THE STATESMEN AND THE CRIMINALS.
T ORD SALISBURY said, on Monday night, in the House Li of Lords, that he never could see what possible connection there was between the diminution of crime and the spread of education. Crime, he thought, was 'a consequence of moral depravity,' and though you might change the nature of the crime by diverting the criminal's tastes and powers into new channels, you would not diminish the "moral depravity in him by altering the direction of his desires, and putting new and more powerful tools into his hands. That is a very narrow view of the noble Marquis's. We are very far indeed from thinking that crime is the mere product of circumstances and temptations, or that, by altering circumstances and diminishing external temptations, we could abolish crime, much less guilt ; still, no one who has studied his own heart in the least has any doubt but that with a sufficiently unfavourable variation of the circumstances by which he has been, not made, but moulded, the evil of which he is conscious in himself might, and most probably would, have broken out in crime. Does the noble Marquis suppose that he himself, or any other of the members of that distinguished branch of the Legislature, is so exempt from all "moral depravity that if he had not been educated at all, nor brought up amongst those who loved the ideas and pursuits which are opened out only by education, but, on the contrary, confined to the monotonous excitements which appeal only to the heart and the senses and an embryo intelligence, he would have been quite beyond the possibility of crime ? We suppose that scarce any of us, if any, are beyond the possibility of guilt, and it is surely a mere question of circumstantial advantages or disadvantages whether guilt passes into crime or not ? The Marquis of Salisbury himself admitted that though education could not diminish crime, it might diminish pauperism. Well, what a vast admis sion is that Can he assert for a moment that poverty does not make the difference in thousands of cases between that moral evil which never even wishes to infringe social arrangements, but may even worship social arrangements with something like a very gross idolatry, and that moral evil which attacks social arrangements unscrupulouslyas its most congenial task ? As far as we have noted the brilliant political career of Lord Salisbury, we think we can distinguish a very specific modification and mollification of his moral tone as a debater and critic, coinciding with the change of his external circumstances,—in the passage from Lord Robert Cecil to Lord Cranborne, and Lord Cranborne to Lord Salisbury. As Lord Robert Cecil he was one of the harshest and most browbeating of the debaters of the Lower House,—frequently and skilfully imputing to his opponents an unworthy class of .motives,—as, for example, to the party which wished for the Bill legalizing marriage with a deceased wife's sister that the agitation was simply founded on a wish for new opportunities of "giving way to the passions," and objecting to the "inexplicable bashfulness" of the clergy about subscription, that it could be due to nothing else but absolute unbelief. If Lord Cranborne or Lord Salisbury has taken wider, more generous, and more statesmanlike views in debate, has that nothing to do with the speaker's external circumstances ? If so, how can he possibly maintain that at the lower end of the social scale, where the moral chasm between pauperism and respectability is infinitely greater than any between the different shades of social distinction at the upper end, the difference between education and ignorance may not account for much more than the difference between legal innocence and legal guilt ?
For our parts, much as we respect the group of administrative statesmen of both parties, there is not one of them whom we cannot easily conceive, if born under less propitious circumstances, and brought up without education, as being liable, like all the rest of us, to fall into positive crime. Lord Salisbury, strong and able as he is, is undoubtedly a strong partizan, liable to very narrow views,—witness this utterance about education and crime,—and not indisposed to be arrogant and overbearing in asserting them. Suppose he had had no education, no means of living, and no social rank to widen and soften him, does anybody doubt but that he might have been one of the dangerous classes,—the very dangerous classes,—hiniself His slight hardness in defence of property-rights might just as well have been excessive hardness in assaulting them,—they come from the same root at bottom,—and if he had taken to burglary, none of the crew would have been so violent against the "peelers," or a bitterer stickler for his share of the "swag." His old opponent in the Commons, on the other hand, Mr. Forster, the Vice-President of the Council, had he been brought up outside the world of education and social amenities, though he would have been quite as formidable as Lord Salisbury,.would have been terrible in a different way. He, it may be, might have been drawn into a Trade Union, and on behalf of such a brotherhood have become a desperate character,— a terrible picket against the "knobsticks,"—an enthusiastic ra. ttener, a stern executioner of the unlawful laws of such an Ignorant and tyrannical Vehmgericht. Nay, if we may let our imagination dwell at all on so very delicate a field as the possible affinities of illustrious and intellectual men for different classes of transgression of the law, had they had none of the advantages which Lord Salisbury thinks so utterly without bearing on crime or "moral depravity," is it so absolutely impossible to imagine that—in another and very much worse world,—some disreputable double of Lord Derby, instead of taking a leap in the dark "to dish the Whigs," might have made his enemy stand and deliver on Hounslow Heath, on pain of receiving a couple of balls in his head, and ridden to York in some incredibly short time to prove an alibi ? or that some unfortunate wretch with a strange whiff in him of Lord Russell, might have been charged with feloniously placing obstacles across the railroad with intent to throw the up train off the rails, to gratify a grudge against some of the passengers ? Is there absolutely no conceivable world in which Mr. Bright might have been a prize-fighter, or Mr. Lowe a body-snatcher, or Lord Westbury a devotee of vivisection practised in open contravention of the law against cruelty to inferior creatures, or Mr. Goschen an accomplished coiner, or Lord Stanley a dangerous tramp and beggar ? Would Mr. Disraeli be quite unimaginable as a LeicesterSquare conspirator against foreign Governments under the guise of a melancholy pedlar of steel pens, or Mr. Gladstone as a promoter of bubble companies, or the Bishop of Oxford as a begging-letter writer ? Is no conception more inconceivable than that some alias of Mr. Walpole's should have been taken up for singing doleful ditties about the streets, with six starving children as his companions, and without strict adherence to history in his lugubrious narrative or that some smiling bumpkin, resembling a village Granville, should have been charged with turning his bonhomie to bad purpose in some country fair, by acting 'bonnet' to the local dicer ?
Remote as these superficial analogies may seem to anything really in the characters of these illustrious men, we feel no doubt in the world that they themselves, if they judge themselves honestly, would admit that they are conscious of tendencies which, if they had not been checked by the high dispersive influence of wide intellectual attainments, and had been stimulated by the goad of extreme want and misery, might well have led them into such breaches with society as we call crimes. We are sure, at least, that we scarcely ever yet met any man born