the real heroic stamp understands the great 
 lesson in regard to human life. That miner 
 holds his own life so cheap, and is so tender of 
 life in general, that he will descend into that 
 mine at the most deadly risk to himself, rather 
 than that the smallest chance should be lost of 
 saving one single fellow- workman out of those 
 fifty or one hundred who have been struck down 
 by that explosion. No one will object to Mr. 
 Mill's lesson, if it be taught in the spirit of that 
 miner. But unless that important distinction 
 between our own lives and the lives of others be 
 constantly kept in view, that lesson becomes in 
 the highest degree dangerous. If men are to be 
 taught to ' assign in their own minds to the fact
 
 LZTTEB xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 187 
 
 of death no more than the degree of relative 
 importance which belongs to it amongst the 
 other incidents of our humanity,' and to be left 
 to make their own estimate of the comparative 
 value of their own lives and of those of other 
 men, is there not great risk of dangerously 
 weakening those feelings and principles which 
 form the counterpoise to the particular tempta- 
 tions which impel a murderer to his crime ? We 
 may conceive a murderer, on the eve of the 
 commission of his crime, applying to himself, 
 with fatal effect, the arguments by which Mr. 
 Mill enforces his lesson, that death stands so low 
 in the list of evils to which humanity is subject. 
 ' The most that the law can do against me 
 in the matter of death,' he may say, ' is to 
 hasten it. I should die at any rate not so very 
 much later, and probably with a greater amount 
 of bodily suffering ; and is it, after all, so 
 dreadful a thing to die ? And if life is risked 
 by other men for objects which they consider 
 worthy, why not by me for an object which, 
 whether worthy or not in the estimation of 
 others, is at all events one which, if unattained,
 
 188 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 deprives me of all that makes life desirable to 
 me ? and then, if death is to be regarded as so 
 low in the catalogue of evils in my case, why 
 not also in the case of the man who stands 
 between me and the object of my desire ? ' 
 
 This question must, I think, be considered 
 by us in subordination to the existing feeling 
 of mankind, whatever that may be in regard to 
 human life. It is, of course, easy to picture to 
 ourselves a people who take so exaggerated a 
 view of the evil of death ; who shrink with so 
 morbid a sensitiveness from any risk to life for 
 themselves or others, as to deprive them of all 
 greatness or manliness of character and make 
 them contemptible. On such a people it would 
 be safe and beneficial to inculcate Mr. Mill's 
 lesson, without any qualification. But we may 
 picture to ourselves the opposite case, in which 
 a general recklessness should prevail, making 
 men ready to risk their own lives and the lives 
 of others for very trifling objects, or for objects 
 of very doubtful benefit, in which case it might 
 be necessary to inculcate the exact opposite of 
 Mr. Mill's lesson. Neither of the supposed cases
 
 LETTEB xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 189 
 
 corresponds, however, with the facts. The 
 prevalent feeling of mankind in civilised coun- 
 tries at the present day cannot be said to come 
 under either of these descriptions, but I think it 
 approaches more nearly to the second of them 
 than to the first. There is amongst civilised 
 men more of recklessness than of morbid sen- 
 sitiveness in regard to human life. Of the latter 
 there seems to me to be very little. Where pro- 
 fessional fame and advancement are concerned, 
 where the object may be represented as national, 
 where men have placed themselves at the dis- 
 posal of a government as in the military pro- 
 fessions in private life, where the feelings are 
 very strongly engaged, where the lives of others, 
 in immediate and palpable danger, are at stake, 
 or when the object in view is one with which 
 other men very warmly sympathise ; in all those 
 cases, those who would shrink from the risk of 
 death for themselves, form a rare exception. 
 To say nothing of our soldiers, our sailors, our 
 ministers of religion, our medical men, who are 
 always ready to put their lives in peril in the 
 performance of the regular duties of their respec-
 
 190 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LKTTEE xv 
 
 tive professions, I believe that the men who (on 
 occasions arising in private life similar to that 
 which I have referred to in the case of the heroic 
 miner) will unhesitatingly act as he acts may be 
 reckoned up by tens of thousands in every rank 
 of life. Unfortunately the prevalent disregard 
 for human life, when the object is one which is 
 great and noble, and commands the respect and 
 sympathy of good men, is very apt to extend it- 
 self to cases in which the object is entirely want- 
 ing in those characteristics, to cases in which 
 the sacrifice of life may be traced to stupidity 
 or selfishness. The carelessness, want of skill, 
 cupidity or culpable ambition of those to whom 
 in large numbers the lives of their fellow- crea- 
 tures are entrusted railway companies, owners 
 of passenger vessels, owners of mines, and, 
 above all, governments need to be strongly 
 and constantly counteracted by the inculcation 
 of a lesson on the value of human life. There 
 is very little disposition in any quarter to take 
 much trouble in the teaching and enforcing of 
 that lesson. It is wonderful how disinclined 
 men are when there is no malice in the case
 
 LETTEB xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 191 
 
 to allow their judgments or feelings to press 
 with much weight on those who have sacrificed 
 hundreds or thousands of human lives to their 
 incapacity, negligence, or selfish ambition, and 
 with what inconsiderate ardour men will throw 
 themselves into any cause, however dangerous to 
 life, which their rulers may have dubbed with 
 the name of national, however little the honour 
 or interest of the nation may really be concerned 
 in the matter. The misfortune is, that in this, as 
 in so many other matters, the faults of a govern- 
 ment and the faults of the people act and react 
 upon each other, and give strength and per- 
 manency to the evil. The indifference of the 
 people in regard to human life tempts rulers, by 
 the certainty of impunity, to embark in foolish 
 or unprincipled enterprises, such, for instance, 
 as the invasion of Russia in 181112, that of 
 Afghanistan in 1841, that of Mexico a few years 
 ago ; and the frequent exhibition of a lavish sacri- 
 fice of human life for objects which either they 
 cannot entirely approve or cannot clearly under- 
 stand, confirms the people in that selfish and 
 dangerous indifference. Heroic self-sacrifice to
 
 192 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTBE xv 
 
 save the lives of others in a case coming under 
 a man's own eyes is unfortunately quite com- 
 patible with great indifference to human life in 
 general, when the scene is laid at a distance and 
 is entirely outside the sphere of his individual 
 influence. Daily experience proves this, and the 
 same man who in the morning may have put his 
 own life in the greatest jeopardy to save the lives 
 of others, will not in the afternoon be prevented, 
 by the news of a battle or a shipwreck a thou- 
 sand miles off. in which hundreds of his country- 
 men have fallen victims to culpable neglect, or 
 still more , culpable ambition, from eating his 
 dinner with his usual appetite. The inculcation 
 of the great lesson of the sanctity of human life 
 is not likely, I think, to diminish the morning's 
 heroism of that man ; and if it should seriously 
 disturb the serenity of his afternoon, and make 
 him a little less tolerant of the mistakes or crimes 
 of those to whom human life on a great scale 
 has been entrusted, mankind could only be a 
 gainer by it. 
 
 As regards our own country, I confess I can 
 see no signs of a tendency to effeminacy in
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 193 
 
 regard to human life, and if the question of 
 retaining or abolishing the punishment of death 
 for murder were put to the vote, I greatly doubt 
 whether one-tenth part of the people would vote 
 for the abolition. On the contrary, I believe 
 with Bentham that, for intentional, unprovoked 
 homicide, death is in England a popular punish- 
 ment, and that the great bulk of the people 
 have, not only no present perception of the 
 objections to it, but that it would be a matter 
 of some difficulty to make them understand the 
 nature and force of those objections. If the 
 abrogation of the death-punishment should be 
 postponed until juries show an indisposition to 
 convict undoubted murderers of the worst kind, 
 it may last for centuries. Where the intention 
 to take life and the absence of strong provocation 
 are placed, by the evidence, beyond all possibility 
 of doubt in such cases, for example, as those of 
 Thurtell, or Burke, or Palmer juries have never 
 shown any unwillingness to convict. When 
 there is hesitation, I believe it to arise from 
 one or other of two causes : either from a doubt 
 of the perfect conclusiveness of the evidence on 
 
 o
 
 194 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 which the verdict of guilty rests, and the con- 
 sequent reluctance to inflict an irreparable 
 punishment ; 6 or from a dislike to inflict the 
 
 6 That juries are much less easily convinced of the guilt of 
 the prisoner than they would be if the punishment fell short of 
 death, is not only undoubted as a matter of fact, but is very 
 honourable to juries. Every right-thinking man will require a 
 stronger foundation of evidence for the infliction of a punish- 
 ment which must be carried out at once in its entirety, than he 
 will for the infliction of one which, being spread over the whole 
 remainder of the convict's life, is not absolutely irreparable in 
 the event of his innocence being established before the termina- 
 tion of that life. As a matter of fact, juries do not unfrequently 
 endeavour, in some indirect way, to escape from the responsi- 
 bility of sending men to the scaffold, where the proofs of guilt 
 are not sufficient to exclude all possibility of doubt. The case 
 of Wiggins, who was convicted, in 1867, of the murder of the 
 woman with whom he lived, is one amongst many which might 
 be cited in proof of this. The case was one either of suicide or 
 of murder. There was no evidence in support of the supposi- 
 tion of suicide, still less did it appear that the murder (supposing 
 it to have been a murder) might have been perpetrated by some 
 other hand. The case against the prisoner was sufficiently 
 strong to make it indecent to acquit him, and yet not sufficiently 
 strong to make it tolerable to twelve men of good sense and 
 good feeling to take away a life which they could never restore. 
 Accordingly the jury endeavoured to save the prisoner's life by 
 suggesting that the fatal act might have been unpremeditated, 
 a most improbable supposition, in support of which there had 
 not been a particle of evidence. Up to the very last moment 
 the man protested his innocence. Within a few seconds of the 
 process which put an end to his life he exclaimed, ' I am inno- 
 cent ; on my dying oath, I am innocent ; I never did it ; I am 
 innocent, innocent, innocent.' So long as the smallest particle
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 195 
 
 same punishment, and one which stands so 
 completely apart in kind from all others, in cases 
 
 of doubt remains in the mind of the juryman, such protestations 
 of a dying man grate harshly on his ears. 
 
 It is natural that we should endeavour to persuade ourselves 
 that innocent men are never hanged, but the juryman who is in 
 the habit of attentively reading murder cases may be excused 
 for believing that weak points in the evidence on which execu- 
 tions for murder have rested are not the very rare exceptions 
 which they are represented to be. There have been cases of 
 erroneous conviction resting on circumstantial evidence of the 
 very strongest kind, and every intelligent man perceives that 
 if in such cases the error is not discovered in time to save the 
 prisoner's life, it is little likely ever to be discovered. 
 
 A good many years ago a man was convicted of the murder 
 of a clergyman in Huntingdonshire, whose name, if I remember 
 right, was Waterhouse. The evidence was entirely circum- 
 stantial. The prisoner, some days after sentence had been 
 passed upon him, having no doubt that he would be hanged, 
 confessed his guilt, and gave full particulars of the circumstances 
 attending the perpetration of his crime. Those particulars it 
 was possible to- verify. They were verified, and it was found 
 that they were entirely unconnected with the circumstances 
 deposed to on the trial on which the conviction rested. The 
 occurrence of such a case could not but produce upon the public 
 mind a painful impression that innocent men are not always 
 safe in our courts of justice. In this case, however, the judge 
 had not been free from doubt as to the conclusiveness of the 
 evidence, and the man, if he had not confessed, would certainly 
 not have been hanged. There is another and a much stronger 
 case of erroneous conviction on a much stronger case of circum- 
 stantial evidence, cited by Sir Fitzroy Kelly in his evidence 
 before the Capital Punishment Commission of 1864-5. Two 
 men (I will call them A. and B., for the names are not given 
 by Sir Fitzroy Kelly) were drinking with others in a public- 
 
 o2
 
 1 96 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 which stand at a considerable distance from each 
 other in the degree of moral depravity and of 
 
 house at night. A quarrel arose between them. A., after 
 having thrown a pint pot at B.'s head, ran out of the house, 
 pursued by B., who was heard to swear that he would be the 
 death of A. A. ran a considerable distance past sheds and 
 buildings towards a certain spot, and B. was seen by several 
 persons at different points between the public-house and that 
 spot. By one witness, who was in a shed very near that spot, 
 but who could not see what was going on there, blows were 
 heard, and cries and struggles ; shortly afterwards an appeal for 
 mercy and other blows and loud words were heard. A minute 
 after this, B. was seen running away in great agitation from that 
 spot at which, a few minutes later, A. was found stabbed in 
 three places and quite dead ; and when B. was seized he was 
 found with his hands and the front of his clothes covered with 
 blood. B. protested his innocence and told his story just the 
 kind of story which a guilty man, having heard such a case 
 against him as that of which I have given the particulars, would 
 be likely to invent as a last chance of escape which, rest- 
 ing on his unsupported assurance, could do little or nothing to 
 weaken the force of such overwhelming proofs of his guilt. 
 Fortunately for B. and for the cause of truth and justice, 
 another man, who lay under sentence of death for a highway 
 robbery with violence, committed in an adjoining county, con- 
 fessed to the murder of A. just in time to save B.'s life and to 
 prove the truth of the highly improbable story which B. had 
 told in his own defence. 
 
 Other cases of erroneous convictions might be cited, but it 
 is unnecessary. One case, in fifty years, such as that narrated 
 by Sir Fitzroy Kelly is sufficient to throw doubt on the very 
 strongest cases of circumstantial evidence and on that descrip- 
 tion of evidence, be it remembered, convictions for murder 
 chiefly rest and to make good the argument against irreparable 
 punishments.
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 197 
 
 injury to the public. If juries are influenced by 
 these feelings the fact is, I think, very much to 
 their credit and very much for the public good, 
 for it is more particularly necessary in the case 
 of great crimes, with a view to the formation of 
 a healthy public opinion, that rulers should not 
 be compelled by the state of the law to ignore 
 important and obvious moral distinctions. There 
 are, for example, reasons conclusive to the 
 understanding of a juryman of average intel- 
 ligence, reasons founded on moral grounds 
 universally recognised, and on obvious grounds 
 of public utility, why a punishment precisely 
 the same both in kind and degree, should not 
 be inflicted on the man between whom and his 
 victim there has been, with fault on both sides, 
 intense mutual irritation of long standing, and 
 the man who plans and executes the murder of 
 a stranger in order to possess himself of a sum 
 of money. 
 
 'It is not human life only/ says Mr. Mill, 
 ' not human life as such that ought to be sacred 
 to us, but human feelings. The human capacity 
 of suffering is what we should cause to be
 
 198 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER XT 
 
 respected, not the mere capacity of existing.' 
 This is true. It is impossible that moralists and 
 legislators should too frequently and strongly 
 impress upon mankind the duty of respecting 
 the feelings and the capacity of suffering of other 
 men, but not on this account ought they, I think, 
 to allow that sentiment of the sanctity of human 
 life by one iota to be lessened. If in no ex- 
 tremity of suffering are men justified in putting 
 an end to their own lives, how can they with 
 safety be allowed to pass judgment on the degree 
 of suffering which makes death desirable to 
 others ? Nothing can be more dangerous than 
 to encourage men to make comparisons between 
 the evil of death and the evil of given degrees 
 of pain, sorrow, or privation. Such comparisons 
 may easily be perverted to the very worst pur- 
 poses, and produce effects the most lamentable. 
 Let the lesson that death is only one out of the 
 innumerable forms of human suffering be steadily 
 inculcated, and we might end by seeing a Hare 
 and a Burke bringing philanthropy to the aid 
 of their villany, and devoting themselves to the 
 task of searching out the lowest depths of human
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 199 
 
 misery, with a view to the promotion of medical 
 science by a supply of the bodies of those to 
 whom life was a burden and death, a relief from 
 torment. Why, you will ask me, unfairly push 
 the maxims of an opponent to lengths to which 
 they were obviously not intended to be carried ? 
 But the question is not to what lengths Mr. Mill 
 carries his maxims ; for with him we know that 
 we are perfectly safe, but to what lengths ordinary 
 men might injuriously carry them, or wicked 
 men pervert them. The question is whether 
 mankind can safely be trusted on this point, and 
 whether it is not more necessary, in the interest 
 of good government, pure morality, and social 
 improvement, to restrain existing recklessness 
 and indifference, than to stimulate the exist- 
 ing spirit of self-sacrifice in regard to human 
 life. 
 
 Mr. Mill speaks with justice of the mania 
 which sometimes arises in this country for paring 
 down punishments. The truth is, that in deal- 
 ing with their criminals, as in some other 
 matters, mankind are apt to be capricious and 
 to fluctuate between mischievous extremes of
 
 200 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER XT 
 
 severity and mischievous extremes of mildness. 
 In England, in the course of the last fifty 
 years, we have seen offences against property, 
 by no means of the worst kind, punished with 
 death, and acts of atrocious cruelty to helpless 
 women and children punished by a few weeks of 
 imprisonment, commutable at the option of the 
 ruffian into the payment of a fine of a few pounds. 
 But we have improved and are still improving 
 in these matters, and there is now no longer 
 anything in our severity or our leniency abso- 
 lutely shocking to humanity on the one hand, or 
 to common sense on the other. There is some 
 ground, however, for the remark that, except 
 for very small offences, and offences against 
 property, our punishments are inadequate, and 
 that there is more need of strengthening than of 
 weakening them. The death-punishment can- 
 not be strengthened ; public opinion will not 
 allow of its being made either more painful or 
 more frequent. The same may be said of all 
 punishments inflicting acute bodily pain. What 
 needs strengthening, and may be strengthened, 
 is the punishment of imprisonment which,
 
 LETTER xv THE PUNISmiENT OF DEATH 201 
 
 applied as we in practice apply it for com- 
 paratively short terms, or for terms reducible 
 very much at the discretion of gaolers, chaplains, 
 or secretaries of state, is a most inadequate pun- 
 ishment for great crimes. What is needed is that 
 we should fairly give our understandings to the 
 question whether imprisonment for long terms 
 of years, extended in the worst cases to the 
 entire remainder of life, and accompanied by 
 complete extinction of all intercouse with the 
 external world, may not be beneficially applied 
 to the prevention of great crimes. Imprison- 
 ment for life is practically unknown to us ; 
 Mr. Mill would lead us to suppose that he is 
 shocked by its severity. In this I think he is 
 mistaken, and that, in the long run, taking it 
 from its first day to its last, it would be less 
 severe than it seems : but, be this as it may, if 
 punishments for crimes against the person are 
 to be strengthened, what other mode than this 
 is open to us of strengthening them ? What 
 adequate punishment but imprisonment is pos- 
 sible for crimes against the person of a degree 
 of atrocity just falling short of the point at
 
 202 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 which juries can be got to send men to the 
 scaffold ? 
 
 [The following draft of a letter in Mr. Romilly's 
 handwriting, found among his papers, and ap- 
 parently addressed to a newspaper in reply to 
 one published by Mr. Newman, appears to sup- 
 ply a fitting conclusion to the preceding letters, 
 and is therefore here added. EDITOR.] 
 
 April 1863. 
 
 May I be allowed a small space in your 
 columns for the purpose of emphatically denying 
 the truth of the proposition on which, in his 
 letter to you of April 22, Mr. Newman rests 
 his defence of capital punishment, viz. that all 
 moral improvement is impossible in a prison 
 life. I affirm, on the contrary, that there is 
 no sphere so narrow, no situation so dead, as 
 to afford no field for the exercise of Christian 
 virtues. Within the walls of a prison there are 
 always duties which may be performed, and 
 passions which may be restrained, kindliness 
 which may be fostered, past offences which 
 may be mourned over, pain which may be
 
 LETTEH xv THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 203 
 
 courageously endured, words of persuasion or 
 of pity which may be spoken to make fellow 
 prisoners less wicked or less miserable. Mr. 
 Newman tells us that there is no possible 
 career within the walls of a prison. I say that 
 these things constitute a career, and one which, 
 if prolonged over a large part of a man's life, 
 may go far to atone for the crimes which may 
 have assigned their author to the narrow world 
 of a prison. Let a man be placed hi any situa- 
 tion in which it is possible to place him ; let 
 him be confined for the remainder of his life in 
 a ship, in a mine, in a hospital, or even in a 
 prison, I say there are powers and faculties, im- 
 planted in him by the hand of God, which may 
 be freely used by him to make himself progres- 
 sively better and wiser and less miserable as life 
 goes on, and that to affirm the contrary is to 
 affirm a doctrine which is as impious as it is 
 shallow. 
 
 If our prisons should ever become what 
 Mr. Newman would have us believe they now 
 are ; if life prisoners in England should, in 
 some terrible future, be subjected to treatment
 
 204 THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH LETTER xv 
 
 of such a kind as to crush out of them all moral 
 existence, and to make them more worthless and 
 depraved at the close of their prison life than 
 at its commencement ; then the time will have 
 come when she must relinquish all claim to be 
 included in the list of civilised nations.
 
 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 AND 
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 
 
 TO WHICH ABE APPENDED 
 
 A LETTER FROM JOHN STUART MILL, M.P. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF 'THE BEADEB,' 
 29TH APRIL, 1865. 
 
 AND OBSERVATIONS THEREON. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY ROMILLY, M.A. 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 PUBLISHED IN 
 1867.
 
 THE writer thinks it necessary to say that he has used the 
 word Ballot throughout the following pages in the sense 
 of a method of voting at Elections of such a kind as to 
 make it impossible that the Yoter should give any proof 
 of the vote he has given beyond his own unsupported 
 assertion.
 
 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 AND 
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT. 
 
 IN his speech of June 16, 1863, against the ballot, 
 Lord Palmerston observed that its advocates 'placed 
 the whole thing upon a wrong foundation ; that they 
 seemed to forget the vital principle, the breath of life 
 of the British constitution, namely, public opinion and 
 public responsibility.' 
 
 Nothing is more effective in the mouth of an orator 
 than the confident announcement of some great prin- 
 ciple as lying at the foundation of his own particular 
 view of a subject, the absence of any such foundation 
 being tacitly assumed as the weak point of the view 
 taken by his adversary. The mere utterance by a great 
 minister, in a certain tone of voice, and with a certain 
 manner, of such phrases, as freedom of the press, neces- 
 sity of military discipline, defences of the country, 
 balance of power, public responsibility, often carries 
 with it three-fourths of a well-disposed audience, whose 
 cheers are apt to drown the voices of calm men, who
 
 208 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 might be disposed to call upon the orator to furnish his 
 audience with some proof that his great principle was 
 applicable to the particular question under discussion. 
 
 Lord Palmerston's great principle in the case of 
 the ballot is public responsibility. His argument is 
 that, if you divest a man of the responsibility to which 
 he ought to be liable in respect of his public trust, 
 you extinguish one of the essential principles of the 
 British constitution, and substitute something which 
 is unconstitutional and un-English. Nothing seems 
 more clear and simple. The elector, according to this 
 theory, is a trustee. When he goes up to the poll to 
 give his vote, he is executing a trust, performing a duty 
 to the public ; and the public is entitled to call him to 
 account for the proper execution of that trust, for the 
 right performance of that duty ; but how to call him to 
 account, if he has dropped a card into a box, and if 
 the secret of that card is to remain for ever buried 
 within his own breast? How is the verdict of the 
 public upon the quality of the vote to be pronounced, 
 if the vote is to remain for ever unknown ? How shall 
 the voter receive his meed of praise for vote A., or of 
 censure for vote B., when no man can tell whether his 
 vote was A. or B. ? 
 
 The friends of the ballot meet the argument with a 
 question. If the argument is good for a voter at Mary- 
 lebone, why not for a member of the Atheneeum or the 
 Carlton ? To this, Lord Palmerston replies that clubs 
 have nothing to do with the matter. ' These illustra- 
 tions,' he says, ' are foreign to the purpose of the argu- 
 ment ; for these private societies have no public duties 
 and no public responsibilities. They are not respon-
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 209 
 
 sible to the country for the election of their members. 
 They are guided solely by the consideration of who are 
 likely to be agreeable members of their societies and in 
 the club-room.' 
 
 This argument is one of very ancient date. For 
 fifty years past it has been the standing answer of the 
 friend to open voting, who defends the ballot at his 
 club, when he has been reproached with his inconsis- 
 tency. ( Private societies have no public responsibility.' 
 The proposition affords a not uninteresting field for 
 discussion ; a field, whose extent bears a certain direct 
 proportion to the degree of latitude which a man may 
 choose to give to that word public. But why discuss 
 it ? Suppose we grant it to be true. True or false, 
 what bearing has it on the question of ballot or no 
 ballot ? The ballot is a device for the protection of men, 
 not for the protection of societies. The question is 
 this. Is there not the same reason for withholding the 
 vote of a parliamentary elector, as for withholding the 
 vote of a member of a club, from the knowledge of other 
 men ? What answer is it to that question to tell us 
 that private societies have no public responsibility? 
 No one wishes to make a secret of the acts of the gene-?, 
 ral body, club or constituency. The acts of the Carlton 
 and the Athenaeum are known to any one who cares to 
 know them ; and what sane person would wish to make 
 a secret of the fact that it was the borough of Queens- 
 ville which returned - John Brown to the House of 
 Commons, or to protect the constituency of Queensville 
 from the comments of the public and the press, on the 
 merits or demerits of that act of theirs ? It is the indi-
 
 210 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 vidual elector, not the constituency, that needs pro- 
 tection. 
 
 These words public and publicity are, I believe, 
 chiefly responsible for the mist in which this question 
 of the ballot is enveloped. Lord Palmerston speaks of 
 public responsibility as though there were no such 
 thing as a public short of the thirty millions of souls 
 which constitute the population of the British Isles. 
 Is there not a London public and an Edinburgh public ; 
 a scientific public and a literary public ; a public of 
 master-manufacturers and a public of operatives ; a 
 military public and a naval public ; a commercial pub- 
 lic and a public of men of rank and fashion ? Every 
 considerable body of men constitutes a public to an 
 individual of that body. A soldier is responsible to his 
 country and to the army, but he is still more closely 
 and directly responsible to his regiment. The wider 
 responsibility does not destroy the narrower. Lord 
 Palmerston says with truth that clubs are not respon- 
 sible to the country for the election of their members. 
 With equal truth might he have said that the consti- 
 tuencies of Great Britain are not responsible to the 
 human race for the British House of Commons ; or that 
 the Duke of Devonshire's butler was not responsible to 
 the inhabitants of Piccadilly for the safety of the plate 
 at Devonshire House. It is quite true that the inte- 
 rests of the British empire are not likely to be much 
 affected by the result of the next ballot at Brooks's ; 
 nor are the interests of mankind likely to be much 
 affected by the result of the next election for Middle- 
 sex. The responsibility is so remote and indirect that 
 Lord Palmerston is perhaps justified in ignoring it
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 211 
 
 altogether. But all this looks very much like trifling 
 with the subject. The remoteness or the entire absence of 
 responsibility towards the larger body does not disprove 
 responsibility towards the smaller. The constituencies 
 of Great Britain are not perhaps responsible to the 
 civilised world or to Europe, but they are responsible 
 to Great Britain. The great man's butler in Grosvenor 
 Square may not be responsible to the public of Gros- 
 venor Square, but he is responsible to his master. So 
 a London club may not be responsible to the country, 
 but an individual member of a club is responsible to 
 his club. If the effect of his vote has been to admit an 
 unpleasant man into the club, the club is the sufferer. 
 If a parliamentary elector by his vote sends an in- 
 capable man into the House of Commons, the country 
 is the sufferer. In order to prevent incapable legislators 
 from getting into the House of Commons, Lord Pal- 
 rnerston thinks it right to subject the vote of the 
 elector to the criticism of the country; and yet he 
 denies that, in order to prevent unpleasant men from 
 getting into Brooks's Club, the votes of individual 
 members of Brooks's Club should be subjected to the 
 criticism of the club. There seems to be some incon- 
 sistency in this. Surely the comfort and respectability 
 of a club are as much dependent on the votes of its 
 members, as the good name of the constituency and the 
 welfare of England are dependent on the votes of par- 
 liamentary electors. 
 
 The analogy between the situation of a member of 
 a club when a candidate for admission is about to be 
 balloted for, and that of a voter at a parliamentary 
 election, is so close and perfect that it is difficult to 
 
 p 2
 
 212 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 treat with becoming seriousness the assertion that there 
 is no analogy whatever between them ; and that the 
 purpose which by the ballot is successfully effected in 
 the one case, is unnecessary or unattainable in the 
 other. Propose to a member of a club some question 
 which involves no personal considerations; such a 
 question, for example, as this : shall a valuable set of 
 the Latin classics be purchased for the library ? or 
 shall the members of the club be increased fron 600 to 
 800 ? It will be a matter of perfect indifference to 
 him whether his vote is given openly or secretly. But 
 propose to him the question whether A.'s application 
 to become a member of the club ought to be granted or 
 refused. If you wish to get his real opinion on the 
 merits of that question, you must allow him to conceal 
 his vote from A. and A.'s supporters. It may happen 
 that A., whom he considers a most unfit person to be a 
 member of the club, is connected with him in business, 
 or by relationship, or officially ; or that A. is an inti- 
 mate friend of persons to whom it would be most pain- 
 ful to him to give offence. It might perhaps be best 
 if he had the moral courage to brave the anger of his 
 friends, and manfully do his duty by the club; but 
 three gentlemen out of four have not the moral courage 
 o do this ; and if, by means of the ballot, it is possible 
 to get his real opinion, and to relieve him from all 
 nnpleasant consequences, why should that not be done ? 
 Why call upon him for a painful effort of moral courage 
 which is wholly unnecessary ? The case of the parlia- 
 mentary elector is precisely similar. Propose to him 
 some question which involves no personal consequences ; 
 such a question as this, for example : Which is the
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 213 
 
 most beneficial to a nation, agriculture or manufac- 
 tures ? It will be indifferent to him whether he gives 
 his vote upon it openly or secretly. But propose to 
 him the question whether M. or N. shall be member 
 for the borough or county of which he is an elector. 
 If you wish to make sure of getting from him a vote 
 corresponding with his real opinion of the comparative 
 fitness of M. or N. for a seat in the House of Commons, 
 you must enable him to conceal his vote from M. and 
 N., and from their friends and supporters. M. may be 
 his employer, or the near friend or relation of his 
 employer, and it might be most painful to him to give 
 offence to his employer, who has been a good friend to 
 him and his family. And yet he may be intimately 
 convinced that M. will make as bad a member of Par- 
 liament as N. will make a good one. It might be best 
 if he also had the moral courage to brave the anger of 
 his employer and the imputation of ingratitude, and do 
 his duty by his country ; but nine electors out of ten 
 have no such courage, and if by giving him the protec- 
 tion of the ballot, you can get from him a vote corre- 
 sponding with his real opinion of the comparative 
 qualifications of the two candidates, without injurious 
 consequences to himself, why should you not do so ? 
 Why call upon him unnecessarily to sacrifice his feel- 
 ings or his worldly interest in the discharge of his duty 
 to his country ? 
 
 I am aware that Lord Palmerston is supported in 
 this attempted distinction between a parliamentary 
 elector and a member of a private society by very high 
 authority, for I find in Mr. Mill's work on Representa- 
 tive Government the following passage :
 
 214 . PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 ' A member of a club is really what the elector 
 falsely believes himself to be, under no obligation to 
 consider the wishes or interests of any one else. He 
 declares nothing by his vote but that he is or is not 
 willing to associate in a manner more or less close with 
 a particular person. This is a matter on which, by 
 universal admission, his own pleasure or inclination is 
 entitled to decide.' 
 
 The admission, however, amounts merely to this, 
 viz. that no other person is entitled to interfere with 
 his discretion, which is equally true of the parliamentary 
 elector. Surely, it does not go the length of maintain- 
 ing that he is under no moral obligation to consider in 
 his vote what is likely to be agreeable, or the contrary, 
 to the other members of the society. A member of a 
 club is surely as much morally obliged to consider the 
 comfort and respectability of the club as an elector is 
 obliged to consider the credit of the constituency to 
 which he belongs, and the welfare of the country. The 
 degrees of importance in the two cases are different, 
 but the principle is the same. There is a ballot at the 
 
 Club for A. B. He is an ill-natured, quarrelsome 
 
 man, always seeking occasion to lead those in whose 
 society he finds himself into discussions, which he con- 
 ducts with acrimony, want of candour, and personality. 
 I happen to be so constituted that to me this is an 
 agreeable excitement; but I am well aware that, to 
 some members of the club, the admission of this man 
 will be a serious calamity. I vote for him, nevertheless, 
 on Mr. Mill's principle, that I am under no obligation 
 to consider any wishes or interests but my own. Or take 
 a case of an opposite kind. An accomplished man, of
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 215 
 
 unexceptionable conduct and agreeable manners, is pro- 
 posed at the Oxford and Cambridge ; I happen to have 
 a dislike to him, of the same kind as that which some 
 men have to Dr. Fell. According to Mr. Mill, I am 
 morally justified in giving effect by a black ball to my 
 selfish antipathy, in defiance to what I know to be the 
 general wish of the club. 1 If a member of a club may 
 do this, why may not a parliamentary elector vote for 
 a personal friend, whom he knows to be quite unfit for 
 the duties of a legislator ? or withhold his vote from a 
 virtuous and able statesman, of his own way of thinking 
 in politics, on some petty ground of personal offence ? 
 The interests of the people of England are more im- 
 portant than those of a London club undoubtedly ; but 
 this seems to be the only difference between the cases. 
 In both cases the individual man has a duty to perform 
 towards the general body. If it is right in principle to 
 protect the member of the club from the resentment of 
 those to whose wishes he may find himself opposed in 
 the performance of that duty, it is right so to protect 
 the parliamentary elector. If it is right in principle 
 to subject the vote of the parliamentary elector to the 
 supervision of the public, it is right to subject the vote 
 of the member of the club to the supervision of the club. 
 There are two kinds of motives by one or the other 
 of which a parliamentary elector, when he gives his 
 
 1 Practically, the member of the club, who might be tempted 
 to conduct himself in this foolish and unprincipled way, would 
 be stopped by a sense of responsibility and the suggestions of a 
 more enlightened self-interest ; and the elector, under the 
 ballot, would be restrained by similar considerations from any 
 similar act of petty selfishness.
 
 216 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 vote, must of necessity be actuated. His vote must 
 either be given in subjection to the control of other 
 men, or free from such control. Either his vote is 
 determined by the fear of offending or the hope of con- 
 ciliating some other man or men who happen to be 
 friendly or to be hostile to the pretensions of a parti- 
 cular candidate, or it is the simple expression of his 
 own conviction or inclination, free from all external 
 pressure. Now, the purpose and the effect of the ballot 
 is to withdraw the voter from that first class of motives, 
 to relieve him from all external pressure, whether it 
 take the more definite form of a bribe or a menace, 
 or the less definite form of a disinclination on his part 
 to give offence to other men. But then this question 
 arises. If the elector be protected from external pres- 
 sure, can he be trusted to carry his free judgment and 
 inclination in the direction of the public good ? G ranted 
 that, by the ballot, you relieve him from an injurious 
 influence the seductive or coercive influence of rich and 
 powerful men but do you not, by that same ballot, 
 withdraw him from a beneficial influence, the moral 
 influence of an enlightened public ? The question is, 
 in truth, two questions. First, when no longer liable 
 to be tempted or frightened out of the path of duty, 
 will not his inherent perverseness lead him to desert 
 that path ? and, secondly, if that be so, would not 
 public opinion if, by the ballot, you had not rendered 
 it powerless have been effectual to keep him within it ? 
 Mr. Mill, in the work from which I have already 
 quoted, answers both questions in the affirmative ; 
 the advocate of the ballot answers them both in the 
 negative.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 217 
 
 To the second of these questions I will address 
 myself hereafter. In reference to the first of them, the 
 attempted distinction between the member of the club 
 and the parliamentary elector seems to me to rest upon 
 no intelligible foundation. Lord Palmerston and Mr. 
 Mill would be the first to contend that, when a member 
 of a club has been relieved by the ballot from all fear of 
 giving personal offence, his individual interest is iden- 
 tical with the interest of the general body. The object 
 of the club is to get well-conditioned, pleasant men into 
 the club, and to keep ill-conditioned, unpleasant men 
 out of it. The object of the individual member is and 
 must be the same. But if this be affirmed of the 
 member of the club, how can it be denied of the parlia- 
 mentary elector, that, when protected by the ballot 
 from the seductive or coercive influence of other men, 
 his interest will be reduced to his interest as a citizen. 
 The interest of the citizens, as a body, or, to use the 
 equivalent but more common phrase, the interest of the 
 country, is to send to Westminster the most honest 
 and capable men that can be found. The interest of 
 the individual citizen is and must be the same. If, 
 when he is no longer liable to be corrupted or intimi- 
 dated, the elector can be supposed to have some other 
 interest, what is it ? We can form no conception of 
 any other, and Mr. Mill does not tell us of any other. 
 He tells us, indeed, that an elector may be foolish or 
 malicious, and have unworthy feelings within his breast ; 
 but the members of clubs are no more free from such 
 defects of character than parliamentary electors ; and 
 the one is not much more likely than the other to 
 sacrifice the permanent welfare of the body to which he
 
 218 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 belongs, to a morbid antipathy or an idle caprice. The 
 responsibility theory of Lord Palmerston and Mr. Mill 
 rests upon two propositions : first, that a parliamentary 
 elector owes a duty to his country ; and, second, that 
 he cannot be got to perform that duty, except under 
 public supervision. To the first, which is a truism, I 
 have nothing to object; but to the second I demur. 
 I maintain that if you place him by the ballot quite 
 beyond the reach of the improper control of other men, 
 you leave to the elector no intelligible interest, except 
 that of the body of which he is a member his interest 
 as a citizen. In other words, you bring his interest 
 into coincidence with his duty, in which case it is idle 
 to say that he will not perform his duty unless the 
 public eye is upon him. In other cases, when interest 
 and duty coincide, we leave men to themselves. Why 
 should we do otherwise in the case of an elector ? 
 
 For example, if there were any reasonable fear that 
 farmers, manufacturers, and merchants would conduct 
 their business for the purpose of reducing themselves to 
 poverty, it would be necessary, under pain of ruin to 
 the country, which would be the consequence of that 
 particular mode of carrying on productive industry, to 
 make them responsible to the public for the rational 
 employment of their capitals. If physicians were likely 
 to enter upon the practice of medicine with a view to 
 the extension and aggravation of diseases, it would be 
 necessary to make the medical profession responsible to 
 the public for a legitimate use of its acquired skill and 
 knowledge. Again, if there were any danger of Lord 
 Palmerston and his colleagues conducting their delibe- 
 rations with a view to the diminution of the dignity
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 219 
 
 and power of Great Britain, it might be necessary that 
 public reporters should be admitted to the meetings of 
 the Cabinet. We do not in fact subject these persons 
 to any such supervision ; we do not call upon the 
 merchant for his balance-sheet, the physician for his 
 prescriptions, or the minister for a report of the pro- 
 ceedings at Cabinet Councils, because we are satisfied 
 that they have no intelligible motive for exercising 
 their respective functions in a mode hurtful to the 
 public; indeed, that there is a motive of adequate 
 strength impelling them in the opposite direction. We 
 are aware that the only thing we have to fear from 
 them is defective judgment, and that publicity is no 
 cure for that. So, if there were any reasonable fear 
 that an elector, when protected from improper external 
 control, would deliberately choose a dishonest or foolish 
 man to make laws for him, it might be necessary to 
 make him responsible to the country for his vote. But 
 the elector, when so protected, has no conceivable in- 
 terest in voting for a dishonest or foolish man, and has 
 a certain obvious interest in voting for an honest and 
 wise man. Indeed, if it cofuld be made apparent to his 
 mind that candidate A. was, in one single particular, 
 however trifling, superior to candidate B., being equal 
 to him in everything else, we have no reason to doubt 
 that he would give a preference to candidate A. He 
 might deceive himself in regard to the comparative 
 merits of A. and B., but, as I have already observed, to 
 make a man responsible to other men will not convert 
 a bad judgment into a good one. The Palmerstonian 
 theory of electoral trusteeship seems, then, not to have 
 made its first step on very solid ground ; for it is by no
 
 220 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 means clear that it is necessary to make the elector a 
 trustee at all. 
 
 If a man has a certain plain definite interest in 
 acting for the public good, what do you gain by making 
 him responsible to other men, some of whom have the 
 same plain interest as himself, neither more nor less, 
 the rest having, by your own admission, selfish interests 
 which are not those of the public ? I do not deny that 
 the plain interest of an elector to vote for the best man 
 may be overruled by passion or caprice, but then the 
 men to whom you would make him responsible are as 
 subject as he is to those disturbing influences, often 
 much more so. If you could pick out the 500 best 
 and wisest men in the country, and erect them into 
 a model public for the special use of your electoral body, 
 well and good. Even then, however, it might be asked 
 how this public of good and wise men are to bring their 
 goodness and wisdom to bear upon the practical ques- 
 tion, which has to be resolved upon the hustings. Grant 
 that your model public is overflowing with wisdom and 
 virtue ; but the elector is waiting to know, not whether 
 he is to vote for wisdom and virtue against vice and 
 folly, but whether he is to vote for A. or for B. How 
 will your model public answer that question, except in 
 the very rare cases in which an admirable Crichton 
 stands opposed to a notorious knave or blockhead ? 
 They cannot answer it ; because in ninety-nine cases 
 out of a hundred wise and good as they are, they will 
 not all be of one mind in regard to the comparative 
 merits of A. and B. They will be reduced at last to 
 say to the elector, what it would have been wiser to 
 say at first : ' Judge for yourself. Vote for him whom
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 221 
 
 you believe to be the best man, and, if all other electors 
 do the same, there is nothing for us to do.' 
 
 This is no peculiarity of a parliamentary election ; 
 your model public would have the same difficulty in all 
 cases in which there is no certain criterion of right and 
 wrong ; in all cases in which the question at issue is a 
 matter of opinion. Poll the artists of Europe on the 
 question, which is the greater landscape painter, Turner 
 or Claude. What will you gain by talking to them of 
 their responsibility to the world of art ? Take a vote 
 upon the comparative merits of High Church and Low 
 Church, or of the Federals and Confederates, or upon 
 the question whether Smith, Jones, or Thompson is the 
 fittest man to represent Warwickshire ; what good will 
 you do by calling upon each individual voter to make 
 public declaration of his opinion ? These are matters 
 on which every man is entitled to use his own judg- 
 ment, and on which, whether the votes be take openly 
 or secretly, it is barely conceivable that, except from a 
 desire to please, or a fear to offend other men, a man 
 should vote one way when he thinks another. 
 
 The principle seems to be obvious. When you have 
 some plain, infallible test of right and wrong in the 
 matter, or some unerring insight into the motive, sub- 
 ject men to responsibility. If these things fail you 
 and in matters of opinion they always will fail you 
 leave a man to his own judgment. You can do nothing 
 but mischief by meddling with him, except to protect 
 his judgment from the interference of other men if such 
 interference is threatened. If you have reason to think 
 that he is capable of forming a sound judgment, do not 
 interpose between him and his judgment. If you think
 
 222 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 otherwise, do not call upon him for an opinion; in 
 the case of an electoral system, do not give him the 
 suffrage. 
 
 Sydney Smith, in his famous article against the 
 ballot, when he came to enforce by examples his doc- 
 trine of the responsibility of parliamentary electors, was 
 at once stopped short by the facts of the case. He was 
 reduced to the alternative of giving up his doctrine, or 
 of resorting, in support of it, to a supposition which has 
 no practical reality ; which may perhaps be true once 
 in ten thousand times, or twice in two hundred years, 
 but not much oftener. 
 
 ' Who,' says he, ' brought that mischievous profligate 
 villain into parliament ? Let us see the names of his 
 real supporters. Who stood out against the strong and 
 uplifted arm of power ? Who discovered this excellent 
 and hitherto unknown person ? Who opposed the man 
 whom we all know to be one of the first men in the 
 country ? Are these fair and useful questions to be 
 veiled hereafter in impenetrable mystery ? Is this sort 
 of publicity of no good as a restraint ? Is it of no good 
 as an incitement to, and a reward for, exertions ? Is 
 not public opinion formed by such feelings ? and is it 
 not a dark and demoralising system to draw this veil 
 over human actions ; to say to the mass be base and 
 you will not be despised ; be virtuous and you will not 
 be honoured ? ' 
 
 This is excellent declamation, and, if it did not rest 
 for its argumentative force upon an untrue description 
 of an English election, it would be excellent reasoning, 
 and would be a triumphant vindication of the principle 
 of responsibility as applied to parliamentary electors.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 223 
 
 If, when a voter comes up to the poll, the question as 
 between the candidates were a clear question between 
 wisdom and folly, between integrity and profligacy, 
 between patriotism and selfishness so clear that no 
 voter could possibly give his vote in ignorance that if 
 he voted for A. he was betraying his country, and if he 
 voted for B. he was discharging a plain, imperative duty, 
 the sense of responsibility however little it might be 
 needed could at all events operate only for good, that 
 is, against the villain and in favour of the good man. 
 The weak point of the argument is that it is founded 
 on a fiction. The author carries us with him to a scene 
 which is the creation of his fancy. He places us on 
 what he is pleased to describe as an English hustings. 
 There Vice stands opposed to Virtue, and there are 
 infallible signs by which to distinguish them. Vice is 
 elected, and carries his mischievous villany into Parlia- 
 ment. Higgins, the shoemaker who voted for the 
 villain, is held up to the indignant reproof of England, 
 and by that severe example the most beneficial effect 
 is produced for all time coming on the conduct of parlia- 
 mentary electors. Can anything be more unreasonable 
 and unjust ? Poor Higgins, who is a very respectable 
 and sensible man and acted with the best intentions, 
 was, when he gave his vote, entirely without suspicion 
 of the real character of this monster of profligacy, which 
 only developed itself at a later period ; and although 
 as it turns out a prodigy of wickedness was opposed 
 to a paragon of virtue at this particular election, there 
 are a thousand chances to one that a similar case will 
 not recur for the next hundred years. 
 
 Continuing, for the purpose of this discussion, the
 
 224 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 assumption of a public of wise and good men ; still, in 
 what way, I would ask, can it exercise any useful in- 
 fluence over a particular class of acts, unless those acts 
 are of such a kind as to bear upon the face of them their 
 good or evil tendency, or the motive which dictated 
 them ; unless, in short, it shall be easy to find, in 
 respect of them, ready and true answers to such ques- 
 tions as the following : Has he acted honestly or dis- 
 honestly ? Has he acted wisely or foolishly ? Has he 
 performed the duties attaching to the office which he 
 holds to the situation in which he has placed himself, 
 or to that in which accident has placed him justly or 
 unjustly, efficiently or inefficiently, with firmness or with 
 weakness ? There are cases innumerable of human con- 
 duct but voting at a parliamentary election is not one 
 of them in which such questions may be answered 
 without difficulty. You may find examples of them at 
 every step. 
 
 For instance, a million of cotton operatives, in con- 
 sequence of certain occurrences on the other side of the 
 Atlantic, over which neither they nor their employers 
 had any control, are suddenly deprived of their accus- 
 tomed means of subsistence. It is a clear case for a 
 national subscription to relieve their wants, and a sub- 
 scription is set on foot. Nine rich men out of ten at 
 once come forward with their contributions. The tenth, 
 who happens to be so constituted that his feelings of 
 compassion do not very easily get the better of his love 
 of money, is tempted to hold back ; but there is some- 
 thing in that long subscription-list which will infallibly 
 appear next week in a conspicuous part of the county 
 paper, containing the names of all the rich men in the
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 225 
 
 neighbourhood except hia own, which he has not the 
 courage to face. He yields to the force of public 
 opinion, and sends his fifty guineas. 
 
 A member of Parliament, having won his election 
 by an announcement of free-trade principles, goes up to 
 Westminster, and on the first occasion which presents 
 itself votes with the Protectionists. His dishonesty is 
 flagrant ; public opinion cries out upon him ; honest 
 men cut him. Slippery politicians are, by his example, 
 for ever discouraged from seeking to obtain seats in 
 Parliament on false pretences. 
 
 A foreign invasion is expected. Volunteers collect 
 from all quarters. A. B., a young man, muscular but 
 faint-hearted, is tempted to remain quietly at home ; 
 but the people of his village could not possibly be kept 
 in ignorance of his absence from the place where his 
 companions are about to risk their lives in defence of 
 their country. It is a greater trial to his courage to 
 brave the comments of his neighbours than to face the 
 enemy. He bows to the force of public opinion, and 
 hurries to the scene of action. 
 
 ' England expects every man to do his duty,' said 
 Nelson at Trafalgar. No man in the fleet thought of 
 asking, what is my duty? Every man in the fleet 
 knew that his duty was to brave every danger, to strain 
 every muscle in doing what his commanding officer 
 should order him to do. He knew too that, when the 
 battle should be over, those who had been by his side 
 would be able to say whether he had done his duty or 
 not. His public was the fleet. To him the difference 
 between the admiration and contempt of the fleet was 
 more than the difference between life and death. 
 
 Q
 
 226 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 Here are four cases of human conduct which speak 
 for themselves, on which all doubt as to what is right 
 and what is wrong is as impossible in the mind of the 
 actor as it is in the minds of those who will pass judg- 
 ment on his conduct ; in which, therefore, the beneficial 
 influence of public opinion is undoubted. 
 
 Take now the case of a juryman. The duty which 
 his country calls upon him to perform is not less im- 
 portant than that of the seaman in Nelson's fleet. But 
 what plain and certain criterion is there of the quality 
 of the performance ? A man is tried for murder. Public 
 feeling is strong against him. Eleven of the jurymen 
 are for conviction. The twelfth, having applied such 
 powers of mind as he possesses to a consideration of the 
 evidence, concludes that there is no sufficient ground 
 for a conviction, and finally brings round his eleven 
 brethren to his way of thinking. The man is acquitted ; 
 the public is indignant, and wise men are of opinion 
 that a murderer has escaped. Would it tend in the 
 smallest degree to prevent the recurrence of similar 
 failures of justice that his fellow-citizens should visit 
 with their anger the mistaken juryman ? Would it 
 increase the number of good verdicts and lessen the 
 number of bad ones, to make the twelve men discuss in 
 public the questions submitted to them ? Would a 
 sensible judge take occasion, from such an occurrence, 
 to lecture juries upon their public responsibilities ? To 
 what purpose lecture them, when every man of the 
 twelve knows perfectly well that the only point on 
 which it is possible for him to go wrong is on the point 
 of judgment, and that publicity or no publicity he is 
 as anxious to be right on that point as the judge can
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 227 
 
 be, or as the public can be ? To remind a juryman of 
 his responsibility to public opinion will not give him 
 the power of weighing evidence, if he does not possess 
 it already ; and let the verdict on some particular occa- 
 sion be what it may, neither judge nor public will be 
 able to prove conclusively that it was wrong. 
 
 If public opinion is to have any effect on human 
 conduct the public must be agreed what acts to approve 
 and what acts to condemn. There must be some prin- 
 ciple of agreement, some plain criterion of right and 
 wrong. If the case be that of a contested parliamentary 
 election, it must be made apparent to the moral sense 
 of the country, that to vote yellow is a praiseworthy act, 
 and to vote blue a blamable one, or vice versa. But if 
 one-half of the world believes blue to be wrong and 
 yellow to be right, and the other half believes yellow to 
 be wrong and blue to be right, how can the world give 
 a beneficial verdict in the matter, or any verdict at all ? 
 Public opinion in such a case may be aptly typified by 
 a jury, of whom six are for conviction and six for 
 acquittal. What moral authority has such a verdict ? 
 of what practical use is it ? An elector sets off for the 
 hustings to give his vote, the candidates being A. and 
 B. He is most anxious to secure the public approba- 
 tion for his conduct. On the way he debates the matter 
 with himself, thus : ' If I vote for A. the Tories will 
 applaud vociferously. If I vote for B. the gentlemen 
 of the Whig committee will shake me by the hand, and 
 the rest of the Whigs will smile approvingly. My own 
 strong belief is that A. is all to nothing the best man ; 
 but A. is a Protectionist, and although my worldly 
 interest undoubtedly lies in the direction of Protection,
 
 228 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 I am honest enough not to be led by worldly interest 
 to deviate from what I believe to be right. What shall 
 I do ? If I vote for B. I shall be praised for my dis- 
 interestedness, but my conscience will tell me that I 
 have not voted according to my real belief of the merits 
 of the candidates. If I vote for A. my vote will be 
 branded for its selfishness, and yet it will have been the 
 true, honest vote. Will any one tell me what I am to 
 do to satisfy my conscience at the same time that I 
 satisfy public opinion ? ' No ; nobody will tell him, 
 or can tell him ; nor will anybody ever find in his vote 
 the groundwork for a correct moral judgment of his con- 
 duct. It is mere folly to interfere between him and his 
 conscience. 
 
 A holder of the responsibility theory, as applied to 
 parliamentary electors, may perhaps retort upon me in 
 this way : ' You do not deny that a member of the 
 House of Commons should be made responsible to 
 public opinion : and yet he may be called upon to vote 
 on questions just as incapable of being answered by a 
 reference to some plain, incontestable criterion of right 
 and wrong as the question of the elector between a blue 
 and a yellow vote.' True ; but the act of the elector is 
 the one single act attaching to his office, which he is 
 called upon to perform on an average not more than 
 once in every two or three years ; whereas the supposed 
 act of the member of Parliament is only one of a vast 
 number and variety of acts, taking place from day to 
 day, and extending over a considerable period of time ; 
 and although, out of that long list of acts which make 
 up his parliamentary career, you might pick out single 
 acts from which it would be impossible to deduce any
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 229 
 
 accurate judgment of the skill or honesty with which he 
 has performed the duties of his office ; yet, if you passed 
 in review the whole of those acts, you would find no 
 such difficulty. If members of the House of Commons 
 were sent up to Westminster for the purpose of voting 
 upon this one question, and no other : ' Shall A. or B. 
 be Prime Minister of England ? ' there would except 
 on one ground be exactly the same reason for making 
 them vote secretly, and exactly the same absence of any 
 good reason for making them vote openly, that there is 
 in the case of the elector who has to choose between 
 M. and N. as member for Middlesex. That one ground 
 is this, viz. that the member of the House of Commons 
 is a representative of other men. The constitution of 
 the country intended that those who chose him should 
 have an opportunity, at certain recurring periods, of re- 
 considering their choice ; of re-electing him if they are 
 satisfied with his conduct, of substituting some other 
 person if they are not. His acts being the groundwork 
 of their choice, they must not be kept in ignorance of 
 those acts. Their function would become a nullity, and 
 the intention of the constitution would be frustrated, if 
 -he votes and proceedings in Parliament were kept 
 secret. If an elector were also chosen by a more numer- 
 ous body to represent them, the case of an elector would, 
 in this respect, be the same as that of a member of a 
 legislative assembly ; and under some Constitutions it 
 is so. The fact that in England it is not so is proof 
 sufficient that, by the theory of the British Constitution, 
 parliamentary electors are supposed to possess within 
 themselves the capacity and the motives requisite for 
 the proper performance of their one single function.
 
 230 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that, in principle, the 
 ballot would not operate in the same way and to the 
 same beneficial end in a representative assembly as at 
 a parliamentary election. The votes of electors are 
 not the only votes that may be bought and sold ; and 
 the ballot would as effectually obstruct the corrupt 
 practices of a minister as those of a rich candidate for 
 a seat in Parliament. A century ago, before the 
 virtuous example of the first William Pitt had made it 
 dishonourable in members of Parliament to hold their 
 votes at the disposal of the dispensers of the public 
 money, it might almost have been a question whether 
 the incontestable advantages of publicity were not too . 
 dearly bought, at the cost of that mass of political tur- 
 pitude, which it would have been possible, by means of 
 the ballot, to sweep from within the walls of Parliament. 
 But in the present condition of political morality in 
 England, which, looking with undisturbed complacency 
 at any number of corrupt bargains between candidates 
 and electors, shrinks with horror from a corrupt bargain 
 between a minister and a member of Parliament, the 
 case is different. Within the walls of Parliament the 
 evil of which secret voting is the specific remedy has, 
 in the present day, shrunk to dimensions, too small to 
 detract in any sensible degree from the advantages of 
 publicity ; whereas, on the hustings, the case is exactly 
 the reverse. There the advantages of publicity are, as 
 they always must be, too small to lessen, in any sensible 
 degree, the vast dimensions of that evil. It is as diffi- 
 cult to overrate the value of publicity in a representative 
 assembly, as it is to underrate its value at the polling 
 booth.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 231 
 
 The first and greatest use of publicity is to give 
 practical validity to the relation between elector and 
 elected : and. inasmuch as in England no such relation 
 exists between the general public and the parliamentary 
 voter, no such use is in that case to be derived from 
 publicity. To shut the doors of the House of Commons 
 upon the public is in truth to place 656 men in a situ- 
 ation of high trust, and to refuse to those whose duty 
 and privilege it is periodically either to continue them 
 in the trust or to discharge them from the trust, all in- 
 formation as to the mode in which they have executed 
 the trust. It is to restrict the choice of the con- 
 stituencies to untried men. It is to call upon con- 
 stituencies to choose, and to withhold from them the 
 knowledge without which they can scarcaly choose well. 
 It is to invest them with a political function, and to 
 deprive them of the means of performing it beneficially. 
 But if at the polling booth you should prohibit all in- 
 trusion into the secrets of the ballot box, you would not 
 be withholding information necessary for the proper per- 
 formance of a political function, for you have not con- 
 ferred any such function. You have not given to those 
 who might wish to penetrate that secret the power to 
 retain the name of one single elector on the registration- 
 list or to strike it off. At the point at which, in a 
 representative system, the relation of elector to elected 
 ceases, at that same point does the principal use of 
 publicity cease. At some point or other in the system 
 it must of necessity cease. 
 
 The second great use of publicity in a legislative 
 assembly is, that the political education of a people de- 
 pends upon it ; and upon the political education of the
 
 232 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 people under which term I include both governors and 
 governed depend the securities for the permanence of 
 the national welfare. When the doors of the Legislative 
 Chambers are closed to a people, or when all legislative 
 and administrative power is in the hands of a single 
 ruler, that state of things if it maintains itself un- 
 opposed as the normal condition of a country pre- 
 supposes, on the part of the people, an entire indifference 
 to their political institutions, and to the management 
 of the national concerns. It presupposes that they 
 are satisfied to be governed in any way in which it may 
 please their rulers to govern them ; and the virtues of 
 rulers can never be proof against such apathy on the 
 part of their natural and legitimate censors. All ex- 
 perience has shown that permanent, good government is 
 incompatible with indifference, and its necessary accom- 
 paniment, ignorance on the part of the people. The 
 people of Great Britain are perhaps the greatest poli- 
 ticians in Europe. The far greater part of what is said, 
 or done, or proposed to be done by their rulers, is laid 
 open to them ; and it is scarcely too much to say that 
 they are the best governed people in Europe. The 
 Turks know least and care least about the acts of their 
 rulers, and they are the worst governed of all the 
 peoples who lay claim to the name of civilised. 
 
 When the acts and words of rulers are laid bare to 
 the criticism of the entire people, the moral effect is as 
 beneficial to the ruled as to the rulers. The reports of 
 the proceedings of the British Parliament form the most 
 instructive work on practical politics in existence ; and 
 no man, whether he be a philosopher or a mechanic at 
 weekly wages, can read them in a serious and truthful
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 233 
 
 spirit, without becoming a wiser man and a better 
 citizen. The daily reading of those debates, in which 
 all opinions and interests find exponents, in which 
 everything that is noble and true, and every form even 
 of prejudice and selfishness, has its advocate and its 
 assailant, operates as a slow but sure check upon igno- 
 rance, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance. Popular 
 estimates both of men and measures are brought nearer 
 and nearer to the truth by that continuous stream of 
 discussion outside the walls of Parliament, which is 
 created and stimulated by the publication of those 
 debates. It is easy to find examples. Take the case 
 of the laws which regulate the labour of women and 
 children in factories. The attempt to legislate on that 
 subject was met at first by strong though unselfish 
 hostility : but it ended, under the influence of public 
 discussion, by being acquiesced in as beneficent and 
 necessary ; and of many of the greatest and best 
 measures of the present century the Reform Bill for 
 instance, Catholic Emancipation, and the Repeal of the 
 Corn Laws it has been the fate to be carried by de- 
 monstrations of opinion, which could never have ac- 
 quired the necessary strength under any system but one 
 which threw open the doors of Parliament to the public. 
 The qualities in rulers which form the best securities 
 for good government, integrity, moral courage, disinter- 
 estedness, devotion to public duties, are precisely those 
 which are especially fostered by the rewards which an 
 approving people have it in their power to bestow ; but 
 a people can neither reward nor approve unless the acts 
 and words of their public men are laid open before 
 them. Under that enduring ordeal of publicity the
 
 234 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 more showy qualities of a legislator, the mere power of 
 expression, dexterity in extempore reply, and the arts 
 of the ri etorician slowly but as surely lose ground, as 
 the higher qualities truthfulness, candour, precision of 
 mind, comprehensiveness gain ground in the popular 
 estimation. 
 
 Great and virtuous statesmen do, no doubt, like 
 comets, appear from time to time in countries in which 
 government is carried on under a veil ; but the only 
 possible rewards of statesmen in such countries the 
 pleasures, flatteries, and glitter of mere wealth and 
 power the material rewards, as contradistinguished 
 from the moral rewards which publicity places at the 
 disposal of a people tend in no degree to foster the 
 growth of such men. When they do appear, they 
 appear in spite of the political system of the country, 
 not, as in England, in consequence of it. 
 
 Whatever may be thought of the soundness of that 
 principle of government which is expressed in the 
 saying, ' For the people but not by the people,' it is quite 
 certain that no government will long continue impar- 
 tially to devote itself to the interests of all classes of the 
 people, high and low, without favour or exception, if it 
 is not carried on under the eye of the people. Of the 
 England of the present day it may with truth be said 
 that there is, within her shores, no class of persons, 
 however humble, whose welfare is not a subject of 
 frequent solicitude on the part of their rulers, and no 
 class in whom a frequent observation of that fact has 
 not produced a high degree of confidence in the excel- 
 lence of their government. The same could certainly 
 not have been said fifty years ago, and the change is
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 235 
 
 perhaps chiefly owing to the increased publicity of 
 parliamentary proceedings. The tendency of that 
 publicity is twofold, and it is as constant as it is 
 benetunai. ; it tends to strongmen the motives for exer- 
 tion and to raise the standard of excellence in the 
 minds of rulers, and it tends to diminish the incapacity 
 of the people to judge soundly of their qualities and 
 conduct. It would be idle to waste words in proving 
 that no effects analogous to those I have described 
 have been produced, or are capable of being produced, 
 by making public the votes of parliamentary electors. 
 To follow step by step the public career of a statesman 
 or the history of a legislative measure is an instructive 
 process even to a stupid man ; but what instruction 
 will the cleverest man extract out of a knowledge of 
 the individual votes at a contested election ? 
 
 If, however, you insist upon telling an elector that 
 he is a trustee who cannot with safety be left to his 
 own discretion and virtue in the execution of the trust, 
 you must in common consistency furnish him with some 
 rule of conduct. If you refer him to public opinion, 
 you must begin by telling him what you mean by the 
 public; of whom that body is composed, and what 
 steps he is to take in order to find out what they really 
 think about the rival candidates. There are certain 
 persons, with Lord Palmerston at their head, who talk 
 of the elector's responsibility to the country as though 
 the word country* were a mere synonym for a body of 
 men absolutely free from all the elements of internal 
 disagreement, bound together by one set of interests 
 and one set of principles, and possessed of one uniform 
 rule of conduct for the use of all applicants for inform a-
 
 236 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 tion or advice. And yet these same persons will tell 
 you that the country is made up of a multiplicity of 
 different interests, each of which is entitled to its fair 
 share of representation. Imagine the dreadful situation 
 of a strictly conscientious voter who goes up to the 
 poll at the Queensville election, burning with anxiety 
 to do his duty to his country. His duty to his country ! 
 What is his country ? The following are a few of its 
 component parts. There is the shipping interest and 
 the colonial interest; the agricultural interest, the 
 manufacturing interest, and the railway interest. 
 There is the Church and the Dissenters ; and there 
 are the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestants ; and 
 there is the old established Church of Scotland and the 
 Free Church of Scotland ; and the Irish tenants and 
 the Irish landlords ; and there are the direct-taxation 
 men and the indirect-taxation men, and half a hundred 
 other interests of less importance, which it would be 
 too long to enumerate. Think of the problem sub- 
 mitted to the mind of this unhappy man. His business 
 is to discover whether the most perfect adjustment of 
 all these discordant interests to the eternal principles 
 of truth, justice, and right will best be promoted by 
 voting for Sir Jasper Heaviside, the rich banker, or for 
 Mr. Plausible, the Under-Secretary of State for the 
 
 Department under Lord Paragon's administration. 
 
 When a right-minded man has such a problem as this 
 to resolve, is it not a refinement of cruelty to add to 
 his sufferings by talking to him, as Sydney Smith did, 
 about public responsibility and the obligation of doing 
 his duty to his country manfully and in the face of the 
 world ? Allow me to ask these gentlemen this ques-
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 237 
 
 tion : Why may not I, who am a simple man with my 
 own opinions, be allowed to use my own understanding, 
 and quietly vote for the man whom I believe to be the 
 most likely to make a good member of Parliament, 
 without control by, or responsibility to, other people, 
 who may not be as competent judges as I am ? ' No ! ' 
 I am told, ' you are a trustee. The public must be 
 allowed to judge of your conduct.' But what public ? 
 Is it the thirty millions of the census of 1861 ? or, if 
 only a part of the thirty millions, what part ? Is it 
 the entire adult population of the kingdom which is 
 to be my judge ; or only the adult males, the women 
 being thrown overboard ? or is it that part only of the 
 population called the manufacturing class I being a 
 member of that class ? or is it the class of non-electors, 
 my brother electors being supposed to be able to take 
 care of themselves ? or, finally, is it merely my own 
 little particular public of Queensville which is to be my 
 judge ? To that I should have no objection : but then, 
 if I succeed in satisfying the public of Queensville, 
 which happens to be the principal seat of the riband 
 manufacture, how do I satisfy the men of enlarged 
 economical views who would call this riband interest a 
 narrow or selfish interest ? In short, if I am to satisfy 
 the general public, how am I to know their wishes ? if 
 the manufacturing interest, what will the agricultural 
 interest say to it ? if the riband interest of Queensville, 
 what will political economy say to it ? 
 
 Many thousands of English electors ask to be pro- 
 tected by the ballot from the pressure of certain cor- 
 rupting and persecuting influences. No ; we are told, 
 your case is a hard one, but nothing can be done for
 
 238 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 you ; for the remedy you propose would throw you 
 open to a still more injurious influence, that of your 
 own inherent folly and wickedness. One thing you 
 must at all hazards be prevented from doing, and that 
 is to settle the question of your votes with your own 
 consciences and your own understandings. 
 
 1 Thirty years ago,' says Mr. Mill in the same chapter 
 of his work on representative government, from which 
 I have already quoted ' thirty years ago it was still 
 true that in the election of members of Parliament, the 
 main evil to be guarded against was that which the 
 ballot would exclude coercion by landlords, employers, 
 and customers. At present, I conceive, a much greater 
 source of evil is the selfishness or the selfish partialities 
 of the voter himself. A base and mischievous vote is 
 now, I am convinced, much oftener given from the 
 voter's personal interest, or class interest, or some mean 
 feeling in his own mind, than from any fear of conse- 
 quences at the hands of others ; and to these influences 
 the ballot would enable him to yield himself up free 
 from all sense of shame or responsibility.' 
 
 Mr. Mill treats the matter as though it were a 
 simple question between two sets of injurious influences, 
 from one or the other of which there is no escape ; a 
 question between the evil of a vote dictated by another 
 man, and the evil of a vote emanating from mischievous 
 baseness or selfishness existing within the breast of the 
 voter. The argument seems to say, that if, by secret 
 voting, you escape from one of these evils, by secret 
 voting you fall into the other ; that although the ballot 
 may give you the man's real vote, the real vote will be 
 good for nothing when you have got it. But surely
 
 VOTE EY BALLOT 239 
 
 the dictates of self-interest are not always mischievous. 
 A man's interest may be bound up with that of other 
 men. When the framers of a Constitution give the 
 suffrage to a people, they do so in the hope that it will 
 be exercised in accordance with an enlightened self- 
 interest ; that kind of self-interest which, when two or 
 more candidates are set before me for election to an 
 office of trust involving duties in the efficient perform- 
 ance of which I, in common with my fellow- citizens, 
 am personally interested leads me to give my vote to 
 the man whom I believe likely to perform them well, 
 in preference to the man whom I believe to be likely to 
 perform them less well. As an elector I have a per- 
 fectly clear intelligible interest in that preference ; an 
 interest which I understand myself and can explain to 
 others. If the duties of that office are generally well- 
 performed, I am a sharer with my fellow-citizens in the 
 benefits which wise and impartial legislation confers 
 upon a people ; if they are generally ill-performed, I 
 share in the injury which ill-considered or partial 
 legislation inflicts upon a people ; and I have a clear, 
 definite, palpable interest in contributing by my vote 
 to secure the first of these results and to prevent the 
 second of them. This is no vain illusion, and it is as 
 certain as anything in moral science can be that, in the 
 absence of counteracting motives and let Mr. Mill 
 remember that to destroy such counteracting motives is 
 the object and would be the effect of the ballot that 
 interest will determine my vote. It matters little what 
 we call it ; one man may call it patriotism, and another 
 selfishness ; but call it by what name we will, as the 
 determining principle of the conduct of parliamentary
 
 240 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 electors, such self-interest is that which all men who 
 really care for human progress will be anxious to foster, 
 it is that on which all rational theories of popular 
 representation are in reality founded. 
 
 I do not contend that all voters who give their 
 votes upon that sound and legitimate view of their inte- 
 rest will give them wisely ; some will and some will 
 not. That depends upon the intelligence of the voter. 
 What I do contend for is this, viz. that, amongst the 
 various forms of self-interest which determine the votes 
 of an electoral body supposing it not to be composed 
 of idiots this beneficial form is one of those upon 
 which practically if you will only protect the voter 
 from the selfish pressure of other people you may 
 the most surely rely. Mr. Mill, however, in the pas- 
 sage I have quoted, passes it over as though it had no 
 existence. 
 
 Now a few words with respect to mischievous sel- 
 fishness. Mr. Mill speaks of selfish partialities, base- 
 ness, personal interest, class interest, and mean feelings 
 in the voter's mind ; but there is a good deal of vague- 
 ness in these phrases. The mischievous kinds of self- 
 interest are in truth all included under one or other of 
 the two following heads. 
 
 1st. The interest of the individual man, apart from 
 any interests which he has in common with other 
 men. 
 
 2nd. His interest as a member of a class; the 
 class having interests opposed to those of the public 
 at large. 
 
 Now as regards the first of these ; will Mr. Mill tell 
 me what exclusive interest as an individual I can have
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 241 
 
 in voting for A. rather than B., except that I may hope 
 to secure the good will, or avert the ill will, of A. or 
 A/s supporters, in return for my vote? But secret 
 voting makes it impossible that they should ever have 
 conclusive proof that I did vote for him. If I give my 
 vote openly, he has that proof, and I may reasonably 
 hope that he will show, in some practical form, his 
 grateful sense of the support I have given him. The 
 ballot will effectually crush any such hope. Mr. Mill 
 will surely not contend that it is possible for me to 
 extract exclusive personal benefit out of any possible line 
 of general parliamentary conduct which A. may pursue, 
 except in so far as I am one of a class of persons to 
 whose class interests A. is known to be favourable. 
 
 Now as regards mischievous class selfishness. How 
 is a vote dictated by a selfish class interest likely to be 
 prevented by open voting ? Such vote, if it is unpopu- 
 lar with one portion of the public, will be just the 
 reverse with another. It will be applauded, not con- 
 demned, by that portion of the public with which I am 
 most directly and habitually brought into contact, and 
 to which I consider myself more particularly respon- 
 sible. If I am a cotton spinner, I associate habitually 
 with cotton spinners; if a farmer, with farmers; if a 
 silk-weaver, with silk-weavers. The praise of my own 
 people will weigh a thousand times more with me than 
 the dispraise of the rest of the world ; the more so that 
 the former will be near and clamorous, the latter dis- 
 tant and subdued. No one needs to be told what an 
 outcry a knot of men, great or small, will sometimes 
 make about the interests of their class ; and how seldom 
 they receive, at the hands of the general public, even 
 
 B
 
 242 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 the gentlest rebuke for their selfishness. The ballot, if 
 it were good for nothing else, would be good for a great 
 deal, if it weakened as it would do the power of sel- 
 fish cliques, to convert all the rest of the world into 
 mere props for the support of their separate class inte- 
 rests. Mr. Mill thinks that the sense of responsibility 
 has the best effect upon voters, and yet speaks of base 
 and mischievous votes given from class interests. But 
 what is responsibility, if it be not the being accountable 
 to a class ; a class greater or smaller, more or less 
 numerous? The little class interests are not more 
 mischievously selfish than the large class interests. 
 When the silk-weavers of Spitalfields clamoured for 
 protection, were they one whit more mischievously 
 selfish than the landlords, when they made their great 
 stand against free trade in corn ? The class interest of 
 the British shipowner ; is it less selfish than the class 
 interest of the London needlewoman ? What course of 
 conduct, according to Mr. Mill, ought a small farmer, 
 some twenty years ago, to have taken at the election of 
 an agricultural county, as between the candidates on 
 the protection-to-agriculture interest, and the candi- 
 dates on the free-trade interest ? To vote for the former 
 was to vote for a mischievous class interest of the 
 highest order of mischief; to vote for the latter was to 
 set at defiance all sense of responsibility to the only 
 public which to the voter was a practical reality. 
 
 I confess that under no system should I be much 
 alarmed at the prospect of electors voting from a ( mean 
 feeling in their own minds,' if by that phrase I may un- 
 derstand Mr. Mill to designate, not so much cases of 
 selfish interest, as cases of irrational caprice or preju-
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 243 
 
 dice : such cases as that of an elector who should vote 
 for a candidate because he was six feet high and his op- 
 ponent only five feet six, or to give Sydney Smith's 
 examples because his father knew the candidate's 
 grandfather, or because his second son is the candidate's 
 footman. Every one is entitled to have his own opinion 
 of the extent to which, in the serious business of life, 
 Englishmen are the slaves of such follies. If Sydney 
 Smith was right, and if no change for the better has 
 taken place, one can only lament the fruitlessness of all 
 that expensive machinery which has so long been at 
 work to promote the education of the people. But it 
 is useless to discuss the question. Without laying 
 open the breasts of some millions of people there is no 
 possibility of proving anything one way or the other ; 
 and in a country in which the upper class thinks itself 
 called upon to make a stand against the inroads of 
 democracy, it is idle to look for an impartial upper- 
 class estimate of lower-class virtue and good sense. 
 Let the irrational voters, however, be many or few, one 
 thing respecting them is certain, viz. that open voting 
 does not tend to diminish their numbers. The public 
 has no ground of judgment but the vote, and there is 
 nothing in the vote to indicate the irrationality of him 
 who gave the vote ; and, even if there were, you will 
 never sbame a fool out of his foolishness. If you would 
 cure him you must educate him. 
 
 No one denies the existence amongst men of the 
 defects and vices enumerated by Sydney Smith and 
 Mr. Mill : selfishness, envy, servility, the spirit of 
 tyranny, the spirit of revenge, irrational caprice, simple 
 stupidity. I will even admit the possibility of one 
 
 K2
 
 244 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 man in ten thousand having within his breast that 
 passion to which Sydney Smith gave the name of the 
 Simious passion the unprovoked desire to give pain 
 to others. I will add religious bigotry and national 
 jealousy. But what proof is there that these vices and 
 defects will in any important degree be restrained by 
 the publicity of the vote ? There is a preliminary 
 difficulty. Possibly it may be more apparent than 
 real, but the 2 anti-ballotists have passed it over alto- 
 gether. The public sentiment of a country is the sen- 
 timent of the people of that country; and even the 
 anti-ballotists will not contend that the entire body of 
 a people will be less tainted with vice and folly than a 
 portion of that people selected for its presumed supe- 
 rior virtue and intelligence. Is it then reasonable to 
 expect that the vices of the electoral body will be re- 
 strained by the sentiment of a public which is in a still 
 less degree exempt from those vices ? Possibly the 
 anti-ballotist may meet this objection with an arithme- 
 tical refutation after this fashion. The public, he may 
 say, consists of a certain number of persons. Let us 
 suppose one-tenth of them to be envious, one-tenth 
 foolish, one-tenth bigots, one-tenth ' simious,' and so 
 forth. Now although there will be in that public a 
 taint, say of bigotry, yet as nine-tenths of the whole 
 will not be bigots, there will be a great preponderance 
 of opinion against religious persecution, and the bigoted 
 elector will thus be shamed out of his bigotry. The 
 
 2 The responsibility for the invention of the word ballotist 
 rests with Sydney Smith. It is barbarous but convenient ; and 
 if one has the courage to print ballotist, one need of course not 
 boggle at anti-ballotist.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 245 
 
 same of the other vices ; each vice in succession being 
 compelled to hide its head on the hustings by an adverse 
 public sentiment of the arithmetical value of nine- 
 tenths of the whole. Or the anti-ballotist may get rid 
 of the difficulty in another way. He may say that he 
 attributes these defects to a small portion only of the 
 electoral body, and that, although the general public 
 may be tainted with similar defects in a certain pro- 
 portion, to the extent, say, of one-fourth, the remaining 
 three-fourths will be pure ; and that thus the compara- 
 tively small number of electors who might be disposed 
 to give way to their unworthy feelings or silliness on 
 the hustings will be kept right by fear of a public 
 opinion whose tone has been formed by the healthy 
 feelings of a majority of three to one. 
 
 I am not prepared to say that there may not be 
 some force in these supposed refutations of my prelimi- 
 nary objection, and I will therefore not insist upon it. 
 The other objections cannot, I think, be got rid of quite 
 so easily. For first, be it observed, these infirmities of 
 men are not all of one kind, some of them being moral 
 defects, and others defects of the understanding. Now 
 at a certain cost of time and trouble, men may be 
 educated out of defects of the understanding, but they 
 cannot, at a particular time and place, be shamed out 
 of them. The publicity of the vote will not only not 
 entirely neutralise irrational caprice, prejudice, incapa- 
 bility of reasoning, or silliness, but it will not do so in 
 any degree. The elector is wanting in intelligence. 
 Enlighten him, and you cure him ; and you can en- 
 lighten him as easily under one system of voting as 
 under another. Out of the moral defects of electors,
 
 246 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 their unworthy passions or feelings, more or less, you 
 may shame them, provided you can bring the sense of 
 shame to bear upon them at all. I say ' more or less,' 
 because some men are entirely unconscious that certain 
 of their feelings are unworthy. On a man afflicted 
 with that description of moral blindness you can pro- 
 duce no effect whatever. There are thousands of men 
 who, though the whole world should tell them they are 
 bigots or tyrants, will reply that their character is mis- 
 understood; that what the world calls bigotry is in 
 truth only a laudable firmness in the maintenance of 
 what is right and just. I need scarcely say that public 
 opinion will not move such men as these one inch from 
 their course. Even thoroughly selfish men are often 
 stone blind to their own selfishness. But let an anti- 
 ballotist, in proof of his theory of the virtue of public 
 opinion at elections, take the most favourable case that 
 it is possible for him to take, the case of a man who is 
 urged to a particular vote by a passion let us say 
 Sydney Smith's simious passion which he knows to be 
 utterly unworthy. You will perhaps shame him out of 
 his unworthiness if you can bring the sense of shame to 
 bear upon him at all. But how bring it to bear ? The 
 unworthy motive is his secret, which you have no power 
 to penetrate under any system of voting. The vote 
 does not bear upon the face of it the unworthiness of 
 the motive. If you could lay bare the man's breast, 
 and expose the unworthy motive to the indignant gaze 
 of his fellow-citizens, well and good ; but you cannot do 
 so. You suspect him of selfishness or malignity, and 
 you endeavour, on the strength of your suspicion, to 
 raise a cry against him ; but you have no proof ; no
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 247 
 
 man of good sense will join you in your cry. The 
 voter's reply to you will be this : I voted for A. because 
 I thought him the fittest man, and 471 other electors 
 have proved by their votes that they are of my way of 
 thinking. How will you answer that ? You may dis- 
 believe him, but how will you refute him ? He cannot 
 prove that he was actuated by a laudable regard for the 
 public interest, but as little can you prove that he was 
 actuated by a contemptible feeling of spite, whim, or 
 passion. 
 
 If Parliamentary elections could be reduced to plain 
 unmistakable cases of vice versus virtue as Sydney 
 Smith, in stress of argument, assumed them to be the 
 vote would carry with it the worthiness or unworthiness 
 of the voter, and public opinion would have some hold 
 upon him. Three times only in the course of the pre- 
 sent century a general election has mainly turned upon 
 questions which may be thought to make some slight 
 approach to such a case Catholic Emancipation, the 
 Reform Bill, and the Corn Law question ; but I will 
 venture to say that neither Mr. Mill nor Sydney Smith 
 would have thought themselves justified, even in these 
 extreme cases, in holding up to the reprobation of the 
 country as an unworthy person the elector who should 
 have given his vote against the popular view of those 
 questions. 
 
 For the purpose of this discussion the electoral body 
 may be divided into two classes the electors with a 
 conscience a conscience, that is, in regard to the right 
 performance of the electoral duty and the electors 
 without a conscience. With the latter class I have 
 already shown that the publicity of the vote will be in-
 
 248 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 operative to check unworthy feelings. Now the elector 
 with a conscience, he who has no unworthy feelings 
 whose predominant feeling is an anxious desire to do 
 his duty by his country, finds himself in this position : 
 He has his own opinion of the comparative merits of the 
 candidates, and if he is to follow that, there can be no 
 possible objection to his voting secretly. If he is to 
 follow in the wake of public opinion, he must be made 
 to vote openly. But there are two publics differing 
 widely from each other. To which of them is he to 
 apply for advice or assistance ? There is, first, the real 
 bond fide practical public which meets him wherever he 
 goes, and which consists of the people by whom he is 
 surrounded and with whom he habitually associates : a 
 manufacturing public, if he is a manufacturer ; an 
 agricultural public, if he is a farmer or squire ; the 
 Horse Guards and the army, if he is a military man ; a 
 public represented by the ' Times ' and the London clubs, 
 if he is a member of the aristocracy. This is one kind 
 of public. The other is that intangible public which is 
 coextensive with the people of the British Isles, which 
 has no interest but the true interest of the entire people 
 high and low, and holds a perfectly even hand between 
 classes, cliques, and interests. Now the anti-ballotist 
 is in this dilemma. If he refers his conscientious 
 elector to the former of these, the practical public of 
 flesh and blood, he is placing him under the guidance 
 of what he himself denounces as a selfish class interest ; 
 if to the latter, he is referring him to a mere abstrac- 
 tion, to a public whose verdicts are, in ninety-nine cases 
 out of a hundred, purely imaginary, and in the hundredth 
 almost as likely to be wrong as to be right. *
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 249 
 
 In a question like this, which is one of practical 
 politics, it is not enough arbitrarily to set up public 
 opinion before us as a kind of Sibyl, with her doors 
 open to the world, giving forth oracles of truth and 
 wisdom to all comers. We must go back to the ex- 
 periences of history, and look fairly in the face the acts 
 and utterances of the people who in times past have 
 acted the part of public, and not throw away the lessons 
 of that experience. I say of the people who have 
 ' acted the part of public,' because it has not unfrequently 
 happened that a violent and clamorous minority, with- 
 out understanding and without scruple, has been enabled, 
 through the inaction of a majority whom fear has de- 
 prived of all power of speech and motion, falsely to set 
 itself up as the embodiment of the opinion of a nation. 
 What was public opinion in the State of Mississippi in 
 the United States of America on a question of the repu- 
 diation of a State debt ? What is the worth of public 
 opinion in any country on questions affecting a rival 
 nation ? How did public opinion conduct itself in 
 London in 1780 and in the county of Warwick in 1791 
 on questions of religious toleration ? What is the value 
 of public opinion in that not very rare condition of the 
 public mind called a panic, political or commercial ? It 
 is precisely in cases like these, when public opinion is 
 mischievously wrong, that it is difficult to resist its 
 power. At periods of political excitement the practical 
 sense to an elector of the phrase ' responsibility to 
 public opinion ' is too often this : ' Go up to that polling 
 booth, and, at your peril, vote for any candidate but the 
 popular candidate.' This may work very well in a 
 period of a nation's history when the lower and middling
 
 250 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 classes are struggling to obtain equal justice from a 
 monarch or from an oligarchy who have been rendered 
 selfish by a long continuance of power, and I have no 
 fault to find with the effect of popular dictation in the 
 case of the Reform Bill or the repeal of the Corn Laws. 
 But as a permanent element in an electoral system I do 
 object to popular dictation ; and I ask how the matter 
 will stand at some future time, when, on questions of high 
 national honour and integrity of justice, for instance, 
 to the public creditor ; of equitable principles of taxa- 
 tion ; of the fair and impartial adjustment of a quarrel 
 with a foreign State ; of resistance to any tampering with 
 the sacred rights of property a wise and far-seeing 
 upper class may perchance be struggling to maintain 
 great social principles against the clamour of an un- 
 thinking multitude. Read the history of France during 
 the last ten years of last century, and say whether 
 public opinion, on those rare occasions when it does 
 acquire an irresistible power, may not as easily excite 
 as restrain the dangerous passions of a people. The 
 truth is that in times of political quiescence public 
 opinion says nothing to the elector ; in times of political 
 excitement it says too much, and too often says what is 
 
 i/ / 
 
 wrong. In times of excitement the Sibyl is too apt to 
 lose her head ; in ordinary times too apt to go to sleep. 
 There is one point upon which it is essential to a 
 right understanding of this subject, that the open- voting 
 men and the secret-voting men should understand one 
 another ; and, strange to say, even Mr. Mill has done 
 nothing to clear up that point. How far does Mr. Mill 
 think that the function of public opinion should extend ? 
 Does he desire that public opinion should merely assist
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 251 
 
 the judgment of the voter, or that it should supersede 
 his judgment ? If the former, the ballotists and he are 
 of one mind ; if the latter, they are at issue ; for the 
 publicity of the vote is as necessary for the latter pur- 
 pose as it is unnecessary for the former. For example : 
 Mr. Mill says that ' the opinions and wishes of the 
 poorest and rudest class of labourers may be very useful 
 as one influence among others on the minds of the 
 voters as well as on those of the Legislature.' In one 
 sense, and a very important sense, this is true. It is in 
 the highest degree useful that the Legislature, and in a 
 less degree that Parliamentary electors, should know what 
 the wishes and opinions of all classes of the people really 
 are, let those wishes and opinions be what they may, 
 be they wise or be they foolish. The man who has the 
 good of the people at heart, whether he be legislator 
 or elector, will be materially assisted in his beneficent 
 purpose by that knowledge. But the knowledge of 
 another man's wishes, as an aid to your judgment in 
 deciding what is best for him and his fellow-citizens, is 
 a very different thing from the overruling influence of 
 his wishes over your conduct impelling you, right or 
 wrong, in the direction of those wishes or opinions. If 
 the beneficial operation of public opinion is,' in Mr. 
 Mill's view of the matter, limited to the first of these 
 things, the publicity of the vote at elections is not 
 needed. An elector can use his eyes and ears and 
 understanding as effectually in making himself ac- 
 quainted with the prevalent feelings and opinions of the 
 various classes of the community whether he gives his 
 vote at the polling-booth openly or secretly. If Mr. 
 Mill goes beyond this, and thinks that it is necessary
 
 252 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 to influence the conduct of the voter independently of 
 his judgment, then, no doubt, the control of publicity 
 is necessary ; but in that case it will also be necessary 
 to show that, in point of morality or intelligence, some- 
 thing will be gained by that control. Mr. Mill must be 
 able to say of his poor labourer what Madame Pernelle 
 said of Tartuffe : 
 
 Et tout ce qu'il controle est fort bien control^. 
 
 But surely no one will seriously contend that in any 
 country in which the representative system is not an 
 imposture the average honesty and intelligence of the 
 electoral body is not superior to that of the community 
 at large, in other words, to that of a body made up of 
 electors and non-electors. Nor will any one seriously 
 maintain that it is desirable to set up an inferior intelli- 
 gence for the purpose of overruling the decision of a 
 superior one, or a lower standard of morality to super- 
 sede the decision of a higher standard. 
 
 It is very desirable that the friends of the ballot 
 should make it clearly understood that the language 
 which they would put into the mouth of the electoral 
 body is this : ' We are most anxious to know what you 
 say, and think, and wish, and we are entirely opposed to 
 all systems which can impede free discussion between 
 us and you, whether you be landlords, or master manu- 
 facturers, or rich customers whether you be operatives 
 or agricultural labourers whether you come before us 
 as representing the non-electors, or in whatever capacity 
 you come before us, or be you what you 'may ; but dis- 
 cussion is not compulsion, and we object in the 
 strongest way to be compelled, directly or indirectly,
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 253 
 
 morally or materially, whether by appeals to our 
 cupidity or appeals to our fears, whether by bribes of 
 worldly gain or threats of worldly loss, or threats of 
 moral censure, to act upon your opinion when it happens 
 to run counter to our own. We claim the right to 
 decide for ourselves after having heard all that is to be 
 said on all sides. If you can show, and more particu- 
 larly if you, the non-electors, can show, that, on the 
 whole, your judgment is more to be relied upon than 
 ours, that may be a good reason for taking the suffrage 
 from us and giving it to you ; but it can be no reason 
 for depriving us of our free choice so long as the 
 suffrage is not withdrawn from us.' 
 
 According to Mr. Mill, there are two distinct poli- 
 tical functions a superior and an inferior. He speaks 
 of the indirect influence of those who have not the 
 suffrage over those who have, deriving its practical 
 efficacy from the publicity of the vote, as a minor 
 function which may beneficially be exercised by day 
 labourers whom it would not be safe to entrust with 
 the superior function, that of the suffrage. But, if by 
 this minor political function of day labourers is meant 
 something more than liberty to speak out what they 
 think, and feel, and wish so freely and openly, that the 
 rest of the world electors included cannot choose but 
 hear what they say ; if Mr. Mill means something more 
 than this, and includes in this minor function a power 
 which, whether direct or indirect, virtually determines 
 the vote by some process other than that of convincing 
 the understanding of the voter, then I say that there is 
 no substantial difference between the two functions. 
 The day labourer, when he exercises his minor function,
 
 254 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 is in truth exercising the power of a voter just as much 
 as if his name were on the register. Either the influence 
 of which Mr. Mill approves is intended to operate simply 
 and exclusively on the judgment of the elector, in which 
 case it will not be affected by this or that mode of 
 voting ; or it is intended to operate on his vote inde- 
 pendently of his judgment, in which case the possession 
 of that influence is equivalent to the possession of the 
 vote, and it would be better to give in name what is 
 possessed in substance. One thing only can make it 
 desirable that the non-elector should exercise over the 
 elector an influence greater than that which arises from 
 obtaining a fair hearing for all that he may have to say 
 for himself and his class, and that thing is his being 
 wiser and better than the elector ; and surely this gives 
 him an undeniable claim to the suffrage. 
 
 I quite admit with Mr. Mill, that it is undesirable to 
 give to the least educated class in the community an in- 
 fluence in the Legislature to which the superior numbers 
 of that class would give dangerous predominance ; but 
 this in no way detracts from the force of the argument, 
 that labouring men, if they are capable of exercising a 
 useful control over the actual possessors of the suffrage, 
 are themselves worthy of the suffrage. The danger 
 arising from their superior numbers may be a good 
 ground for giving them political power in limited 
 quantity, but it cannot be a good ground for with- 
 holding it altogether, if they are fit to exercise it well. 
 It might be wrong, for instance, to give to every labour- 
 ing man a vote, but it might not be wrong to give to 
 every six labouring men the right to constitute one of 
 the six an elector.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 255 
 
 But Mr. Mill contends that there is another advan- 
 tage in open voting. 3 He thinks that the publicity of 
 the vote will operate as an aid to truth ; that fear of 
 censure by those whose opinions are opposed to his 
 will lead a man to take extraordinary pains to make 
 sure of the soundness of his own views. With a tho- 
 roughly conscientious man, whose sole object is the truth, 
 a knowledge of the fact that other men disagree with 
 him will have that effect undoubtedly ; but it is not so 
 clear that the cause of truth will be promoted by the 
 necessity which publicity will impose upon him of 
 defending his opinion against their censure. He reasons 
 thus with himself : ' Nine men out of ten seem to be 
 against my view of this matter ; I cannot reasonably 
 assume that they are not as capable of judging as I am; 
 the presumption, therefore, is that I am wrong, and I 
 must carefully reconsider the grounds of my opinion.' 
 Accordingly, he sits down and works out the question 
 once more from beginning to end. Now, in the pro- 
 
 s ' It is a very superficial view of the utility of public opinion 
 to suppose that it does good only when it succeeds in enforcing 
 a servile conformity to itself. To be under the eyes of others 
 to have to defend oneself to others is never more important 
 than to those who act in opposition to the opinion of others, for 
 it obliges them to have sure ground of their own. Nothing has 
 so steadying an influence as working against pressure. Unless 
 when under the temporary sway of passionate excitement, no 
 one will do that which he expects to be greatly blamed for, 
 unless from a preconceived and fixed purpose of his own, which 
 is always evidence of a thoughtful and deliberate character, and, 
 except in radically bad men, generally proceeds from sincere 
 and strong personal convictions.' Considerations on Representa- 
 tive Government, by John Stuart Mill, p. 200.
 
 256 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 secution of this task of re-examination, one understands 
 perfectly how the prospect of having to defend his 
 opinion against that of other men if that is painful to 
 him should give him a bias in favour of their conclu- 
 sions, and a wish to discover arguments which may 
 justify him in abandoning his own ; but this is an effect 
 unfavourable, not favourable, to the discovery of the 
 truth. If that prospect is not painful to him, it will 
 have no effect upon his mind one way or the other. 
 The conscientiousness of the conscientious man will no 
 doubt go far to counteract any bias unfavourable to 
 truth, arising from fear of public censure. But nine 
 men out often especially in the political world are not 
 so perfectly conscientious as to be proof against all con- 
 siderations except the pure love of truth. The men are 
 not few in number whose conscientiousness will make 
 but a poor struggle against the disinclination which 
 they feel to be put upon their defence in matters of 
 opinion. A man in a minority is always subject to 
 more or less of persecution on the part of the majority ; 
 and many a man, in the investigation of a question of 
 morals or politics, will give a little innocent twist to his 
 understanding, just sufficient to turn it into a direction 
 likely to lead to conclusions which will secure him 
 against what is painful to him. I do not deny that 
 there are in the world both pure lovers of truth and 
 men with a passion for contradiction, but they are the 
 exception. In general, if you tell a man that the public 
 is against him, you will make him rather seek for argu- 
 ments to justify him in a change of views, than make 
 him sit down to re-examine the subject in a perfectly 
 impartial spirit.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 257 
 
 Mr. Mill admits the evil of bribery and of coercion, 
 whether by landlords, employers, rich customers, trades 
 unions, or mobs ; but he thinks there is a greater evil 
 still, the inherent folly and selfishness of the voter. But 
 let me ask these questions : Granting the existence of 
 the folly and selfishness, are they not in a great degree 
 the product of bad political training? of evil habits 
 created by the law ? Are they not the natural fruit of 
 those various baneful influences which I have enume- 
 rated ? and is it not obvious that the first step to honesty 
 and intelligence in the matter of vote-giving must be 
 the independence of the voter ? What we have been 
 doing under our system of open voting is this, we 
 have been creating and strengthening in a large propor- 
 tion of our voters the habit of regulating their votes by 
 a variety of considerations, which differing from each 
 other in certain respects have yet all of them this one 
 property in common, viz. that they are all entirely 
 foreign to the one great consideration by which, on any 
 intelligible principle of political morality as applied to 
 the conduct of an electoral body, the voter ought to be 
 guided. The practical questions which, by our system 
 of open voting, we force upon many thousands of our 
 electors are of this kind. Can it be necessary that, for 
 the sake of one single vote, I should give offence to a 
 good landlord ? Can I afford, in a manner which occurs 
 only once every two or three years, to lose a good 
 customer ? Is it reasonable to expect that I should, 
 under any circumstances, run the risk of having to leave 
 a comfortable home and to look out for a new master ? 
 Why, upon a view of a subject which after all may be 
 mistaken, should I set at defiance a violent mob or a 
 
 S
 
 258 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 pitiless trades union committee, which have it in 
 their power to persecute or annoy me ? Why may I 
 not give my family a number of little comforts which 
 will make them happy by accepting ten pounds from a 
 rich man who will not miss the money, who thinks him- 
 self obliged by my acceptance of it, and who, after all, 
 may make as good a member of Parliament as his op- 
 ponent ? To leave the voter exposed to the influence of 
 such considerations as these is, in effect, to shut out 
 from him the one consideration which the law should 
 endeavour, by every means in its power, to force upon 
 him. It is practically to forbid him to ask himself the 
 one question which it is his duty to ask ; this question, 
 namely, ' Which of these candidates, from what I know 
 of them or have heard of them, do I think most likely 
 to perform important public duties honestly, wisely, and 
 diligently ? ' 
 
 There is no more superficial view of this subject 
 than that which overlooks the indirect effects of electoral 
 coercion ; which assumes that no harm is done so long 
 as no tenant at will has received notice to quit, so long 
 as no steady workman has been dismissed from his em- 
 ployment. These are serious evils, but they are small 
 as compared with the great evil of all, habitual sub- 
 mission to degrading influences. Mr. Mill thinks that 
 the habit of voting at the bidding of an employer or a 
 landlord has diminished in the course of the last thirty 
 years. Perhaps so ; possibly the act of bidding is no 
 longer necessary. There are many forms of coercion in 
 the world which, by long exercise on the one side and 
 submission on the other, have become so well established 
 that the announcement of the master's will is no longer
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 259 
 
 needed. Is it the fact that at elections in England 
 tenants at will vote less universally than they did thirty 
 years ago for their landlord's candidate ? If not, it is 
 perhaps the habitual subserviency of the voters which 
 conceals from us the reality of the landlord's power. 
 None but a fool will command or even suggest degrading 
 acts of obedience to his will, if experience has proved 
 to him that the disposition to dispute his will no longer 
 exists. If the voters are as subservient as ever, they 
 are as much as ever the tools of other men ; as far 
 removed as ever from the first step in the process of 
 becoming honest and intelligent electors. No man who, 
 in some particular matter, acts in habitual obedience to 
 another man, will ever acquire the habit of forming a 
 judgment of his own in that matter ; will ever acquire 
 the self-respect and mental strengthening created by 
 that habit. If he feels the obedience as a degradation, 
 the subject becomes hateful to him ; if he does not so 
 feel it, it is indifferent to him. In neither case will he 
 ever arrive at that frame of mind which would lead him 
 to look upon the act which he performs at the polling- 
 booth as the discharge of an important public duty. 
 We may talk as we will about an elector being a trustee, 
 but, so long as he remains the contented mouthpiece 
 of another man, the trust is a farce and the trustee an 
 impostor. Having invested men with the privilege to 
 choose their own rulers, having told them that they 
 owe it to their country to make an honest and intelli- 
 gent choice, can anything be imagined more unjust and 
 irrational than to refuse to them that protection without 
 which they are unable to act upon their own judgment ; 
 and then, when they have sunk into a state of habitual 
 
 s 2
 
 260 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 indifference, to argue from that condition of moral de- 
 gradation, which is the work of our own hands, that they 
 are too base or stupid to be trusted with irresponsible 
 power ? It is the reasoning of the slave owner. By 
 sheer violence he imposes upon his victims, generation 
 after generation, a system which consolidates their 
 moral and intellectual debasement, and then argues that 
 they are an inferior race, incapable of freedom. 
 
 ' The Radicals,' says Sydney Smith, ' praise and 
 admit the lawful influence of wealth and power. They 
 are quite satisfied if a rich man of popular manners 
 gains the votes and affections of his dependants; but 
 why is not this as bad as intimidation ? ' 4 Whether 
 the lawful influence of wealth and power is as bad as 
 intimidation which may with great propriety be 
 described as the unlawful influence of wealth and 
 
 4 The passage continues as follows : ' The real object is to 
 vote for the good politician, not for the kind-hearted or agree- 
 able man ; the mischief is just the same to the country, whether 
 I am smiled into a corrupt choice or frowned into a corrupt 
 choice ; what is it to me whether my landlord is the best of 
 landlords or the most agreeable of men ? I must vote for Joseph 
 Hume, if I think Joseph more honest than the Marquis. The 
 more mitigated Radical may pass over this, but the real car- 
 nivorous variety of the animal should declaim as loudly against 
 the fascinations as against the threats of the great.' 
 
 Whatever it may be reasonable to expect of the carnivorous 
 Radical, no one has a right to expect that the logical variety of 
 the animal should trample upon logic by repudiating his own 
 principles. The logical variety is a great friend to argument, 
 discussion, persuasion ; the more fascination the better, provided 
 the fascination, if it fails to fascinate, is not followed up by 
 something of greater practical efficacy.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 261 
 
 power is a question which I will discuss presently ; 
 but of this there can be no question, that the latter is 
 an evil, and that you may prevent it ; and that the 
 former, whether an evil or a good, you cannot prevent. 
 It may be as injurious to me that an artful scoundrel, 
 taking advantage of my compassionate nature by some 
 lying story of undeserved distress, should wheedle me 
 out of ten pounds, as that a member of the swell mob 
 should pick my pocket of the same sum ; but that 
 would be a very bad reason for not trying to put down 
 pickpockets. It may be as hurtful to the country that 
 my landlord should, by irresistible charm of manner, or 
 by arguments of which I am not clever enough to detect 
 the fallacy, induce me to vote for the least good of the 
 three candidates at the county election, as that he 
 should drive me so to vote, by threatening, in the 
 event of my refusal, to turn me out of my farm ; but 
 that is a very bad reason for maintaining in the hands 
 of landlords a power of punishment which it is admitted 
 that they ought not to possess, and which the law may 
 easily take from them. 
 
 But this phrase, ' the lawful influence of wealth 
 and power,' suggests a topic the importance of which, 
 in its bearing on the question of open or secret voting, 
 it is difficult to overrate. Sydney Smith, in the passage 
 I have quoted, in effect asks whether the mischief to 
 the country is not just the same, whether the voter is 
 smiled into a bad choice or frowned into a bad choice. 
 My answer is, that the mischief lies neither in the smile 
 nor in the frown, but in the power which open voting 
 gives to the landlord whether in the first instance his 
 wishes have been urged by persuasion or by menace
 
 262 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 to enforce those wishes by the infliction of punishment. 
 Take away the power of punishment and we object as 
 little to the frowns as to the smiles. Indeed, his 
 frowns he will not waste upon us ; and as for his smiles, 
 they will always be welcome to us, as the fitting accom- 
 paniments of an appeal to our understanding or our 
 good feelings. All we ask is to be placed by the law 
 in a position to be able, with safety to ourselves, to 
 disregard all attempts to drive us into a choice which 
 is not ours. 
 
 In another passage 5 of his famous article, Sydney 
 Smith argues on the opposite supposition, viz. that the 
 
 5 ' But if landlords could be prevented from influencing their 
 tenants in voting, by threatening them with the loss of farms ; 
 if public opinion were too strong to allow of such threati, 
 what would prevent a landlord from refusing to take as a 
 tenant a man whose political opinion did not agree with hig 
 own ? What would prevent him from questioning, long before 
 the election, and cross-examining his tenant, and demanding 
 certificates of his behaviour and opinions, till he had, according 
 to all human probability, found a man who felt as strongly as 
 himself upon political subjects, and who would adhere to those 
 opinions with as much firmness and tenacity 1 What would 
 prevent, for instance, an Orange landlord from filling his farms 
 with Orange tenants, and from cautiously rejecting every 
 Catholic tenant who presented himself plough in hand 1 But if 
 this practice were to obtain generally, of cautiously selecting 
 tenants from their political opinion, what would become of the 
 sevenfold shield of the ballot 1 Not only this tenant is not 
 continued in the farm he already holds, but he finds, from the 
 severe inquisition into which men of property are driven by the 
 invention of the ballot, that it is extremely difficult for a man 
 whose principles are opposed to those of his landlord to get any 
 farm at all.' Works of Sydney Smith, vol. ii. p. 312.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 263 
 
 ballotists are enemies, not friends, to the lawful influ- 
 ence of wealth and power. For he asks us, in a tone 
 of triumph, ' What would become of the sevenfold 
 shield of the ballot,' if the landlords were driven in self- 
 defence to select tenants for their political opinions ; if 
 Orange landlords were to fill their farms with Orange 
 tenants, ' cautiously rejecting every Catholic who should 
 present himself plough in hand ' ? Our answer is, that 
 the proceeding he describes would be a perfectly legiti- 
 mate exercise of landlord power, and that we have not a 
 word to say against it. We object to one thing ? and 
 to one thing only, viz. the coercion which practically 
 deprives the voter of the right of private judgment. 
 By all means let Orange landlords surround themselves 
 with Orange tenants, and Catholic landlords with 
 Catholic tenants, and when this has been done, so far 
 from wishing to make the Orangeman vote for the 
 Catholic, or the Catholic for the Orangeman, this is 
 precisely the kind of dishonesty which, by the ballot, 
 we wish to prevent. If landlords would only take the 
 trouble to surround themselves with dependants of their 
 own way of thinking in politics, no sensible man could 
 possibly object to it. They might not get their land 
 very well farmed, but politically the arrangement would 
 be neither immoral nor inconvenient. What we find 
 fault with is that the landlord takes no trouble about 
 the matter ; that he puts upon his estate the best farmer 
 he can find, without any reference to his political 
 opinions, and then avails himself of the power which 
 he derives from the ownership of the land to make his 
 new tenant the mere mouthpiece of his political opinions 
 or tool of his political interests. If rich and powerful
 
 264 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 men would only agree to surround themselves with 
 their own bond fide political friends, and never attempt 
 to coerce or corrupt those who are not so, the agitation 
 of the ballot would cease at once. 
 
 But we go further than this. Not only do we not 
 object to a Catholic landlord letting his farms to 
 Catholic tenants, but we give him full leave, on one 
 condition, to use all his powers of persuasion and argu- 
 ment to bring over his Protestant tenant, if he has one, 
 to his own way of thinking. That condition is that he 
 will take the trouble to make it clear to that Protestant 
 tenant, beyond all possibility of mistake, that persuasion 
 is not to be followed up by coercion that, on the day 
 of election, his vote is to be his own. Persuasion, argu- 
 ment, free discussion are the main elements of that law- 
 ful influence of the upper class over the lower which 
 we would foster, not repress. But we must be allowed 
 to point out what we mean by lawful influence, and 
 what by unlawful ; for by including them both under a 
 common name, and attributing to us, in this way, a 
 hatred of both, the views we really hold have not unfre- 
 quently been misrepresented. 
 
 There is an influence which may be properly de- 
 scribed as the influence of a man over other men, who 
 happen to stand to him in some relation of life which 
 gives to him a power over their worldly condition ; a 
 power of such a kind that it enables him to raise them 
 or to lower them in the scale of worldly prosperity, 
 sometimes in a degree which may, to the unfortunate 
 man so acted upon, make the difference between a com- 
 fortable subsistence and destitution ; at other times in 
 a degree represented by the possession or non-possession
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 265 
 
 of ten pounds or ten shillings. This influence is the 
 influence of a landlord over his tenant at will, whom he 
 can, if he pleases, eject from his farm ; of the employer 
 over his workman, whom he can, if he pleases, send 
 forth upon the world to seek a new master and a new 
 home ; of the rich or noble customer over the trades- 
 man, from whom he or she can, if he or she pleases, 
 withdraw custom, or patronage which brings custom. 
 It is the influence of the trades union, which can 
 enter upon a course of petty persecution against a dis- 
 sentient from the views of the society. It is the influ- 
 ence of the mob, which can persecute any man within 
 its reach by any one or more of those weapons of per- 
 sonal annoyance which are at the disposal of mobs. It 
 is the influence of the tempter who comes to a man with 
 gold, or some equivalent of gold, to filch from him his 
 honesty and self-respect. The advocates of the ballot 
 have over and over again explained that it is their object 
 to protect the elector from such influences as these, and 
 from such as these only, and they contend that the ballot 
 will be effectual for that purpose. 
 
 There is another and a very different kind of influ- 
 ence against which no true and intelligent friend of the 
 ballot ever uttered a word. Every advocate of secret 
 voting, who is not distressingly ignorant of the prin- 
 ciples of representative government, looks with hope to 
 the extension, and with fear to the diminution, of this 
 kind of influence ; for it is the natural, legitimate, bene- 
 ficial influence of more educated over less educated men ; 
 of strong over weak minds; of earnestness and high 
 principle over indifference and laxity. It is essentially 
 a moral as contra-distinguished from a worldly influ-
 
 266 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 ence ; it addresses itself to the understandings and 
 moral principles of men, and not to their interests. If 
 it did not exist already it would be necessary to create 
 it. But it does exist under all systems ; only, under a 
 system of open voting it is counteracted by those other 
 noxious influences of which I have spoken. It makes 
 itself felt through a variety of channels ; through the 
 press, by example, by free discussion and interchange 
 of thought. Even if the press were confined to news- 
 papers, the writer in a newspaper is often unconsciously 
 exercising, over three-fourths or more of his readers, 
 the influence of a superior over an inferior mind. The 
 practical adherence to right principles by magistrates, 
 members of parliament, official men, professional men, 
 and private persons in the business of their respective 
 callings and in the every-day transactions of life, being 
 matter of observation to persons of all classes in life 
 who are not blind to what is passing around them, is a 
 very effective form of the moral influence, the influence 
 by way of example. The most important of all, perhaps, 
 is that which arises from discussion and interchange of 
 thought between men of the same class or of different 
 classes in life ; for the vigorous and well-regulated will 
 in nine cases out of ten unconsciously often to both 
 carry with it the less vigorous and less well-regulated 
 mind. Let the selfishness or perverseness of a man be 
 what it may, to a considerable extent it will be coun- 
 teracted by these moral influences which will operate 
 within his breast unknown to others, sometimes almost 
 unknown to himself. The making a man, when he 
 votes at an election, speak out his vote, will not increase 
 them, the making him put his vote into a box will not
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 267 
 
 diminish them. The most determined anti-ballotist 
 will not tell me that the ballot will tend in any degree 
 to destroy an effect, whether favourable or unfavourable 
 to a particular man or a particular cause, which has 
 been produced upon my mind by the representations 
 of rival canvassers, by conversation with my landlord 
 or my next-door neighbour, by leading articles in the 
 county papers, by my knowledge of the estimation in 
 which a candidate is held in the neighbourhood, or by 
 my own observation of his qualities. No system of 
 voting that man can devise will destroy the effect of 
 these things, but it may be counteracted by a system 
 which enables certain persons, who have interests of 
 their own to serve, to drive me or to tempt me to act 
 against my own judgment. My conduct is determined 
 in a certain degree by these moral influences ; in what 
 degree it shall be so determined must depend partly on 
 the amount of protection which you will give me against 
 the corrupting and persecuting influences. 
 
 In so far as rich and powerful men are better and 
 wiser than their inferiors, their moral influence will be 
 beneficial, and to this extent therefore we may properly 
 apply to it Sydney Smith's designation of the lawful 
 influence of wealth and power, as contra-distinguished 
 from the unlawful influence of wealth and power, bribery 
 and intimidation. In what exact degree and in what 
 precise respects rich and powerful men are better or wiser 
 than their inferiors is a question which I cannot under- 
 take to answer, but there is a fair presumption that, 
 on those important subjects which are connected with 
 Government and the management of the national con- 
 cerns, they are wiser than the average of their fellow-
 
 268 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 citizens, and, if so, quite capable of giving wholesome 
 advice on such subjects to the electoral body. That 
 presumption rests upon the fact that they have had more 
 leisure than their inferiors to acquire knowledge, and a 
 greater command of good instructors, whether in the 
 shape of books or men, and that their attention has been 
 more closely and particularly directed to subjects con- 
 nected with a career in life to which their superior rank 
 naturally leads them to aspire. But there are two things 
 which must not be forgotten : first, that of the highly 
 educated class a large proportion are neither wealthy 
 nor powerful ; and secondly, that the moral influence of 
 educated men is, under the open voting system, weak- 
 ened not strengthened by the possession of wealth and 
 power. Take two men capable, in exactly equal degrees, 
 of exercising a purely moral influence over the minds of 
 electors, and assume the one to be a wealthy landowner 
 and the other to be the occupant of an obscure lodging 
 with an income of a couple of hundred pounds. Let them 
 address the elector in similar language, the language of 
 sound argument. The words of the rich landowner, who 
 can command the vote, will fall dead upon the ear of the 
 elector. The words of the poor educated gentleman, 
 whose only power over the vote is that which is to be 
 obtained by producing conviction in the mind of the 
 voter, will be listened to with respect and attention. 
 Take away from the former all possibility of bringing 
 his wealth or power to bear upon the cupidity or the 
 fears of the voter, and his arguments also will be 
 listened to with respect and attention. The system of 
 publicity which gives to the landlord power to control 
 the vote, takes from him all power to convince the
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 269 
 
 understanding. The dependent voter suspects with 
 reason that the argument of a landlord is little more 
 than a decent covering for what is substantially a com- 
 mand. He says to himself, ' Convinced or not convinced, 
 I must do what is expected of me. To what purpose 
 listen to arguments ? ' The elector who has in his pocket 
 the five sovereigns for which he has sold his vote, or 
 who has in his mind a picture of the family break-up 
 which may be the consequence of any flagrant act of 
 opposition to the landlord's will, is not exactly in a state 
 of mind to weigh reasons. Having determined, right 
 or wrong, that his vote is to be given in completion of 
 his bargain, or to allay his fears, his mind is impervious 
 to moral influences, whether proceeding from his cor- 
 rupter, from his landlord, or from other men. Let the 
 reasons in favour of candidate A. be irresistible, still he 
 must vote for B. Let the reasons in favour of B. be 
 worthless, still he must vote for B. To what good pur- 
 pose listen to the reasons ? As well might the colonel 
 expect his soldiers to listen with patient attention to a 
 discourse on the merits of the war, when they are only 
 waiting for the word of command to charge the enemy. 
 Sydney Smith draws a lively picture of the immora- 
 lities of secret voting. If his powers of painting had 
 been employed upon the opposite side of the canvas, he 
 might have drawn a picture equally lively, but more 
 true, of the immoralities of open voting. Take the 
 tenants of a great landlord. Divide them, as regards 
 their political opinions, into two classes. Take, first, the 
 man who thinks with his landlord. Ballot or no ballot 
 he will vote with his landlord. But under the open 
 system he gets no credit for his vote. It is in truth
 
 270 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY A5D 
 
 the expression of his real opinion, but his friends and 
 M in set it down to subserviency. It is the vote 
 
 of an honest man. but it is believed to be the vote of a 
 coward. Take next the men who do not think with 
 their landlord. Setting aside those who do their duty 
 manfully and brave the consequences, the remainder 
 Attar do the bit of dirty work expected of them and 
 bluster, or do the bit of dirty work and blush. The 
 first makes a parade of his dishonesty. In such words * 
 as those which Sydney Smith puts into the mouth of 
 the radical voter for the nominee of the Tory Duke, 
 he impudently proclaims himself the knave he really is. 
 The second, painfully conscious of his baseness, slinks 
 away with shame from his companions, and endeavours 
 to conceal his dishonesty under an affectation of indif- 
 ference to politics, or by pretending to hold opinions 
 which are the opposite of those he really holds. This is 
 not a rery edifying moral spectacle, and we shall cer- 
 tainly not improve it by turning our eyes from the 
 tenant to the landlord. 
 
 ' Go in at the front door.' says Sydney Smith 7 to 
 
 * * I ama nwfiiswil Radical/ said the tenant of a great Duke 
 to a friend of none, 'and the Duke knows it ; bat if I rote for 
 he lets me talk am I please, lire with whom I 
 tot care if I dine at a Radical dinner erery day 
 
 If there is a ballot, nothing could pomade the 
 Doke or the Duke's hi, the steward, that I was not deceiv- 
 ing them, and I ihosM lose nry farm in a week.' Sydney 
 Smith's Works, roL iL p. 312. 
 
 7 ' An abomhmhle tyranny exercised by the ballot is that it 
 compels those persons to conceal their rote* who hate all con- 
 ceahnent, and who glory in the cause they support. If you are 
 to go in at the front door, and to say in a dear roice
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 271 
 
 the elector, and say in a clear voice what you hare to 
 say, or if you don't like to do so, let me do so. The 
 
 what you have to say, go in at the back door and say it in a 
 whisper. But this is not enough for you. you make me, who am 
 bold and honest, sneak in at the back door as well as yourself ; 
 because you are afraid of selling a dozen or two of gloves less 
 than usual, you compel me, who have no gloves to sell, or who 
 would dare and despise the loss if I had, to hide the best feel- 
 ings of my heart and to lower myself down to your mean morals. 
 It is as if a few cowards, who could only fight behind walls and 
 houses, were to prevent the whole regiment frcm showing a 
 bold front in the field. What right has the coward to degrade 
 me, who am no coward, and put me in the same shameful pre- 
 dicament with himself ? ' Sydney Smith's Works (Ballot), 
 voL ii. p. 308. 
 
 But surely the representative system was not devised for the 
 purpose of providing a field for the exercise of the heroic 
 virtues. To give an honest vote in disregard of the power of a 
 landlord, an employer, or a rich customer, may be an act of 
 heroism undoubtedly, but the occasions for the display of 
 courage in resisting persecution are sufficiently numerous in thia 
 world, without seeking to increase them. Why force heroism 
 upon a man who is not a hero ; and if he is a hero, with a taste 
 for martyrdom, what is there in secret voting to prevent him 
 from indulging his taste 1 Being the tenant of a Tory landlord 
 he has voted for the Whig. Let him proclaim that act of 
 virtue in the market place, if he is one of those to whom virtue 
 without fame is valueless. No one will disbelieve him, unless 
 he is found to be a spurious hero, who has taken up martyrdom 
 as a matter of business. The ballot was not intended for heroes 
 or gentlemen, but for poor dependent voters who have either 
 not the courage to brave persecution, or not the virtue to resist 
 temptation. If it affords protection to these latter it has effected 
 its purpose. The heroes and gentlemen, if they cannot live 
 in peace without the fame of their good actions, must be at the
 
 272 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 anti-ballotists seem to think that all true English man- 
 liness is summed up in performing a part on a public 
 stage. Unhappily, there is often as little in common 
 between the actor on the stage and the real man off the 
 stage, on the hustings as at the theatre. When we 
 see some four-and-twenty electors from a neighbouring 
 estate, on the day of election, ' go in at the front door 
 and say in a clear voice ' what they have been brought 
 to that place to say, we may in truth be witnessing as 
 sorry an imposture as any that could be played before 
 us on the stage of a second-rate theatre in a provincial 
 town. 
 
 A man may smile and smile and be a villain. 
 
 trouble to blow their own trumpets. If the world suspects the 
 notes of the trumpet to be false, so much the worse for them. 
 The ballot is not to be made responsible for their inability to 
 convince the world of their truthfulness. 
 
 Sydney Smith objects to the ballot, that it deprives us of a 
 test of the sincerity of patriotic fervour. 
 
 ' If ballot be established,' he says, ' a zealous voter cannot 
 do justice to his cause ; there will be so many false Hampdens 
 and spurious Catos, that all men's action^ and motives will be 
 mistrusted. It is in the power of any man to tell me that my 
 colours are false, that I declaim with simulated warmth and 
 canvass with fallacious zeal ; that I am a Tory though I call 
 Russell for ever, or a Whig in spite of my obstreperous panegyrics 
 of Peel.' 
 
 Very true. But then how does open voting mend the 
 matter ? The knowledge of the vote will not enable us to dis- 
 tinguish between the real Cato and the sham Cato. The vote 
 may be as false as the speeches. The hope of a snug berth at 
 the Post Office or the Excise for one of the sons may be at the 
 bottom of the whole thing.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 273 
 
 And so may a man speak loud, and hold up his 
 head and walk with a firm step, and be a knave. These 
 things can as little be accepted as the signs of true 
 manliness as the regular utterance of the responses at 
 morning service at St. George's can be taken to be 
 undoubted proofs of true religious feeling. 7 
 
 I know nothing which presents so repulsive, and 
 I believe so untrue, a picture of our upper classes as 
 Sydney Smith's description of the flood of immorality 
 which, in his belief, would pour in upon us if secret 
 voting were established. Nothing can be more fla- 
 grantly immoral than the conduct which he imputes to 
 them. By their superior education and rank in life 
 they are more especially bound to set to their inferiors 
 an example of respect for the law ; and yet if we are 
 to believe Sydney Smith they would unhesitatingly 
 bring to bear upon the law every form of hostility and 
 evasion in support of a selfish power over other men 
 which the law had condemned. Not satisfied with 
 having demoralised their inferiors by the practice of 
 bribery for the best part of a century, Sydney Smith 
 affirms of them that they would shamelessly set at de- 
 fiance a law enacted for the express purpose of putting 
 an end to the demoralisation of bribery. ' If ballot 
 
 7 A certain elector has met with treatment from A. B. (who 
 is a candidate for the representation of the county) which he 
 believes to be in the highest degree unjust and cruel. He is 
 convinced, however, that A. B. is a fitter man to represent the 
 county than his opponent. He goes to the polling booth and 
 drops into the ballot box a vote in favour of the man who has 
 injured him. Does the secrecy of the vote destroy the manli- 
 ness of that conduct ? 
 
 T
 
 274 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 were established,' lie says, ' it would be received by the 
 upper classes with the greatest possible suspicion, and 
 every effort would be made to counteract it and get rid 
 of it.' Again, he says, ' Bribery carried on in any town 
 now would probably be carried on with equal success 
 under the ballot. The attorney, if such a system pre- 
 vailed, would say to the candidate, " There is my list 
 of promises ; if you come in I will have 5,OOOZ., and 
 if you do not, you shall pay me nothing ;" ' and then 
 he proceeds to show what precautions would be taken 
 againt fraudulent demands on the bribery fund. ' There 
 must be honour among thieves; the mob regularly 
 inured to bribery under the canopy of the ballot would, 
 for their own sake, soon introduce rules for the distri- 
 bution of the plunder, and infuse with their customary 
 energy the morality of not being sold more than once 
 at every election.' 
 
 The case is this. Under our present mode of 
 voting a demoralising system of bribery prevails, set on 
 foot by the rich candidate or his supporters to secure 
 his election. The law steps in with a remedy. It is 
 objected to the remedy that it will not stop the immo- 
 rality. Not stop it ? How so ? ' Because,' say the 
 objectors, ' the rich candidate or his supporters will 
 devise means to keep up the immoral practice in the 
 teeth of the law ! ' So long as the existing system is 
 maintained, the rich candidate may perhaps be justified 
 in saying that the law cannot be supposed entirely to 
 disapprove what it makes no serious effort to prevent. 
 If the law were altered and ballot were established, that 
 salve to his conscience would be taken from him. 
 Thenceforward bribery would not only be what it has
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 275 
 
 always been, a defiance of the laws of morality, but it 
 would be a plain defiance of the laws of England. 
 Nevertheless, Sydney Smith believed that rich English- 
 men, ambitious of a seat in Parliament, would have no 
 more scruple in thrusting their consciences out of doors 
 in the new state of things than in the old. I am not 
 able to think quite so ill of the upper class of my 
 countrymen. 
 
 Again of landlords, Sydney Smith expresses himself 
 thus: 'The cardinal position of the radicals is that 
 landlords, after the ballot is established, will give 
 up in despair all hopes of commanding the votes of 
 their tenants. I scarcely ever heard a more foolish and 
 gratuitous assumption. Given up ? Why should they 
 be given up ? I can give many reasons why landlords 
 should never exercise this unreasonable power, but I 
 can give no possible reason why a man determined to 
 do so should be baffled by the ballot ; ' and he proceeds 
 to show that, on the contrary, the landlords who now 
 exercise the power which open voting gives them, would, 
 if open voting were made illegal, become doubly vigi- 
 lant, inquisitive, and severe. Now what is the case ? 
 So long as the law maintains, against all opposition, 
 a system of open voting, which gives to the landlord a 
 practical control of a very perfect kind over the votes 
 of his tenants, he may, with some show of reason, put 
 forward that fact as proof that the Legislature is not 
 convinced of the injurious character of that control. If 
 that system were abandoned, the landlord could by no 
 possibility interpret that abandonment otherwise than 
 as a declaration by the Legislature that it was just and 
 necessary that such control should, by force of law, be 
 
 T 2
 
 276 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 made to cease. What Sydney Smith in effect affirms 
 is this : that English landlords, from whom as a class 
 our lawmakers are in great part taken, so far from set- 
 ting an example of scrupulous obedience to the unmis- 
 takable intention of that new law, would forthwith set 
 themselves to weaken and undermine it, and that by 
 the not very honourable method in use by inquisitors. 
 His prediction is, that the landlord, hopeless of directly 
 depriving the voter of his newly acquired independence, 
 would set up against him a promise-exacting and cross- 
 questioning persecution ; and thus seek to force him or 
 to entrap him into a position of moral perplexity of such 
 a kind as to render the practical enjoyment of that in- 
 dependence thenceforward contingent upon the main- 
 tenance of habitual falsehood. No one who knew 
 Sydney Smith will believe him to have been capable of 
 attributing conduct such as this, so cruel, and at the 
 same time so little, to any class of his countrymen, 
 much less to the class to which he himself belonged, 
 if he had taken much trouble to understand the true 
 character of that conduct. It is impossible to avoid 
 the reflection that one who could make so false a moral 
 estimate of the upper class of his countrymen was not to 
 be trusted in his estimate of the lower ; and that he was 
 probably as much mistaken in supposing that the ballot 
 would fail in consequence of want of common honesty 
 and intelligence on the part of the poor voter, as he 
 certainly was mistaken in supposing that it would fail 
 from a small revengeful spirit of persecution, having for 
 its object to cheat the poor voter out of the law's intended 
 protection on the part of the rich landlord. The truth 
 is that, on the point of morality, the article of Sydney
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 277 
 
 Smith was utterly at variance with itself. His chief 
 argument in favour of open voting was based upon the 
 beneficial moral influence of public opinion, and yet he 
 took infinite pains to lower our moral estimate of 
 those who constitute the public ; of landlord and tenant, 
 of high and low, of rich men and poor. 
 
 One of the main props of the anti-ballot theory is 
 that the ballot would lead to lying. Now lying is of 
 several kinds, and the determining motives of lies are 
 not a bad measure of their wickedness. There is the 
 lie of vanity, and the lie of malevolence, and the lie 
 of cowardice, and the lie of selfishness, and the lie of 
 legitimate self-defence. The wickedness is not exactly 
 the same in all cases. For example : it was much less 
 wicked if, indeed, it was wicked in any degree in the 
 author of certain celebrated books to reply, to the im- 
 pertinent question of a prince, that he was not the 
 author of those books, than it would be in you or me, 
 by giving a false character to obtain for one whom we 
 knew to be a thief a situation in a respectable family. 
 A rich man in contravention of the undoubted purpose 
 of a law which says to him, ' You shall no longer be 
 allowed to interpose your private interests or political 
 leanings between this poor man's privilege and its free 
 exercise/ endeavours to force from that poor man the 
 secret which has been given to him as a shield, but 
 which he can successfully defend from the moral violence 
 by which it is threatened no otherwise than by a lie. 
 Let any man of sense and honesty say which of these 
 two is the greater moral delinquent, the educated 
 inquisitor striving to wrest the law from its acknow- 
 ledged purpose, or the uneducated voter who defends
 
 278 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 the law and his own privilege by a lie. Let him rack 
 his brain and picture to himself, if he can, a more 
 grotesque perversion of all moral consistency than this 
 rich man and his apologists holding forth on the 
 wickedness of lying. 
 
 There is one truth which no amount of hammering 
 seems likely ever to drive into the head of a thorough- 
 going ballot-hater ; and that is, that there are other 
 and worse infractions of the moral law than that of 
 defending oneself from unjust persecution by a lie. 
 Under the system of publicity you have the dishonest 
 vote : the vote for A. from fear of worldly loss, or in ex- 
 change for worldly gain, when B. is believed to be the 
 best man. If the world would only agree to call this 
 by its right name, ' falsehood ' for substantially it is 
 falsehood, and, when committed by a citizen in dis- 
 charge of the most important perhaps of all the duties 
 of citizenship, falsehood of a very bad kind the anti- 
 ballotist would be refuted out of his own mouth. But 
 you never can get him to look upon it as anything more 
 than a little bit of excusable moral weakness ; a mere 
 loosening of one of the strings of a code of political 
 morals which have been screwed up a little too tight. 
 Because it happens not to come within his definition of 
 a lie, it is not worth talking about. What he under- 
 stands by a lie is a deliberate affirmation of something 
 as a fact which is not a fact. You cannot get him to 
 look into motives. Whether it has been my object to 
 slander my neighbour, to cheat my customer, to escape 
 from a troublesome duty, or merely to protect myself 
 from unauthorised impertinence is no concern of his 
 ' I haye stated as a fact that which is not a fact.' That
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 279 
 
 is enough for your thoroughgoing anti-ballotist. If 
 England can only be saved from that one particular 
 form of falsehood, the rest of the moral law may be left 
 to take care of itself. This seems to me to be both a 
 superficial and a dangerous view of morality. I believe 
 the dishonest vote to be morally worse than the lie in 
 defence of the honest vote. Be this, however, as it may, 
 what are we to think of men who reject a proposed 
 cure for one form of immorality, on the ground that 
 their own selfish conduct is likely to make the efficacy 
 of that cure dependent upon the practice of another 
 form of immorality ? Why do they not clear away the 
 selfishness from their own breasts ? This would relieve 
 us from all difficulties. Let rich and powerful men 
 only, in good faith, take the necessary steps to dis- 
 possess themselves of a power over the poor voter which 
 the law never intended them to possess, and there need 
 be no further discussion on different forms of immorality 
 or different modes of voting. 
 
 ' Take the necessary steps to dispossess themselves,' 
 I purposely use that phrase, because I admit that, as 
 regards the men of wealth and power, the principals in 
 the business of electoral bribery and intimidation, this 
 is something more than a simple question of abstaining 
 from the exercise of an injurious power. They, directly, 
 in their own persons, have rarely exercised that power. 
 The man of many acres has seldom or never been 
 brought into direct personal contact with a refractory 
 tenant ; nor has the moneyed candidate ever, with his 
 own hands, tendered the bribe to the ten-pounder 
 householder of the easy political conscience. Their 
 function in the business has been the simple one of
 
 280 PUBLIC [RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 shutting their eyes. There is a machinery, but, 
 although worked for their benefit, it is not worked by 
 them. They know nothing of it except the result the 
 announcement of the successful candidate at the close 
 of the poll. It is worked by friends, dependants, 
 political adherents, paid and unpaid, who, knowing 
 perfectly well what has to^be done, have learned by 
 long experience to apply to the doing of it a mechan- 
 ism which is as silent as it is effective ; a mechanism 
 which works so smoothly as very rarely to excite 
 the public attention ; which compromises no one ; 
 which enables him who reaps the reward to say, ' I 
 know nothing of it ; ' and enables him who moves the 
 wheels to say, ' They are not moved for my benefit.' In 
 this world of skilful appliances of all kinds, material 
 and moral, abounding with cloaks in which the ugliest 
 things may be decently wrapped up, nothing is more 
 easy than for a great man to enjoy in substance a power 
 injurious to other men, which in name he repudiates. 
 A great landowner in Britain may retain substantial 
 possession of the votes of his tenants, and yet be able 
 to say truly that he never asked a question in his life 
 about the vote of a single man among them ; and it is 
 perhaps too much to expect that our landed aristocracy, 
 For no more direct and immediate benefit than the 
 political welfare of England in so far as that welfare 
 depends upon the creation and maintenance of a broad 
 popular constituency, thoroughly independent, earnest 
 and true should undertake to deprive themselves for 
 all time coming of a power which they may continue 
 to enjoy with little personal unpopularity, and with a 
 notable increase of personal consequence. The difficulty
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 281 
 
 of the case is that, unless the great men, for whose 
 benefit the machinery exists, are virtuous enough, for 
 the public good, to break up the machinery and that is 
 not always a very simple task there is no way left but 
 for the injured parties to wit, the great bulk of the 
 general public to take the matter into their own hands. 
 In the case before us, the object in view being an inde- 
 pendent electoral body, there seems to be no alternative 
 but this the ballot ; or a virtuous effort of self-denial on 
 the part of those who profit by the existing corruption 
 and subserviency of the electors, of which, as coming 
 from the whole of a numerous class of persons, there are, 
 I fear, but few examples in the history of the world. 8 
 
 8 To secure the votes of his tenants against all interference, 
 direct or indirect, so completely as to give them the reality and 
 the feeling of independence, cannot be a very easy task for a 
 great landowner, surrounded as he is by friends and dependants 
 filled with zeal for his interests ; but the thing may, no doubt, 
 be done. That it seldom or never is done can, however, excite 
 no surprise. It is scarcely reasonable to expect that a man who 
 has strong political opinions should refrain from using the power 
 he possesses to advance those opinions. Even though it should 
 be apparent to him that it is wrong to use the power of a land- 
 lord to control the votes of tenants, yet if he sees that power 
 used without scruple by his neighbours for the advancement of 
 doctrines which he believes to be false and mischievous, he is 
 perhaps entitled to say that he is acting from a sense of duty 
 when he employs similar weapons for the support of what he 
 believes to be the cause of truth and right. The current of 
 public opinion is not likely ever to set very strongly against a 
 practice which may be defended by so plausible an argument, 
 and it is idle, therefore, to look forward to a general voluntary 
 abandonment of electoral intimidation. If it should ever come 
 to an end it will be by the pressure of an Act of Parliament.
 
 282 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 In one passage of his work on Representative 
 Government Mr. Mill imputes to the ballot a moral 
 mischief of a kind which he describes as follows : After 
 saying truly that ' the spirit of an institution, the im- 
 pression it makes on the mind of the citizen, is one of 
 the most important parts of its operation,' he goes on to 
 observe that ' the spirit of vote by ballot the interpre- 
 tation likely to be put on it in the mind of an elector 
 is that the suffrage is given to him for himself, for his 
 particular use and benefit, and not as a trust for the 
 public ; ' and that ' this one idea taking root in the 
 general mind, does a moral mischief outweighing all 
 the good that the ballot could do, at the highest possible 
 estimate of it ; ' and he adds, that Mr. Bright and his 
 school of democrats have given currency to this mis- 
 chievous idea by maintaining that the franchise is a 
 right and not a trust. But the advocates of the ballot 
 do not all belong to Mr. Bright's school of democrats ; 
 and many of them, except in a legal sense, acknowledge 
 no rights except such as can be proved to be for the 
 general advantage. Mr. Grote is or was the leader of 
 the ballot movement, and he held it out as one of the 
 principal advantages of his proposed measure that it 
 would make it impossible for the elector to use the 
 franchise for his own particular use and benefit. Any 
 such false idea of the suffrage may at all events be 
 easily corrected. When a man's name is placed upon 
 the register, let it be required of him that he shall make 
 before a public officer the following declaration : ' I 
 hereby engage to the best of my ability to use for the 
 public benefit a privilege which the constitution of my 
 country has given me for the public benefit, and for that
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 283 
 
 only.' If there is risk of misapprehension in the mind 
 of the elector, this is an easy cure for it ; but there is 
 really no such risk. Mr. Mill's estimate of the stupidity 
 of common men passes all bounds of belief. After 
 observing that 'an ordinary citizen, on whom there 
 devolves any social function, is certain to think and feel, 
 respecting the obligations it imposes on him, exactly 
 what society appears to think and feel in conferring it ' 
 a proposition no one will dispute Mr. Mill proceeds 
 to say that 'the interpretation which such citizen is 
 almost sure to put upon secret voting is, that he is not 
 bound to give his vote with any reference to those who 
 are not allowed to know how he gives it, but may be- 
 stow it simply as he feels inclined.' But surely society 
 will not appear to think and feel one thing when in fact 
 it thinks and feels another and a very different thing, 
 and makes no secret of that fact. The question of the 
 ballot having been publicly discussed in and out of 
 Parliament at frequent intervals for the last fifty years, 
 the grounds upon which it rests must by this time be 
 pretty familiar to the public mind ; and the interpre- 
 tation which the public puts upon it can scarcely be 
 other than that which its advocates put upon it. Now 
 its advocates have explained themselves with unmis- 
 takable clearness. Their position has been this : ' We 
 recommend that the public be excluded from the direct 
 knowledge of individual votes, because experience has 
 proved that a powerful section of the public cannot be 
 trusted not to abuse the power which that knowledge 
 gives them.' That is the Alpha and Omega of the 
 advocacy of the ballot. If society should ever adopt 
 the ballot, it will be because it has become convinced of
 
 284 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 the soundness of that position. To suppose that any 
 class of citizens will understand the ballot to be given 
 to them as a free licence to caprice and selfishness, and 
 a full discharge from all regard to public interests, 
 when for fifty years its advocates have been urging its 
 adoption on a plain simple ground of a totally different 
 kind, is really a most gratuitous and unwarranted im- 
 putation of stupidity. An Englishman of sane mind 
 can no more suppose that the election of members of 
 Parliament is not intended for the furtherance of the 
 public good, than a juryman, when he discusses with his 
 eleven brethren the evidence on a trial for burglary, 
 can suppose that such discussion is not entered upon in 
 the interest of public justice. The case of the elector 
 may be aptly illustrated by that of the juryman. If it 
 had been the practice for juries to discuss the question 
 of the verdict aloud in open court, and if that practice 
 had been found to open a door to persecution in cases 
 where individual jurymen happened to take a view of a 
 case displeasing to persons thus becoming cognizant of 
 the particulars of that discussion, could any one mis- 
 understand the purpose of society if it should determine 
 to alter the law, and thenceforward to send the jury out 
 of court to discuss their verdict in a private room ? Is 
 there one man in a thousand so stupid as to look upon 
 that change from publicity to secrecy as meaning that 
 jurymen were thenceforth to be under no obligation to 
 society, and were to be free to convict or acquit as they 
 felt inclined ? 
 
 But Mr. Mill's excellent observation as to the effect 
 of the spirit of an institution on the mind of the citizen 
 is capable of another application. Mr. Mill observes
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 285 
 
 that ' the effect of a doctrine on the mind is best shown, 
 not in those who form it, but in those who are formed 
 by it.' Now, apply these words to the doctrine of 
 shaming electors out of unworthy votes by the pressure 
 of public opinion. That doctrine rests upon the assump- 
 tion, as a matter of fact, that English electors are for 
 the most part morally incapable of overcoming prejudice, 
 passion, or caprice in a degree sufficient to bring their 
 votes under the control of a sense of public duty, and 
 of their own interest in good government. In Mr. 
 Mill's words : ' A man's own particular share of the 
 public interest, even though he may have no private 
 interest drawing him in the opposite direction, is not, as a 
 general rule, found sufficient to make him do his duty to 
 the public without other external inducements.' In other 
 parts of the same chapter Mr. Mill enumerates the un- 
 worthy feelings which will lead men to give base or 
 mischievous votes. Sydney Smith gave still more par- 
 ticular expression to his unfavourable opinion of the 
 moral condition of a large class of English electors. 
 ' If a man,' said he, ' be sheltered from intimidation, is 
 it at all clear that he would vote from any better motive 
 than intimidation? .... The landlord has perhaps 
 said a cross word to the tenant ; the candidate for whom 
 the tenant votes in opposition to his landlord has taken 
 his second son for a footman, or his father knew 
 the candidate's grandfather. How many thousand votes 
 sheltered as the ballotists suppose from intimidation, 
 would be given from such silly motives as these ? How 
 many would be given from the mere discontent of 
 inferiority? or from that strange simious schoolboy 
 passion of giving pain to others, even when the author
 
 286 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 cannot be found out ? motives as pernicious as any 
 which could proceed from intimidation.' 
 
 Now, I would ask, what impression is likely to be 
 made upon the minds of electors by an institution which 
 is founded and defended upon such a view as this of their 
 moral condition ? Mr. Mill and Sydney Smith are vir- 
 tually addressing them in such language as the follow- 
 ing : ' You have an important public duty to perform ; 
 you are yourselves sharers in the advantages which will 
 be derived to the public from the right performance of 
 that duty ; you have no substantial private interests 
 running counter to that duty. Nevertheless, we cannot 
 trust you ; we dare not leave you to yourselves ; for, 
 being men, you are capricious, ignorant, prejudiced, 
 selfish, or malignant ; regardless of worthy objects in the 
 desire to gratify some contemptible whim or passion ; 
 ready to serve any fancied petty interest of your own, 
 in preference to that of the public. To keep you in a 
 path which is at once the path of duty, and that of an 
 enlightened self-interest, the public must keep its eyes 
 constantly upon you. We can trust nothing to your 
 own intelligence, public spirit, and honesty ; our trust 
 must be in your fear, lest your baseness or folly should 
 expose you to the anger or contempt of your fellow- 
 citizens.' ' The effect of a doctrine,' says Mr. Mill, ' is 
 best shown in those who are formed by it.' What sort 
 of electoral body, I would ask, is likely to be formed by 
 addressing to them such language as this ? Are we 
 likely to make men honest, intelligent, and public- 
 spirited by telling them that it is necessary to take 
 against them precautions required by dishonesty, 
 stupidity, and selfishness ? What would be thought of
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 287 
 
 the wisdom of the master of one of our public schools, 
 who should announce to the school that no boy was to 
 be trusted out of the sight of a master or a monitor ? 
 When the United States of America find themselves, 
 as they soon will, with four millions of negroes upon 
 their hands, will they render the task of raising those 
 negroes to the condition of intelligent, honest, indus- 
 trious freemen easier, by applying to them a system of 
 treatment fitted only for the incurably indolent, stupid, 
 or vicious ? No man had a deeper knowledge of human 
 nature than Dr. Arnold. This was not his method of 
 raising the moral standard of human beings entrusted 
 to his care. His language to his boys was in a very 
 different spirit. The following is an example of it. He 
 said to them, ' If you say so, that is quite enough ; of 
 course I believe your word.' The self-respect of the 
 boys was raised, and in Arnold's school, a boy who told 
 a lie disgraced himself as much in the eyes of his school- 
 fellows, as in those of the master. Dr. Arnold thought 
 that it was, on the whole, both more politic and more 
 true, to treat boys in a spirit of blind confidence, than in 
 a spirit of blind distrust ; to look upon an offence as the 
 exception rather than the rule. He believed that he would 
 more surely enlist the feelings of his boys in favour of 
 what is good and true, by treating every unworthy act 
 as a falling below the existing standard, than by treat- 
 ing every worthy act as a rising above it. The elector, 
 nay, the minister, of state, is but a graver and more 
 knowing schoolboy. Might it not then be worth the 
 experiment to treat our electoral body in Dr. Arnold's 
 spirit, and address them in language such as his ; to 
 say to them, ' The suffrage is given to citizens in the
 
 288 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 belief that they are honest and intelligent enough to 
 exercise it properly. We do not choose to believe 
 otherwise of you. We will not lower you in your own 
 eyes, and in those of your fellow-citizens, by the suppo- 
 sition that your conduct at the poll stands in need of 
 public supervision.' 
 
 I believe that Mr. Mill greatly overrates the difficulty 
 of making an elector understand the position in which 
 the constitution of his country has placed him. I see 
 no necessity for talking to him either of rights or trusts, 
 and I see no objection to telling him that he is to con- 
 sult his own interest. He knows perfectly well that 
 the only substantial interest which he can have in the 
 matter of voting, when once the law has made it impos- 
 sible that other men should bribe him out of his vote, 
 or frighten him out of his vote, is that interest which he 
 has, in common with the rest of his fellow-citizens, in 
 being governed by the best and wisest men. It is a 
 very superficial view of the matter to suppose that a 
 man never acts upon an enlightened view of his inte- 
 rest, unless he sits down at a table to construct a chain 
 of causes and effects. When he debates the matter with 
 himself, his reasoning may be perfectly sound, although 
 he does not know what it is to reason ; and although, 
 if you called upon him to explain his conduct, his 
 explanation might be unintelligible. The fact may be 
 that he has voted against Squire A. because the squire 
 is known to him as a man whose only serious occupation 
 in life is the preservation of game, and who was never 
 able, at a public meeting, to utter three consecutive 
 sentences which were intelligible ; and that he has voted 
 in favour of the second son of Squire B., because^every
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 289 
 
 one he meets on market day at Queensville tells him 
 that young B. was a great man at college, that he is a 
 rising lawyer, and is running away with all the business 
 at assizes ; and that in the House of Commons, up in 
 London, they always listen to what he says. This is 
 not the less voting from an enlightened view of his in- 
 terest, because, if asked to explain his interest in the 
 vote he has given, he may stammer and look like a fool. 
 With the most stupid agricultural tenant in all England, 
 considerations of this kind will, I believe, have more 
 weight than Sydney Smith's simious passion ; all men, 
 even small agricultural tenants, feel a pride in seeing 
 their native place represented by a man who is respected 
 and looked up to. 
 
 Before taking leave of the subject, I wish to guard 
 against being understood to contend that secret voting 
 is better than open voting in all supposable states of 
 society. Indeed, it is evident that, in a country of 
 which the people should universally respect each other's 
 right of private judgment in the choice of representa- 
 tives, the concealment of the vote would not only be use- 
 less but would universally be so considered. There is 
 one plain and great advantage in secret voting, and only 
 one, viz. that all encroachments on the right of private 
 judgment would be paralysed by it, all influences which 
 whether exercised by landlords, rich men, or mobs 
 act upon the will of the elector otherwise than through 
 his understanding. If such influences had no existence, 
 or if, existing, they could be rooted out by some more 
 direct and simple method than the ballot, a discussion 
 on the comparative merits of open and secret voting 
 would be a very idle occupation. If in England, for 
 
 U
 
 290 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AMD 
 
 instance, the public sentiment on the suffrage were uni- 
 versally of such a kind, that no elector could have any 
 reasonable hope of particular advantage or fear of par- 
 ticular injury as a consequence of his vote, there would 
 be an absence of all motive for concealment in the 
 matter of voting ; and it would be immaterial whether, 
 at the polling booth, votes were given viva voce in the 
 presence of other men, or were silently dropped into a 
 box. In either case, practically, the votes would be 
 known. In tha,t supposed condition of the public feel- 
 ing, you would no more think of doubting the veracity 
 of your neighbour when he told you that he had voted, 
 or was about to vote, for Johnson in preference to 
 Thomson, than you would doubt his veracity if he told 
 you that he was sowing one of his fields with oats and 
 another with barley ; and your neighbour would no 
 more think of making a mystery of the one matter than 
 of the other. There can be no greater mistake than 
 that of supposing that, by the ballot, all confidence in 
 the good faith and veracity of electors would be de- 
 stroyed. It would be destroyed only, where it is the 
 object of the ballot to destroy it ; that is, where there 
 is injustice or immorality to be counteracted; in all 
 other cases it would remain unimpaired. It would be 
 destroyed in all cases in which an immoral bargain had 
 been entered into, or an unconstitutional power was 
 assumed ; and to destroy it in such cases is to destroy 
 one necessary condition to the successful carrying out 
 of the corrupt bargain, or to the maintenance of the un- 
 just power. The mode in which the ballot would ope- 
 rate is plain enough. The vote, under the ballot, would 
 be the voter's secret, which he might reveal or not,
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 291 
 
 as he pleased. The secret, if revealed, would rest upon 
 his unsupported testimony. He would have no proof 
 to offer but his own assurance. Now the case is this : 
 that no rational man would be satisfied with that 
 assurance if it came from one who had been dishonest 
 enough to sell his vote, or if it came from one whose 
 situation in life was such as to make it necessary that 
 he should defend himself from the attempted coercion 
 of a landlord, a patron, or a mob ; whilst, on the other 
 hand, no rational man could fail to be satisfied with 
 that assurance, if it came from one who, being neither 
 dishonest nor dependent on other men, had no con- 
 ceivable motive for concealment. When the honesty 
 and independence of an elector are universally respected 
 by his fellow-citizens, no man of sense will doubt his 
 good faith in regard to the vote of to-morrow, or his 
 veracity in regard to the vote of yesterday. 
 
 The operation of the ballot in an electoral system 
 bears a certain analogy to that of a safety-valve in a 
 steam engine. The function of both is to get rid of 
 excessive or irregular power. If you could go on gene- 
 rating steam in the exact quantity required for the 
 work to be done by the engine, the safety-valve 
 would have nothing to do. If, in the election of re- 
 presentatives, no man desired to arrogate to himself a 
 power which the constitution has not conferred upon 
 him, the ballot would have nothing to do. But so 
 long as men refuse to see anything dishonourable in 
 attempting to get possession of other men's votes by 
 appeals to their cupidity or their fears, the ballot has 
 its appropriate work to do and would continue to do it. 
 
 v 2
 
 292 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 Those attempts would be baffled by the impossibility of 
 penetrating the secret of the ballot box. 
 
 If the public sentiment should change, and such 
 attempts should be abandoned as dishonourable, then 
 vote by ballot would become a useless form. I say 
 useless, because a machinery which has been devised to 
 restrain an injurious power has lost its use when men 
 have been brought voluntarily to relinquish that power. 
 I say useless but not hurtful. Hurtful it never could 
 be ; for the mere form of secrecy cannot be injurious, 
 if the absence of all motive for concealment has made 
 the reality of secrecy morally impossible. There would, 
 however, be as little wisdom in giving up the ballot 
 because an improved state of the public feeling had ren- 
 dered it for the time needless, as there would be in 
 fastening down the safety-valve because the engine had 
 gone on for a certain time generating steam in the exact 
 quantity required. When men have relinquished the 
 exercise of an injurious power, why, if it can be avoided, 
 expose them to the temptation of resuming it ? You 
 may have no reason to doubt the sincerity of their newly 
 acquired virtue, but after all the best security for the 
 continuance of the virtue is the continued impossibility 
 of sinning. The law is a wonderful help to public 
 morality. Without taking a very low view of human 
 nature, one may be allowed to doubt whether, if, in 
 England, the law making the slave trade illegal were 
 repealed, English opinion might not, in the course of 
 time, come to lose a few degrees of the intensity of 
 its horror for slavery ; and whether to give another 
 instance if the Government of Lord Palmerston had 
 succeeded in enforcing the penalties of the Foreign
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 293 
 
 Enlistment Act, that infliction might not have had the 
 effect of infusing serious doubts into the minds of 
 British ship-builders in regard to the morality of fur- 
 nishing ships of war to be used in violation of the inter- 
 national duties of their sovereign. So a law whose 
 special object it should be to make electoral bribery and 
 intimidation impossible, would give wonderful stability 
 to the opinion that they were dishonourable. 
 
 I should wish to recapitulate in a few words the 
 leading points of the controversy between the friends 
 of the ballot and the enemies of the ballot. One funda- 
 mental point is beyond dispute, viz. that the injurious 
 influences which can affect the electoral body are all 
 comprised under the two following heads. First, cor- 
 rupting or coercive influences brought to bear upon the 
 elector by other men ; secondly, selfishness, stupidity, 
 or malevolence, in all their various forms, which may 
 be supposed to operate within his own breast. If it 
 can be proved that open voting does more, on the whole, 
 than secret voting to extirpate these two classes of evil 
 influences, the agitation for the ballot ought to cease ; 
 if the contrary can be proved, that agitation ought to 
 be kept up until it is brought to a successful issue. 
 
 Now the ballotists and the anti-ballotists stand op- 
 posed to each other in the following relative positions. 
 The ballotist offers a specific remedy for the evil in- 
 fluences of the first class. To that remedy the anti- 
 ballotist makes one objection, which is something more 
 than a vague expression of dislike, and only one ; and 
 that objection simply amounts to an allegation that 
 those who profit by the evil landlords and others may 
 be expected, if that specific remedy should receive the
 
 294 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 sanction of the law, to enter upon a course of conduct 
 which would render that law a dead letter. The bal- 
 lotist maintains that, even on the supposition that the 
 upper class of Englishmen whose superior station 
 imposes it upon them as an imperative duty to set 
 an example of respect for the law are capable of the 
 flagrant immorality of a systematic attempt to defeat 
 or elude the law ; the ballotist, I say, maintains that, 
 even on this extreme supposition, the law would possess 
 within itself an efficacy which would render all such 
 attempts unavailing. 9 The anti-ballotist has no remedy 
 of his own to propose for the evil influences of the first 
 class, for corruption and coercion. He cannot of course 
 deny that, under the existing regime of publicity, one 
 portion of the public rich, educated, and powerful 
 gives its support to those evil influences.; but he may, 
 if he pleases, without any a priori absurdity, contend 
 that the remaining portion of the public possesses 
 
 9 The writer has not entered into any formal proof of this 
 point, because that work has been much better done than he 
 could do it by others, and by one person in particular, whose 
 name carries with it a great weight of authority. It is easy to 
 refer to the admirable speeches of Mr. Grote. No one will ever 
 put the argument on which that proof rests more clearly and 
 forcibly than he did. By Mr. Mill and other distinguished 
 advocates of open voting it has not been denied that the ballot 
 would be effectual, in spite of all opposition or evasion, to 
 prevent bribery at elections, and to secure the independence of 
 the elector. That denial rests principally on the authority of 
 Sydney Smith, who, in the article from which I have so often 
 quoted, refers, in words of deep lamentation, to the reported 
 fact that ' Lord John Russell, and some important men as well 
 as he,' had said, ' We hate ballot, but if these practices con- 
 tinue we shall be compelled to vote for it.'
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 295 
 
 enough of virtue and moral strength to shame the rich 
 and powerful men out of that support. No anti-ballotist 
 has ever, I believe, taken up that view of the case, 
 because direct experience has conclusively disproved it. 
 The fact that, in the course of the last century, cor- 
 ruption which has disappeared from within the walls of 
 Parliament, under the regime of publicity, still main- 
 tains itself at the polling booth, proves clearly that the 
 sense of shame, although sufficient to keep statesmen 
 in the path of political virtue in their relations with 
 each other, is not sufficient to do so in their relations 
 with the constituencies. 
 
 Now, as regards the evil influences of the second 
 class : selfishness, stupidity, or malevolence inherent 
 in the breast of the voter. The anti-ballotists, with 
 Mr. Mill at their head, maintain that public opinion, 
 having, under the system of publicity, the opportunity 
 of passing judgment on the merits or demerits of each 
 individual vote, will shame the voter out of his un- 
 worthy feelings, and thus make room in his breast for 
 the admission of a sense of public duty. The ballotist 
 contends that public opinion will have no such power ; 
 that some of those unworthy feelings, being mere de- 
 fects of the understanding, are not accessible to the 
 sense of shame, but only to the influence of education ; 
 and that with respect to all of them whether defects 
 of the understanding or moral defects public opinion, 
 having nothing to guide it but the vote which does not 
 bear upon its face the feelings or motives which deter- 
 mined the vote can no more bring its shaming or en- 
 lightening power to bear upon the elector under one 
 system of voting than under another.
 
 296 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 Then if the anti-ballotist, laying aside his theory 
 of inherent electoral baseness and of public opinion as 
 its appropriate antidote, should reduce his argument to 
 this ; viz. that practically and without entering into 
 nice distinctions between acts and motives an elector 
 may be expected, on the whole, to make a better choice 
 between rival candidates if he votes under the inspira- 
 tion of public opinion than if he simply votes upon his 
 own judgment ; the ballotist, in refutation of that view 
 of the matter, has to urge what follows. First, that 
 the public which practically most influences a man, is 
 that which, from the accident of his rank in life, occu- 
 pation, family connections, or place of residence, comes 
 into more direct and frequent contact with him than 
 any other ; that this is generally but a small fraction of 
 the general public ; and has so frequently interests and 
 opinions at variance with those of the general public, 
 that nothing even in Mr. Mill's view of the matter 
 could be gained by subjecting him to its influence. 
 Secondly, that, even if this were otherwise, and that 
 the elector were always ready to follow the inspiration 
 of the general public, it would be found that, in times 
 of political quiescence, the general public is in so hope- 
 less a condition of internal disagreement in regard to 
 the comparative merits of contending candidates as to 
 be incapable, at such times, of assisting him in his 
 choice ; and so easily led astray from the path of good 
 sense, prudence, and high principle, in times of political 
 excitement, as to be, at these latter times, a most unsafe 
 guide. 
 
 Finally, the ballotist contends that one great object 
 to be aimed at is the progressive improvement of the
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 297 
 
 electoral body ; that the independence of the voter must 
 be the first step to his becoming intelligent, earnest, 
 and true in the performance of the great duty to society 
 which the possession of the suffrage imposes upon him ; 
 that the destruction of the corrupting and coercive 
 powers is a necessary condition of that independence ; 
 and the ballot a necessary condition of that destruction. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 It may seem strange that no attempt should have 
 been made in the preceding pages to disprove an alle- 
 gation which has been so frequently made by opponents 
 of the ballot as the following : viz. that in France, 
 America, and other countries, vote by ballot, having 
 been tried, has proved a failure. 
 
 The question between secret voting and open voting 
 in Great Britain might undoubtedly be decided by an 
 appeal to the experience of other countries, provided 
 the following points were first established. First, that, 
 in the country in which it is alleged that the experi- 
 ment has been tried, vote by ballot is so practised as to 
 give the reality and not the mere name of secrecy ; and, 
 secondly, that the specific evils, for which secret voting 
 is in England proposed as the specific remedy, have, in 
 that other country, any substantial existence ; for it is 
 obvious that vote by ballot so called may exist with- 
 out secrecy, and secrecy without anything for secrecy to 
 cure. If, for instance, that were the case in America, 
 the example of America could prove nothing against the 
 ballot in Great Britain, where there is something to 
 cure, and where it is possible so to take the votes as to 
 ensure secrecy. When the opponent of the ballot has
 
 298 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 established these preliminary points, but not before, it 
 will be possible and useful to discuss with him the 
 question whether secret voting has or has not been tried 
 and failed. 
 
 Under the name of vote by ballot a plan has some- 
 times been put forward for leaving to the elector a free 
 choice between an open vote and a secret vote. If that 
 plan were adopted, bribery and intimidation would be 
 very much what they are under the existing system of 
 compulsory open voting. It seems almost needless to 
 say that a power which is effectual to force a man's will 
 against his judgment when the question at the polling 
 booth is this, ' For whom do you vote ? ' would not be 
 materially weakened by the preliminary question, ' Do 
 you choose to vote openly or secretly ? ' By the depen- 
 dent or corrupt voter that preliminary question could 
 of course be answered only in one way. A secret vote 
 when the alternative of an open vote had been offered 
 would as surely be looked upon as a breach of faith with 
 the purchaser, or a defiance of the power of the landlord, 
 as an adverse vote given openly. 
 
 LETTER FROM JOHN STUART MILL, M.P. 
 To the Editor of ' THE READER,' April 29, 1865. 
 
 THIS pamphlet is a defence of the ballot, or rather an 
 answer to the objections to it. The writer is evidently 
 a man of intelligence and knowledge, and accustomed 
 to discussion. It is always fortunate when disputed 
 questions are treated, not in a rhetorical, but in a dia-
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 299 
 
 lectical, spirit. The pamphlet contains incidentally 
 many true and useful thoughts, and some others which 
 excite surprise that the writer can have gone through 
 the process of putting them on paper without per- 
 ceiving their untenableness. To the present reviewer 
 who must be understood as speaking for himself only 
 the discussion appears, as to its main object, a failure. 
 
 The arguments for and against the ballot are so trite 
 and familiar, that the world is excusably tired of them. 
 But in the answers to them there is still room for 
 novelty, and it is in these that the main stress of the 
 practical controversy lies. The author of the pamphlet 
 directs his principal efforts against one of the anti-ballot 
 arguments, which he is quite right in regarding as the 
 strongest namely, that the franchise is a trust for the 
 public, and the voter should be responsible to the public 
 for the use made of it. 
 
 There are two ways in which a writer might meet 
 this argument. He might admit the moral responsi- 
 bility of the elector, and the beneficial effect on his mind 
 of fulfilling his trust under the eye and criticism of those 
 who are interested in its right fulfilment ; but, he might 
 say, the voters are in such a state of helpless depen- 
 dence each of them, so to speak, has a tyrant with 
 eyes so fiercely glaring on him that since his vote, i 
 known to his friends and family, will be known to his 
 master, the salutary influences of honour and shame 
 cannot be admitted without letting in, along with them, 
 the more powerful ones of terror. Darkness is the 
 only element in which the voter can be free to do his 
 duty ; and we must trust, for a good vote, to such spon- 
 taneous feelings of conscience and patriotism as may
 
 300 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 not need the support of publicity. This would reduce 
 the question to one of fact, on which every one would 
 form his own opinion. He who thinks that the electors, 
 or a large proportion of them, are in this state of compul- 
 sory subjection, will probably be a supporter of the ballot ; 
 though even then he ought to ask himself whether this 
 slavish dependence is likely to last, whether the whole 
 of the changes now taking place in society do not tend 
 to its diminution and even extinction. There might be 
 a good case against its being yet time to abolish the 
 ballot, if we had always had it, and yet no case in favour 
 of introducing, for a temporary purpose, a novelty which 
 when the time comes, for which we ought to be looking, 
 will be mischievous, and which has a decided tendency 
 to unfit men for that coming time. 
 
 This, however, in our judgment, is the only line of 
 defence for the ballot which can ever be, to a certain 
 extent, tenable. The author of the pamphlet has not 
 chosen this mode. He prefers to reject the principle of 
 electoral responsibility altogether. He does not deny 
 the voter to be discharging a duty, for which he is ac- 
 countable to conscience ; on the contrary, a high sense 
 of duty to the public is always present to the author's 
 mind. But he thinks that responsibility to public 
 opinion will seldom operate with much force; that, 
 when it does, it will as often operate on the wrong 
 side as on the right ; and that the voter is more likely 
 to vote well if left to his personal promptings, unin- 
 fluenced by praise or blame from any one. For, ' if 
 you place him by the ballot quite beyond the reach of 
 the improper control of other men, you leave to the 
 elector no intelligible interest except that of the body
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 301 
 
 of which he is a member his interest as a citizen.' 
 (P. 218.) It would hardly be fair to hold the author to 
 this dictum, to which, we are sure, he could not, on con- 
 sideration, adhere. Has no elector any private interest 
 but what other people's bribes or threats create for him ? 
 We will not take advantage, against the author, of his 
 own exaggerations. We will give his argument a 
 liberal construction. He means, and in many places 
 says, that, in the absence of other motives to an honest 
 vote, we may safely rely on the voter's interest as a 
 citizen ; his share of the public interest. 
 
 Now, we venture to say that this motive, in the 
 common course of things, does not operate at all, or 
 only in the slightest possible degree, on the mind either 
 of an elector or of a member of Parliament. When he 
 votes honestly, he is thinking of voting honestly, not 
 of the fraction of a fraction of an interest which he, 
 as an individual, may have in what is beneficial to the 
 public. That minute benefit is not only too insignificant 
 in amount, but too uncertain, too distant, and too hazy, 
 to have any real effect on his mind. His motive, when 
 it is an honourable one, is the desire to do right. We 
 will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order 
 not to ascribe to the voter's state of mind a solemnity 
 that does not belong to it. But he votes for a particular 
 man or measure because he thinks it the right thing to 
 do, the proper thing for the good of the country. Once 
 in a thousand times, as in a case of peace and war, or 
 of taking off taxes, the thought may cross him that he 
 shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year's ex- 
 penditure if the side he votes for prevails. -But these 
 cases are few, and, even in them, the interested motive
 
 302 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 is not the prevailing one. It is possible, indeed, that 
 he or his class may have a private interest acting in 
 the same direction with the public interest, as a man 
 who has speculated for a fall in corn has an interest in 
 a good harvest ; and this may determine his conduct. 
 But, in that case, it is the private interest that actuates 
 him, not his share of the public interest. 
 
 Since, then, the real motive which induces a man to 
 vote honestly is, for the most part, not an interested 
 motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be 
 decided is, whether the social feelings connected with 
 an act, and the sense of social duty in performing it, 
 can be expected to be as powerful when the act is done 
 in secret, and he can neither be admired for disin- 
 terested, nor blamed for mean and selfish, conduct. But 
 this question is answered as soon as stated. When, in 
 every other act of a man's life which concerns his duties 
 to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improve his 
 conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of Par- 
 liament is the single case in which he will act better 
 for being sheltered against all comment. 
 
 The author, indeed, says with truth, and it is his 
 strongest point, that public opinion is itself one of the 
 misleading influences. In the first place, the public 
 opinion nearest to the voter may be that of his own 
 class, and may side with, instead of counteracting, the 
 class interest. Besides, the opinion of the general 
 public has its aberrations, too, and its most violent 
 action is apt to be its worst. ' At periods of political 
 excitement, the practical sense to an elector of the 
 phrase, " Responsibility to public opinion," is too often 
 this: Go up to that polling-booth, and at your peril,
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 203 
 
 vote for any candidate, but the popular candidate.' 
 (P. 249.) Such cases of physical violence are not what 
 we have here to consider. If voters are liable to be 
 mobbed, and if the state of society, as at Rome in the 
 time of Cicero, is so lawless that the public authorities 
 cannot protect them, cadit qucestio, the ballot is indis- 
 pensable : though, in that case, even the ballot is a 
 feeble protection. We are for leaving the voter open 
 to the penalties of opinion, but not to those of brute 
 force. The author overlooks what, under this limita- 
 tion, is the most important feature of the case ; he sup- 
 poses that, if public opinion acts on the elector at all, 
 it must act by dictating his vote. When it is violently 
 exerted, it does so; but its more ordinary operation 
 consists in making the voter more careful to act up to 
 his own sincere opinion. It operates through the quiet 
 comments of relatives, neighbours, and companions ; 
 noting instances of variance .between professions and 
 conduct, or in which a selfish private purpose or a per- 
 sonal grudge prevails over public duty. In countries 
 used to free discussion, it is only in times of fierce 
 public contention that a man is really disliked for voting 
 in conformity to the opinion he is known to hold. If 
 he is reproached even by opponents, it is for something 
 paltry in the motive ; and, if there is a paltry motive, 
 it is generally no recondite one, but such as the opinion 
 of those who know him can easily detect, and therefore 
 may be able to restrain. 
 
 The author deems it a fallacy to distinguish between 
 the election of members of a club and that of members 
 of Parliament on the ground that the voters in a club 
 have no public duty. They have a duty, he says, to
 
 304 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 the members of the club. This we altogether dispute. 
 A club is a voluntary association, into which people 
 enter for their individual pleasure, and are not account- 
 able to one another. What is there wanted is, that 
 each should declare by his vote what is agreeable to 
 himself; whatever has then a majority is proved to be 
 agreeable to the majority, and whoever dislikes it can 
 leave the association. But if we were all born members 
 of a club, and had no means, except emigration, of 
 exchanging our club for any other, then, indeed, the 
 voter would really be bound to consult the interests of 
 the other members, the case would be assimilated to 
 that of an election to Parliament, and the ballot, accord- 
 ingly, would be objectionable. 
 
 There is no room to follow the writer through all his 
 arguments, but we cannot leave unnoticed the answer 
 he makes to the objection that the ballot would lead to 
 lying. To this he replies, that lies are of very different 
 degrees of criminality ; that there are many greater 
 moral delinquencies than ' the lie of legitimate self- 
 defence ; ' that a dishonest vote, given from a selfish 
 motive, is worse ; that such a vote ought to be called a 
 falsehood ; and that to think so rigorously of the mere 
 breach of verbal truth, and so gently of a grave viola- 
 tion of public duty, is shallow and false morality. In 
 all this we heartily concur ; but the fact remains, that 
 the majority of mankind do feel the lie an offence and a 
 degradation, and do not so feel respecting the breach 
 of public duty. We would gladly make them think a 
 dishonest vote as bad as a lie, but it is to be feared 
 we should only succeed in making them think a lie no 
 worse than a dishonest vote. When people have only a
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 305 
 
 few of the moral feelings they ought to have, there is the 
 more danger in weakening those few. This is a truth 
 which many moral saws in general circulation overlook. 
 We are often told, for example, that an equivocation is 
 as bad as a lie. It is well for mankind that everybody 
 is not of this opinion, and that not all who will equivo- 
 cate will lie. For the temptation to equivocate is often 
 almost irresistible ; indeed, the proposition that every- 
 thing which can be termed an equivocation is neces- 
 sarily condemnable, is only true in those cases and those 
 relations in life in which it is a duty to be absolutely 
 open and unreserved. But to confine ourselves to what 
 is really culpable : a person may be a habitual equivo- 
 cator of a bad kind, he may have no scruple at all 
 in implying what is not true, and yet, if when cate- 
 gorically questioned he shrinks from an express false- 
 hood, this ultimate hold on him makes it still possible 
 for his fellow-creatures to trust his word. Let no one 
 underrate the importance of what mankind would gain 
 if the precise literal meaning of men's assertions could 
 be kept conformable to fact. There may be much un- 
 worthy cunning and treachery notwithstanding, but 
 the difference for all human purposes is immense be- 
 tween him who respects that final barrier and those 
 who overleap it. 
 
 Did space permit, we might point out some cases in 
 which the author, though habitually candid, yields to 
 the temptation of caricaturing an opponent's argument ; 
 as in charging a writer (pp. 238 and 257) with arguing 
 as if all votes, given under the shelter of the ballot, 
 would be base or selfish, when the only thing asserted, 
 or needed, was that some would. But we prefer to quote 
 
 X
 
 306 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 a passage which tells strongly against the writer, and in 
 favour of our own case : ' A century ago, before the 
 virtuous example of the first William Pitt had made it 
 dishonourable in members of Parliament to hold their 
 votes at the disposal of the dispensers of the public 
 money, it might almost have been a question whether 
 the incontestable advantages of publicity were not too 
 dearly bought at the cost of that mass of political turpi- 
 tude which it would have been possible, by means ol 
 the ballot, to sweep from within the walls of Parliament ' 
 (p. 230). If, at the time spoken of, our ancestors, to get 
 rid of this mass of turpitude, had introduced the ballot 
 into the House of Commons, they would have done the 
 exact parallel of what we should do if we adopted it in 
 parliamentary elections. And ought not the fact that 
 all this profligacy has been got rid of without the ballot 
 to be a lesson to us for the other case ? We see that 
 the progress of the public conscience could and did, in 
 the space of a single generation, correct political im- 
 moralities more gross and mischievous than those which 
 now remain, and apparently harder to remove, because 
 affecting the elite, socially speaking, of the nation. 
 Such an example in times when the public conscience 
 was much less alive, and its improvement far less rapid 
 than now, ought to reassure us, to say the least, as to 
 the necessity of the ballot, and should deter us from 
 putting on the badge of slavery at the very time when 
 a few more steps and a very little additional effort will 
 land us in complete freedom. 
 
 J. S. M.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 307 
 
 REPLY TO THE ABOVE LETTER. 
 
 Reprinted from ' THE READER ' of May 27, 1865. 
 
 SIR, I ask your permission to be allowed to make 
 a few observations in reply to an article on a pamphlet 
 written by me entitled ' Public Responsibility and Vote 
 by Ballot, by an Elector.' The article in question 
 appeared in ' The Reader ' of April 29, and as it was 
 signed with the initials ' J. S. M.,' I presume I may 
 take it for granted that it was from the pen of Mr. John 
 Stuart Mill. The object of my pamphlet was to defend 
 the practice of secret voting, and Mr. Mill has prefaced 
 his strictures upon it by the following short summary 
 of the line of defence which I had adopted : 
 
 ' The author rejects the principle of electoral respon- 
 sibility altogether. He does not deny the voter to be 
 discharging a duty for which he is accountable to con- 
 science ; on the contrary, a high sense of duty to the 
 public is always present to the author's mind. But he 
 thinks that responsibility to public opinion will seldom 
 operate with much force ; that, when it does, it will as 
 often operate on the wrong side as on the right ; and 
 that the voter is more likely to vote well if left to his 
 personal promptings, uninfluenced by praise or blame 
 from any one. For, " if you place him by the ballot 
 quite beyond the reach of the improper control of other 
 men, you lenve to the elector no intelligible interest 
 except that of the body of which he is a member his 
 interest as a citizen."' 
 
 Now, I must begin by saying that I prefer to de- 
 scribe in my own words the line of defence which I have 
 
 x 2
 
 308 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 adopted ; not that Mr. Mill's description of it is incor- 
 rect, but that it is wanting in that completeness and 
 precision which is required to enable a reader, who takes 
 an interest in the subject, to enter upon the question 
 with a clear perception of the points on which the con- 
 troversy turns. My description, then, would be this : 
 I reject the principle of electoral responsibility 
 altogether. I do not deny that the voter is discharging 
 a duty for which he is accountable to conscience ; on 
 the contrary, a high sense of duty to the public is 
 always present to my mind. But I believe that, if you 
 place the elector, by the ballot, quite beyond the reach 
 of the improper control of other men, you leave to him 
 no intelligible interest except that of the body of which 
 he is a member, his interest as a citizen. That when 
 interest and duty do not run counter to each other, you 
 may safely rely upon a man's doing his duty to the best 
 of his ability. That nothing will be gained, but rather the 
 contrary, by making him responsible to public opinion. 
 That such responsibility, at periods of political excite- 
 ment when it is very difficult to resist its power, and 
 when the consequences of a mistake may be very mis- 
 chievous will as often operate on the wrong side as on 
 the right. That at no period will it operate as a check 
 on unworthy motives, because the vote does not furnish 
 any sure ground on which to judge of the motive. That 
 the public cannot be trusted to pass sound moral ver- 
 dicts on the intrinsic goodness or badness of the vote 
 considered apart from the motive ; and that if it could 
 be so trusted, those verdicts would be as extensively 
 and usefully impressed upon the electoral mind whether 
 the votes of individual electors were known or remained
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 309 
 
 unknown to the public. I think that, if this view of 
 the case be correct (that if the public cannot be trusted 
 to pronounce rightly upon the honest vote, and has no 
 sure method of detecting the dishonest one), then there 
 is absolutely no advantage in making individual electors 
 responsible to public opinion, to be set against those 
 disadvantages of open voting which are admitted on all 
 hands ; that the evil of making known individual votes 
 to persons whether landlords, employers, moneyed men, 
 or mobs who have not the virtue to abstain from making 
 a bad use of the power that knowledge gives them, is, 
 in that case, an uncompensated evil. 
 
 I may, perhaps, be told that the important point is, 
 not what I proposed to prove, but what I succeeded in 
 proving. But I think both points are important. Pos- 
 sibly not one in fifty of those who have read Mr. Mill's 
 article may have read the pamphlet which it criticizes ; 
 and not one of the forty-nine who have not read it can 
 reasonably be expected to read it, if they are led to 
 believe that the author aims only at proving something 
 which, when proved, does not dispose of the question at 
 issue. But, in a controversy, it is essential to a fair 
 judgment that both sides should be heard. 
 
 Mr. Mill, having quoted from the pamphlet the 
 following sentence 'If you place him by the ballot 
 quite beyond the reach of the improper control of other 
 men, you leave to the elector no intelligible interest 
 except that of the body of which he is a member, his 
 interest as a citizen ' makes this remark upon it : 'It 
 would hardly be fair to hold the author to this dictum, 
 to which, we are sure, he could not, on consideration, 
 adhere. Has no elector any private interest but what
 
 310 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 other people's bribes or threats create for him? We 
 will not take advantage, against the author, of his own 
 exaggeration we will give his argument a liberal con- 
 struction. He means, and in many places says, that, 
 in the absence of other motives to an honest vote, we 
 may safely rely on the voter's interest as a citizen his 
 share of the public interest.' Now, I neither plead 
 guilty to Mr. Mill's charge of exaggeration, nor do I 
 altogether accept his liberal construction of my mean- 
 ing. The sentence he quotes seems to me to be one of 
 two things, either a denial of plain facts or a truism. 
 If you separate the sentence from the context, and 
 ignore the fact that it occurs in the course of a dis- 
 cussion on modes of voting at elections, it is plainly 
 false ; if you take it in subordination to that fact, it is 
 plainly true. To place the elector quite beyond the 
 improper influence of other men, will not, if he is a 
 shopkeeper, make it less his private interest to increase 
 the number of his customers ; but it will make it quite 
 impossible for him to make his vote subservient to that 
 end, or to any other purely private end. In one way, 
 the votes of parliamentary electors are made, in every 
 variety of form and degree, subservient to purely private 
 ends ; that is, through the operation, on the minds of 
 other men, of a desire to reward a favourable, and to 
 punish an adverse, vote. The history of elections in 
 England furnishes us, year by year, with a constant 
 supply of examples of that deplorable fact. But I know 
 of no other way in which an elector's vote can be made 
 to promote his purely private interest. I can conceive 
 no other way, and Mr. Mill tells us of none. Mr. Mill, 
 indeed, tells us that an elector may give his vote from
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 311 
 
 private pique, or from irrational caprice or prejudice ; 
 but he can scarcely mean to include such feelings as 
 those under the term private interests. He is not, at all 
 events, entitled to call upon me to do so, because I 
 carefully distinguished between the two, and specifically 
 and separately considered the operation of irrational or 
 unworthy feelings existing in the breast of an elector, 
 showing that open voting in no degree tended to check 
 them. I dealt in the same way with what are called 
 class interests, carefully distinguishing between the 
 elector's purely private interest (his interest, that is, as 
 an individual, apart from any interest he may have in 
 common with other men) from his interest as a member 
 of a class. I admitted that, in so far as the class has 
 interests opposed to those of the community at large, 
 an individual member of the class may be said to have 
 selfish private interests. I admitted that his share in 
 those private class interests might influence his vote, 
 even though the law should have placed him quite 
 beyond the improper control of other men. But then I 
 showed what is sufficiently evident that selfish class 
 interests are rather strengthened than weakened by 
 responsibility to public opinion ; the public which has 
 practically most influence on a man being that of the 
 persons with whom he habitually associates. It follows 
 from what precedes that, without denying the accuracy, 
 as far as it goes, of Mr. Mill's liberal construction of 
 my meaning, I cannot be altogether satisfied with it ; 
 for, whereas it supposes me to contend for no more than 
 this viz. that, in the absence of other motives to an 
 honest vote, reliance may be placed on a voter's interest 
 as a citizen I do in fact contend for much more than
 
 312 PUBLIC [RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 this, endeavouring to show that this interest which is 
 inseparable from that of his fellow-citizens not only 
 affords to the elector a sufficient, but that it affords the 
 only motive to an honest vote ; and that the influence 
 on which Mr. Mill relies to give additional force to that 
 motive viz. the sense of responsibility to public opinion 
 must, of necessity, fail to perform what he expects 
 from it. 1 
 
 When an elector has been protected by the ballot 
 from all improper external control, the question as to 
 what passes or does not pass through his mind when he 
 gives his vote seems to me to be a very unimportant 
 one. I agree with Mr. Mill, that probably not one man 
 in a hundred will make a calculation of his own par- 
 
 1 There are four distinct kinds of interests or feelings, and 
 only four, which can operate on the vote of an elector : 
 
 1st. His private interest, apart from any interest he has in 
 common with other men such, for example, as the interest of a 
 shopkeeper in securing the custom of a wealthy candidate ; the 
 interest of a tenant- at- will in standing well with his landlord, 
 or the interest of a voter in obtaining money for his vote. 
 
 2nd. The interest he has, in common with other men be- 
 longing to the same class as himself, such as was years ago the 
 interest of a landowner in the Corn Law ; or the interest of a 
 cotton manufacturer in the prohibition of the exportation of 
 machinery. 
 
 3rd. His irrational prejudices, caprices, and stupidities. 
 
 4th. His interest as a citizen in the good government of the 
 country in which he lives. 
 
 What I affirm is this viz. that, by secret voting, you pro- 
 duce no change, one way or the other, in the No. 3, weaken the 
 No. 2, and altogether extinguish the No. 1 ; thereby, in a very 
 material degree, strengthening the No. 4 the interest leading 
 to the honest vote which open voting does not strengthen in 
 any way, or in any degree, great or small.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 313 
 
 ticular thirty-millionth part of the interest of the nation 
 in good government, and that ninety-nine out of a 
 hundred will vote for a particular man, because they 
 think it is for the good of the country and the right 
 thing to do. This, I dare say, is the account a respect- 
 able ten-pound householder would give of the matter, if 
 you were to question him about it. But when a man 
 talks of a thing as being the right thing to do, his 
 words are not necessarily the words of a parrot, nor his 
 mind a blank sheet of paper. He has probably thought 
 over the matter many times in his life, and has a general 
 idea, deviating in substance very little from the truth, 
 of the House of Commons, of the duties of its members, 
 of the kind of men who are most likely to perform the 
 duties well viz. men who are reputed to be wise, honest, 
 diligent of it being a right thing to vote for such men, 
 and of his the elector's particular interest in the matter 
 being the same as that of his fellow-citizens. What 
 calculation he may make when he goes up to the poll is 
 a matter of indifference. The important thing is that, 
 under the ballot, he has, in fact, no interest in the matter 
 but the general interest, and will give his vote con- 
 sciously or unconsciously under the influence of that 
 fact. Mr. Mill says that the motive is a social motive, 
 and I have no objection so to consider it. But when 
 he goes on to ask whether the sense of social duty in 
 performing an act can be expected to be as powerful 
 when the act is done in secret, and he, the actor, 
 can neither be admired for disinterested, nor blamed 
 for mean and selfish, conduct, I meet his question 
 by another, and maintain that my question must be 
 answered before it is possible to give any answer to his.
 
 314 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 Will the knowledge of the vote enable the dispensers of 
 the admiration and the blame to wit, the public to dis- 
 tinguish between the disinterested votes and the selfish 
 votes ? In other words, does the vote of an elector bear 
 upon its face the good or bad motive which dictated it ? 
 On the question whether the principle which has 
 led to the adoption of secret voting at clubs is applicable 
 to the case of parliamentary elections Mr. Mill makes 
 the following observations : ' The author deems it a 
 fallacy to distinguish between the election of members 
 of a club and that of members of Parliament on the 
 ground that the voters in a club have no public duty. 
 They have a duty, he says, to the members of the club. 
 This we altogether dispute. A club is a voluntary 
 association, into which people enter for their individual 
 pleasure, and are not accountable to one another. 
 What is there wanted is, that each should declare by 
 his vote what is agreeable to himself.' Let us test Mr. 
 Mill's view of the matter by examples. I will take the 
 Political Economy Club, which is a voluntary association. 
 A and B are proposed as members. S has to choose 
 between them. A is a distinguished professor of the 
 science, whose writings are read with admiration all 
 over Europe. B is an amiable and entertaining man, 
 with very slender pretensions to the title of political 
 economist. The acknowledged purpose of the club 
 being the .promotion of truth in political economy, is 
 not S morally bound to vote for A in preference to B, 
 on precisely the same principle on which, as a parlia- 
 mentary elector, he is bound to vote for the candidate 
 whom he thinks most competent to the discharge of the 
 duties of a legislature ? I would ask a similar question
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 315 
 
 in the case of a political club, a literary club, a military 
 or naval club, a chess club, a club of merchants and 
 bankers, &c. Every voluntary association has some 
 common object of greater or lesser importance. 
 Even though the object should not go beyond agreeable 
 social intercourse between educated men, that object 
 would scarcely be promoted by laying it down that each 
 member was expected to make himself happy and com- 
 fortable in his own way. Vote by ballot in clubs does 
 not mean that there is no common object to be promoted, 
 and consequently no duty to be performed ; it means 
 that the common object will be better promoted and the 
 duty will be better performed by secret than by open 
 voting. The practice of ballot in clubs does not affirm 
 that the members are under no obligations ; but that 
 there is no serious temptation to ignore the obligations, 
 except from a cause which secret voting will remove ; 
 that cause being the dislike to give offence to particular 
 members of the club who happen to take a personal 
 interest in the success of particular candidates. - Vote 
 by ballot at parliamentary elections means something 
 precisely analogous to this. The common object 
 may be more important in the one case than in the 
 other. The good government of England is more im- 
 portant than chess, perhaps more important than politi- 
 cal economy or literature ; but there is, in every case, 
 a common object of some kind or other, and a duty 
 arising out of it. Mr. Mill argues that a citizen who 
 should suffer by the misgovernment brought about by 
 the bad votes of electors would have no remedy, or no 
 remedy but to abandon his country ; whereas the man 
 whose enjoyment of his club has been destroyed by the
 
 316 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 introduction of members who are displeasing to him, 
 has his remedy, and may exchange his club for another ; 
 and that this affords a reason for making parliamentary 
 electors responsible, which does not apply to members 
 of clubs. The distinction, however, seems to me to 
 be more apparent than real ; and a member of the 
 Athenasum if that club should receive a very large in- 
 fusion of fox-hunters and members of the turf would 
 scarcely consider the proposed remedy sufficient. He 
 would seek in vain for a second Athenaeum to console 
 him for the loss of the first. I may be told, perhaps, 
 that it is trifling with the subject to talk of the members 
 of the Athenseum, under the ballot, bringing fox-hunters 
 into the club ; but I, on my side, think it is trifling 
 with the subject to suppose that parliamentary electors, 
 under the ballot, would send uneducated or disreput- 
 able men to Westminster. I admit that there is a 
 phenomenon affording a presumption against my view 
 of this matter, which Mr. Mill may properly call upon 
 me to explain. ' If,' he may say, ' the principle is the 
 same in both cases, if the ballot would operate to the 
 same beneficial end at the polling booth as it does in 
 the club room, how comes it that Englishmen of the 
 highly accomplished class of the class which gives the 
 tone to political opinion universally adopt the ballot 
 in clubs, and that nine out of ten of them reject the 
 proposal to introduce it at parliamentary elections, 
 with a good deal of indignation and contempt ? ' I 
 tender my explanation with some reluctance, for I have 
 no desire to fly in the face of good society ; but I can- 
 not, of course, allow a presumption which has no real 
 weight to tell heavily against me in this discussion.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 317 
 
 The truth, then, is, that the class in question has a 
 strong personal interest in the matter, and their judg- 
 ment, being, of course, biassed by their interest, is not 
 to be trusted. This again requires explanation. When 
 a ballot takes place at a club, all that happens is, that 
 a new member is added to the general body ; but the 
 result of a parliamentary election is very different ; it 
 adds one or more than one, as the case may be to a 
 small body governing the general body, invested for that 
 purpose with political power and patronage, and holding 
 in its hands the purse-strings of the nation. To be one 
 of that chosen band is of course an object of intense 
 desire, and it seems to follow, in accordance with the 
 well-known principles of human nature, that the class 
 from whose ranks that chosen band is chiefly recruited, 
 and which obtains the largest share of the good things 
 which governing bodies always have at their disposal, 
 should be hostile to any proposal which has for its 
 object to render electors more independent than they 
 now are of the control of the more wealthy and power- 
 ful sections of that class. The position of the territorial 
 aristocracy of England in relation, first to the large 
 class of tenants at will for whom the protection of the 
 ballot is chiefly sought and in relation, secondly, to 
 the large class of educated aspirants for employment in 
 the various departments of the State, is too well under- 
 stood, and affords too obvious an explanation of fashion- 
 able opinion on the subject of the ballot, to make it ne- 
 cessary that I should pursue the subject into its details. 
 In his remarks upon that passage of my pamphlet 
 which replied to the charge that the ballot would lead 
 to lying, Mr. Mill raises more than one important ques-
 
 318 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 tion of practical morality. But they open too wide a 
 field of discussion to be entered upon within the com- 
 pass of a letter like the present. I will make only one 
 observation on this part of the subject. When Mr. Mill 
 contends that open voting ought to be maintained, lest 
 the popular reverence for the truth should be weakened 
 by the practice of verbal lying, he seems to forget that 
 the verbal lie of the elector, in defence of his indepen- 
 dence, would not be a necessary, but only a contingent 
 consequence of the ballot ; contingent upon conduct 
 by other men making defence necessary. Is Mr. Mill 
 satisfied that the contingency would arise ? Take the 
 case of the great landowner. If vote by ballot became 
 the law of the land, two courses would be open to him : 
 one, to accept that new law in its spirit, and scrupu- 
 lously to abstain from all encroachments, direct or in- 
 direct, on the newly acquired electoral independence of 
 his tenants ; the other, to enter upon a course of pro- 
 ceeding having for its object to retain his control over 
 their votes, in contravention of the spirit of that new 
 law. Mr. Mill's argument virtually assumes that he 
 will take the latter of these courses, and that assump- 
 tion seems to me tc be altogether unwarranted. There 
 are different degrees and different kinds of immorality. 
 A man may be capable of one degree or one kind, and 
 not of another. A landlord may be morally capable of 
 the neglect of duty if it can be so called which is 
 involved in not taking active steps to secure the electoral 
 independence of his tenantry against a system which 
 substantially transfers their votes to himself especially 
 if he can, with truth, allege that the law, by refusing 
 to meddle with the system, seems to give a sort of
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 319 
 
 indirect sanction to it and yet be utterly incapable of 
 attempting, by a miserable process of inquisitorial per- 
 secution, repugnant to the feelings of a gentleman, to 
 cheat his tenants out of the intended protection of a law 
 enacted for the express purpose of securing their inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 Mr. Mill thinks that a certain historical fact, to 
 which I advert in my pamphlet that of political cor- 
 ruption having disappeared from within the walls of 
 Parliament in the course of a single generation, without 
 any assistance from the ballot ought to reassure us in 
 regard to the corruptions of our electoral system. In so 
 far as bribery is concerned, this hope may not, perhaps, 
 be altogether futile. Public opinion has happily become 
 so much less lenient to pecuniary immorality at elections 
 than it was forty years ago, that another forty years 
 may possibly see the end of it. Still, if it be possible 
 to put an end to a practice which is both a national 
 calamity and a national disgrace, thoroughly, at once, 
 and for ever, why wait forty years, or twenty years, or 
 one ? The disappearance of corruption from within the 
 walls of Parliament is not, however, an example per- 
 tinent to the case of electoral intimidation ; and there 
 the prospect is less reassuring. Granting that the ten- 
 dency of upper-class opinion is favourable to a gradual 
 relaxation in the pressure of territorial influence against 
 the independence of agricultural tenants of which I am 
 unable to see any signs yet unfortunately the remedy 
 comes too late. Immense mischief has already been 
 done, which can with difficulty be undone. The coercion 
 of fifty years has produced its natural fruit, has, to a 
 great extent, rooted out rebellious tendencies ; and the
 
 320 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 existing condition is much less one of unavailing re- 
 sistance to the power than one of contented submission 
 to it. The submission is, no doubt, an evil of a different 
 kind ; but, in the long run, and viewed in relation to 
 its permanent effect on national character, it is perhaps 
 the more injurious of the two. Even under the ballot 
 the recovery would probably be slow from that state 
 of degrading insensibility to public duties ; but under 
 the open-voting system, recovery seems hopeless. The 
 liberation of the voter from external control is the first 
 and necessary step to his perception of a political duty 
 and his appreciation of a political privilege. 
 
 Mr. Mill says that ' he is for leaving the voter open 
 to the penalties of opinion, but not to those of brute 
 force.' But why leave him open to any penalties ? 
 Why punish a man, or why reward him, for answering 
 a plain question according to the best of his knowledge ? 
 He is called upon by his country to exercise, in con- 
 junction with some hundreds or thousands of his fellow- 
 citizens, an act of the judgment to choose freely be- 
 tween A and B ; and thereupon Mr. Mill says to him : 
 We will protect your decision from physical violence, 
 but not from moral violence ; from blows, but not from 
 persecution ; from the coercion of the strong arm, but 
 not from the coercion of the bitter tongue. We will 
 shield you from the mob, but we will not shield you 
 from invective, or ridicule, or the imputation of un- 
 worthy motives. This seems to me to be not only in 
 the highest degree cruel and unjust, but to be in entire 
 contradiction to those principles of liberty which Mr. 
 Mill has, in other works, enforced by unanswerable 
 arguments.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 321 
 
 Mr. Mill thinks that ' the more ordinary operation 
 of public opinion consists in making the voter more 
 careful to act up to his own sincere opinion ; that it 
 operates through the quiet comments of relatives, neigh- 
 bours, and companions noting instances of variance 
 between professions and conduct, or in which a selfish 
 private purpose or a personal grudge prevails over 
 public duty.' I reply, that the friends and relatives 
 are likely to fall into great mistakes and exercise a very 
 mischievous influence by commenting on these things. 
 They are not competent judges of another person's 
 motives. The argumentum ad hominem is altogether 
 unsuited to the case. Let them argue A's claim to the 
 support of the constituency as much as they like. I, as 
 an elector, will listen to them patiently, will consider 
 all they have said, and will then decide for myself; but 
 I beg they will not meddle with my motives, of which 
 they can know nothing. Such interference is simply 
 impertinent. I am more interested in the preservation 
 of my political consistency than they can be. Take 
 the strongest case, that of a personal grudge. Does 
 Mr. Mill mean to lay it down that I am deserving of 
 reproof if I vote against a candidate who has injured 
 or offended me ? . Suppose I sincerely believe him to be 
 the least good of the three candidates. Am I to vote 
 for him in order to show that I am superior to the 
 passion of revenge ? Is this a fit mode of discharging 
 my duty to the State ? Mr. Mill is the last person who 
 would maintain such a doctrine. 
 
 Allow me to say, in conclusion, that Mr. Mill is 
 mistaken in supposing that I have in any instance 
 ' yielded to the temptation of caricaturing the argu- 
 
 Y
 
 322 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 ments of my opponents.' If I have misrepresented 
 any passage on which I have commented, it has been 
 unintentionally. I have either misunderstood his mean- 
 ing, or not clearly expressed my own. If I were im- 
 moral enough to play tricks with an opponent's argu- 
 ments, I am not rash enough to make the attempt with 
 such a writer as Mr. Mill. Something must be left to 
 the intelligence of readers. It might be said, for 
 example, that, in the present letter, I am misleading 
 my reader by not adverting to the fact that there are 
 large landowners whose tenants are holders of long leases. 
 But precautions against misconception may be carried 
 too far. No reader of ordinary intelligence requires to 
 be told that, when large landowners are spoken of in 
 connection with the subject of undue influence at 
 elections, the term is not meant to extend to those 
 whose tenantry hold their farms on conditions which 
 exempt them from the possibility of undue influence. 
 
 I am, &c., 
 
 HENRY ROMILLY. 
 
 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON MR MILL'S 
 LETTER. 
 
 An advocate of open voting has one great advantage 
 over his opponent, which is this, that one of his argu- 
 ments being the necessity of giving to the public an 
 opportunity of commenting on the elector's vote, he 
 seems to be in a special way the friend of free discus- 
 sion ; whereas his opponent, who denies that it is either 
 necessary or desirable to give the public any such oppor- 
 tunity, is presumed to be an enemy of free discussion.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 323 
 
 So far, however, from admitting the accuracy of this 
 presumption, I profess myself both an advocate of secret 
 voting, and as firm a friend as Mr. Mill himself to free- 
 dom of discussion, perfect freedom of discussion, on all 
 topics of public interest. In a State which enjoys the 
 benefit of Constitutional Government, there are no two 
 topics of greater public interest than the comparative 
 merits of candidates for the national representation,, and 
 the rules by which, either generally or on particular 
 occasions, electors should be guided in their preference 
 of one candidate to others. The more discussion there 
 is on these points in books, pamphlets, newspapers, at 
 public meetings, in private society, even in the family 
 circle, the better. The more people think, and talk, 
 and argue on such subjects the more likely is it that 
 sound views of them will prevail. Neither the amount 
 nor the freedom of such discussion is directly affected 
 by the mode of taking the votes. A man's being com- 
 pelled by law to give his vote in such a way that no 
 other man shall know how he has given it, will not 
 deprive him of eyes, or ears, or understanding. He 
 may read, and listen, and reflect, and ask questions, 
 under the one system as much as under the other. 
 Secret voting will neither stop discussion, nor make 
 any class of electors less capable of profiting by it. 1 
 
 1 In England, more or less, open voting does stop discussion ; 
 or to speak more exactly it dues, in a somewhat numerous 
 class of cases, render the mind of the elector inaccessible to 
 discussion on the one question on which it is important that 
 discussion should not be stopped by a foregone conclusion. I 
 mean the question of the elector's duty to the public. I have 
 gone fully into that matter at page 59 of the pamphlet, and it 
 
 T 2
 
 324 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 Why then, I shall be asked, if you are such a friend of 
 discussion, do you object to your vote being discussed ? 
 I will tell you why. I object to your discussing a 
 private question under pretence of discussing a public 
 one. ' Which is tfie fitter man to represent the country. 
 A or B ? ' That is an important public question which 
 cannot be discussed too fully and freely. ' Is JoJtn 
 Thompson to be praised or to be blamed for having given 
 his vote to A?' That is a private question, the discus- 
 sion of which may, in various ways, be hurtful to John 
 Thompson, and can be beneficial to no one, because the 
 facts which are necessary to a fair discussion of it can- 
 not, under any system of voting, be certainly and com- 
 pletely ascertained. To discuss it is, at the best, a 
 piece of useless impertinence, and at the worst a piece 
 of cruel tyranny. The merits or the demerits of the 
 vote for A may be discussed in perfect freedom, and 
 with all possible benefit, without connecting it with the 
 name of John Thompson. If you insist upon connect- 
 ing it with his name, it can only be because, under 
 pretence of passing judgment on his motives, of which 
 you can have no certain knowledge, you wish to control 
 his choice; to take away from him the right of private 
 judgment, which you conferred, or professed to confer 
 upon him when you invited him to give an opinion ; in 
 
 would therefore be waste of time to go into it again. It may, 
 however, be summed up in a very few words. When an elector 
 has sold his vote for money, or when he holds it at the disposal 
 of some person on whom his worldly prosperity depends the 
 publicity of the vote holding him fast to his wretched bargain 
 arguments founded on public interests are too plainly inappli- 
 cable to his case, and remind him too painfully of the degrading 
 position in which he stands, to be listened to with patience.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 325 
 
 other words, when you gave him the suffrage. John 
 Thompson may be a man with a good deal of moral 
 courage and in an independent position in life ; in which 
 case he will treat your comments on his vote with in- 
 difference, perhaps with a little wholesome contempt. 
 Or he may be independent in position, without having 
 the moral courage ; in which case he will perhaps be 
 worried or ridiculed out of his real opinion. Or his 
 position in life may be such as to place him substantially 
 in your power ; in which case unless he is one of the 
 small band of men who are ready for opinion's sake to 
 brave persecution he will of course, right or wrong, 
 vote as he knows you expect him to vote. 2 The 
 holders of the ' electoral-responsibility-theory ' call this 
 ' the ivholesome influence of public opinion.' It seems 
 to me to be tyranny ; the tyranny of powerful men over 
 dependants ; or the tyranny of society over dissentients 
 
 2 ' But surely,' it may be said, ' comment on John Thomp- 
 son's vote for A may be made in the spirit of a fair candid 
 appeal to his understanding, an appeal dictated by a pure love 
 of truth and regard to the public interest.' True ; but what I 
 contend for is, that his understanding will not be less open to 
 such an appeal, nor will the appeal itself be less convincing, 
 because its author (let me call him Verax), having been shut out 
 by law from all knowledge of individual votes, has been unable 
 to give to his arguments any personal application to John 
 Thompson ; and although it may not be in the nature of Verax 
 to deal with such a subject otherwise than in a spirit of truth 
 and candour, there are those too numerous, unhappily who, 
 when such personal application is open to them, are led by their 
 prejudices, their party spirit, their love of power, or their 
 private interests, to carry their treatment of the subject out of 
 the domain of argument into that of persecution, more or less 
 irritating or cruel.
 
 326 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 from prevailing opinions. No writer in Europe has 
 raised his voice against it so powerfully as Mr. Mill 
 has done in his admirable treatise ' On Liberty.' I will 
 quote one out of many passages, all breathing the same 
 spirit. ' Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the 
 majority was at first, and is still vulgarly held in dread, 
 chiefly as operating through the acts of the public 
 authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when 
 society is itself the tyrant society collectively, over 
 the separate individuals who compose it its means of 
 tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may 
 do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society 
 can and does execute its own mandates ; and if it issues 
 wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all 
 in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises 
 a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of 
 political oppression, since, though not usually upheld 
 by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of es- 
 cape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of 
 life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, 
 against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough : 
 there needs protection also against the tyranny of the 
 prevailing opinion and feeling ; against the tendency of 
 society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, 
 its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those 
 who dissent from them ; to fetter the development, and, 
 if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality 
 not in harmony with its ways, and compel all charac- 
 ters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. 
 There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collec- 
 tive opinion with individual independence ; and to find 
 that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 327 
 
 indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as 
 protection against political despotism.' 3 
 
 I am aware that these words of Mr. Mill were meant 
 to apply only to the interference of society with the 
 private concerns of men; but I say that they do in 
 truth apply quite as strongly, perhaps more strongly, to 
 the case of the man who is invited by his country to 
 give an opinion on a public question, and is told to do 
 so in perfect freedom. There is no freedom, if society 
 is allowed to step in and say to him, ' Decide so as to 
 please us and we will commend you, decide so as to offend 
 us and we will censure you.' Who are the people that 
 set up this pretension ? They call themselves ' the 
 public,' and their judgments ' public opinion;' but, in 
 nine cases out of ten, they are a knot of men, more or 
 less numerous, falsely investing themselves with an im- 
 posing name, in order, under the authority of that name, 
 to tyrannise the more securely. In a manufacturing 
 town they are perhaps the Trades Union Committee 
 with its tools and supporters ; who, without any breach 
 of the peace, or of the law, will contrive, nevertheless, to 
 make their neighbour's life miserable if he insists upon 
 thinking for himself on the wages question. In the 
 country they are, perhaps, the tradesmen, dependants, 
 and hangers-on of the great territorial magnate. In 
 the metropolis they are, perhaps, what is called good 
 society, backed up by the fashionable newspapers. When 
 an elector is told that he is responsible to the world for 
 his vote, this is generally the kind of world to which he 
 is responsible. ' The world, to each individual,' says 
 Mr. Mill in the same treatise from which 1 have already 
 3 Pp. 13 and 14 of Mr. Mill's treatise On Liberty, 2nd edit.
 
 328 PUBLIC KESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 quoted, ' means the part of it with which he comes in 
 contact ; his party, his sect, his church, his class ot 
 society : the man may be called, by comparison, almost 
 liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything 
 so comprehensive as his own country or his own age.' 4 
 The misfortune is that the influential world is that with 
 which he comes into close daily contact ; and it is not so 
 easy for the liberal and large-minded elector, under the 
 open-vote system, to induce his narrow world to waive its 
 claim upon him, in favour of that broader world which re- 
 presents the spirit of the age and country, and which, on 
 many occasions, he would prefer to take for his guide. 
 So long as he can go conscientiously with his narroiv 
 world, all is well ; but the moment he thinks that they 
 are taking a mistaken or illiberal view, and shows signs 
 of dissent, the party, the sect, the church, or the 
 class of society, as the case may be, is down upon 
 him, each with its appropriate weapon, which is very 
 seldom physical force, but very often something nearly 
 as effective. 
 
 More or- less, on some point or another, and with 
 different forms of coercion, the interference of ' collective 
 opinion with individual independence ' has existed in all 
 ages. In the present day, an Englishman may with 
 impunity sign his name to a refutation of witchcraft, or 
 give his vote to a dissentient from that doctrine ; which 
 is more than he could have done three hundred years 
 ago ; but he cannot, with impunity either at the polling- 
 booth or on the platform, make himself known as an 
 advocate of a highly popular suffrage, on the special 
 ground that it tends to a more equal distribution of 
 4 P. 35 of Mr. Mill's treatise On Liberty, 2nd edit.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 329 
 
 landed property. This is almost as great an outrage on 
 English upper-class opinion in the nineteenth, as the 
 denial of witchcraft was on European opinion in the 
 sixteenth century; and, although the penalty in the 
 present day is not bodily torture, recent experience has 
 proved that it may be something very difficult to bear ; 
 misrepresentation, the imputation of unworthy motives, 
 and a very general indisposition, amongst persons of 
 the same class in life as the victim, to put a fair and 
 candid construction on his language and conduct. 5 
 There are other instruments at the command of the 
 holders of prevailing opinions, not so effective, perhaps, 
 as misrepresentation and unfair criticism, but which 
 are not without their power; ridicule, for instance, 
 which, with a certain class of minds, and when un- 
 sparingly employed in the service of the same class of 
 society as that to which the victim belongs, is by no 
 means an ineffective weapon. There is no question on 
 which it has been used so unsparingly and with greater 
 success than on this very question of the ballot. When 
 a noble writer of authority, in an elaborate treatise on 
 parliamentary government, pronounces it to be needless 
 to enter into a question which has been completely ex- 
 hausted ; when a great parliamentary leader speaks of 
 the annual discussion of that question, in the House of 
 Commons, as of the performance of an annual comedy ; 
 or when the wittiest man of the age speaks of the 
 greatest advocate of the ballot as of a man who ' would 
 
 5 This was written not very long after the appearance of the 
 celebrated letter of Mr. Cobden to the principal editor of the 
 Times newspaper, in defence of Mr. Bright.
 
 330 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 be an important politician if the world were a chess- 
 board,' not one in a dozen, of the ordinary run of 
 educated men, especially of the young, has the courage 
 to abstain from joining in the laugh, or to avow the 
 desire which perhaps, to his honour, he really feels, to 
 weigh the arguments and verify the facts for himself. 
 The false shame generally gets the better of the desire 
 for more knowledge; and many a man, who is not 
 entirely insensible to the love of truth, will yet allow 
 his mind to settle down into a state of comfortable 
 acquiescence in doctrines which happen to be con- 
 venient, and which are enforced by methods which it is 
 so troublesome and painful to resist. 
 
 If the great majority of prevailing opinions were 
 well-considered opinions, on which any reasonable 
 amount of thought had ever been bestowed, there would 
 be less mischief in this tyranny ; but, unfortunately, an 
 opinion, even in a country like England, will often 
 become a prevailing opinion from causes which are, in 
 a very trifling degree, connected with any fair discussion 
 of its merits. It will have been taken up, perhaps, on 
 very inadequate grounds, by a favourite statesman or 
 by a newspaper which happens to be very much in 
 vogue ; at one time it will originate in a panic, at an- 
 other in some sudden paroxysm of national pride or 
 jealousy. Once established as a fashionable opinion, 
 it will derive new strength from the adhesion of those 
 who habitually take their opinions on trust. Thence- 
 forward it will be invested with all the power and 
 dignity of a great truth, and not one man in fifty will 
 have the courage to open his lips against it. Dis- 
 sentients will be talked down, or sneered down, or
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 331 
 
 smiled down. 6 Any one who ventures to oppose the 
 stream will be spoken of as a dealer in paradox, a man 
 of crochets, one whose vanity it is to be thought original, 
 &c. &c. Society, strong in superior numbers, will be 
 always addressing dissentients in the kind of language 
 which Celimene addressed to Alceste 
 
 ' Et ne f aut-il pas bien que Monsieur contredise ? 
 A la commune voix veut-on qu'il se reduise ? 
 Et qu'il ne fasse pas e'clater en tous lieux 
 L'esprit contrariant qu'il a re9u des cieux ? 
 Le sentiment d'autrui n'est jamais pour lui plaire ; 
 II prend tou jours en main 1'opinion contraire ; 
 Et penserait paraitre un homme du commun, 
 Si 1'on voyait qu'il fut de 1'avis de quelqu'un.' 
 
 The man of the minority, if he happens to be en- 
 dowed with great moral courage, will return laugh for 
 laugh and sneer for sneer, and manfully stand up for 
 his opinion ; but nine men out of ten, painfully con- 
 scious (like Alceste) ' que les rieurs sont contr'eux,' 
 will bow their heads to the storm and will each make 
 his little contribution to the apparent unanimity of 
 public opinion. 
 
 Even though it were otherwise though prevailing 
 opinions were always on the side of high principle and 
 good sense yet no one has so well shown as Mr. Mill 
 has done, the importance of cultivating in the great 
 body of the people the habit of thinking for themselves ; 
 of acting or of choosing on reasons conclusive to their 
 own understandings. It would be difficult to overrate 
 
 6 Let any one who believes this to be an exaggeration call to 
 mind the treatment which any person, sympathising with the 
 cause of the North, received at the hands of good society in 
 England during the early period of the late war in America.
 
 332 PUBLIC EESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 the wisdom of the following observations extracted from 
 the treatise ' On Liberty.' 
 
 ' The human faculties of perception, judgment, dis- 
 criminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral 
 preference are exercised only in making a choice. He 
 who does anything because it is the custom, makes no 
 choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in 
 desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the 
 muscular powers, are improved only by being used. 
 The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a 
 thing merely because others do it, no more than by be- 
 lieving a thing only because others believe it. If the 
 grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person's 
 own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is 
 likely to be weakened by his adopting it : and if the in- 
 ducements to an act are not such as are consentaneous 
 to his own feelings and character (where affection or the 
 rights of others are not concerned), it is so much done 
 towards rendering his feelings and character inert and 
 torpid, instead, of active and energetic.' 7 
 
 I may perhaps again be reminded that the exercise 
 of the suffrage is a matter which does concern the rights 
 or interests of others, and that, throughout his treatise 
 'On Liberty,' Mr. Mill makes a broad distinction between 
 conduct which does, and conduct which does not, concern 
 > other persons. I admit the distinction ; but, although 
 Mr. Mill lays it down that, for the latter kind of con- 
 duct, a man is not amenable to society, he nowhere 
 lays it down that there are no exceptions to the rule 
 that for the former he is amenable to society. 8 On the 
 
 7 Pp. 105 and 106. 
 
 8 Indeed, at page 25 of his treatise, Mr. Mill admits that
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 333 
 
 contrary, his essay is full of such exceptions. One 
 whole chapter is devoted to a most important class of 
 cases, which do, in fact, form an exception to that rule ; 
 I mean the chapter on the Liberty of Thought and Dis- 
 cussion. An article in a newspaper or a review concerns 
 other people as much as a vote at an election. In the 
 opinion of society the vote may have been given for the 
 
 ' there are often good reasons for not holding him to this re- 
 sponsibility.' He goes on to say that ' these reasons must arise 
 from the special expediencies of the case ; either because it is a 
 kind of case in which ' the individual ' is on the whole likely to 
 act better when left to his own discretion than when controlled 
 in any way in which society have it in their power to control 
 him, or because the attempt to exercise control would produce 
 other evils, greater than those which it would prevent.' 
 
 The case of the individual elector seems to me to be precisely 
 a case of this kind. He is called upon for a judgment on a 
 simple matter of opinion (the comparative fitness of two or more 
 persons for the discharge of certain public duties). Society has 
 no power of controlling him in any way which shall, with any 
 certainty, influence that judgment beneficially. The ' moral 
 coercion of public opinion ' can be applied to him in no possible 
 way which shall not weaken his powers of discrimination and 
 independence of character, and which shall not let in upon him 
 a coercion of quite another kind that of individuals or bodies 
 of men who have passions and private interests very different 
 from those of society at large. 
 
 I do not deny that, if the parliamentary electors of Great 
 Britain were a representative body, subject, at certain recurring 
 periods, to re-election by the bulk of the people, one of ' the 
 special expediencies of the case ' might be to give to the people, 
 through the publicity of the vote, the opportunity of reconsider- 
 ing the fitness of each individual elector to be continued in his 
 responsible office. But, inasmuch as this is no part of the 
 British Constitution, there is no such special reason for main- 
 taining the publicity of the vote in Great Britain.
 
 334 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 wrong man, and the article may contain doctrines which 
 are false or dangerous. One principal purpose of that 
 chapter of Mr. Mill's book is to deny the right of society 
 to carry their resistance to doctrines which they deem 
 false or dangerous, out of the domain of free discussion, 
 into that of personal penalty. How, without inconsis- 
 tency, will he maintain that right in the case of the 
 elector's vote ? How will he call upon the voter for his 
 name on the plea that it is necessary to protect society 
 from foolish or dishonest votes, and yet refuse to call 
 upon the journalist for his name, as a protection to 
 society from false or dangerous doctrines ? How sup- 
 port the right of private judgment, against the tyranny 
 of prevailing opinions, in favour of the man who thrusts 
 his doctrines uninvited on the world, and yet refuse 
 to support that right in favour of the man who has 
 been called upon by his country for a free judgment, 
 which, without neglect of a public duty, he cannot with- 
 hold? 
 
 The spirit of that admirable chapter on the Liberty 
 of Thought and Discussion may be expressed in a single 
 sentence ; Attack the opinion, but do not punish the 
 man ; and when society drags forth one man or a hun- 
 dred men from a list of voters, and holds them up to 
 obloquy or ridicule for some vote which it believes to 
 be wrong or ridiculous, society is, in truth, following up 
 dissent by punishment, just as much as when a Govern- 
 ment meets the argument in favour of some doctrine 
 which it believes to be politically immoral or dangerous, 
 by a public prosecution. I grant that ridicule is not so 
 hard to bear as imprisonment ; but I deny, and, if I 
 understand him right, Mr. Mill denies that punishment.
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 335 
 
 of any kind, in any degree, direct or indirect, whether 
 at the hands of a Government or at the hands of society, 
 can be justly or beneficially applied to an expression of 
 opinion. 
 
 If this is admitted in the case of the unsolicited 
 opinion of the writer in a newspaper, how can it be 
 denied in the case of the solicited opinion of a parlia- 
 mentary elector ? If society will not allow of anony- 
 mous voting, lest the elector should cease to be personally 
 responsible, on what principle does it allow of anony- 
 mous writing ? The risk to society is at least as great 
 from false doctrines as from bad votes ; and the doctrines 
 are at least as likely as the votes to be influenced by the 
 dread of what society has it in its power to inflict. 
 
 In conclusion, let me implore the honest enemies of 
 the ballot 9 to disabuse their minds of the notion, that 
 the question between open and secret voting is a very 
 simple one, which may be settled off-hand, in a few well- 
 turned sentences, affirmatory of the value of public 
 responsibility. The responsibility which attaches to 
 the performance of public duties is not always the 
 same either in degree or in kind. It is always such 
 as should be binding on the conscience, but it is not 
 
 9 By honest enemies of the ballot, I mean both those persons 
 who do not allow themselves to be influenced in the considera- 
 tion of this subject, by their knowledge of the fact that the 
 power and worldly interest of themselves, or of the class to 
 which they belong, is promoted by the practice of open voting ; 
 and those persons who, having no interest in the matter but 
 that of the community at large, have no temptation to consider 
 the question otherwise than on its real merits. It is of course 
 useless to address arguments to any one who is not honest in 
 one or other of these senses.
 
 336 PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY AND 
 
 always such as to make publicity necessary or even 
 desirable. The duties of a member of the House of 
 Commons, for example, are such as may be safely and 
 beneficially performed in the presence of the public ; 
 but it does not follow that the same thing is true of the 
 duties of an elector. A more important consideration 
 is this, viz. that the responsibility, be it of what kind 
 it may, is reciprocal. Society may charge me with a 
 duty of such a kind, that she may be .morally bound to 
 protect me in the performance of it. It may be beset 
 with grave dangers, material and moral ; and society 
 cannot, with any regard to decency, call upon me to 
 brave persecution, or to show myself superior to very 
 strong pecuniary temptations, in the discharge of my 
 obligation to her, when she is all the time ignoring her 
 obligations to me. 
 
 On the question of the kind and degree of respon- 
 sibility which attaches to the elector, and of the duty, 
 in the way of protection and forbearance, which society 
 owes to him, there is no work which can be studied 
 with more advantage than that essay ' On Liberty ' to 
 which I have so often referred in the course of these 
 observations. Not that, in that essay, Mr. Mill treats 
 directly of those questions ; but he lays down, with ad- 
 mirable force and clearness, principles, which must be 
 thoroughly understood and fairly applied, if those ques- 
 tions are to be rightly decided. 
 
 One distinction there is, which has been very 
 generally lost sight of, and which lies at the bottom 
 of the whole question ; the distinction if I may be 
 allowed, for shortness, so to call it between votes and 
 voters ; between the intrinsic merits of the vote per se,
 
 VOTE BY BALLOT 337 
 
 and its merits in particular relation to the particular 
 man who gives it. I am sure that it is as unfit to 
 discuss the second of these questions as it is fit and neces- 
 sary to discuss the first of them ; and that the first may 
 be discussed, in perfect freedom and with great benefit 
 to all parties, without discussing the second. It must, 
 I am sure, be plain to any one who will bestow a 
 moderate amount of thought upon the subject, that the 
 comment on the vote of the individual voter is neces- 
 sarily either one or the other or both of the two things 
 following ; either a superfluous repetition of the dis- 
 cussion of the general question the comparative claims 
 of the candidates or a discussion of the voter's motives ; 
 and that, on the question of motives, it is impossible 
 that the public should ever possess any such accurate 
 knowledge as is needed to ensure a just sentence. 
 
 H. R. 
 
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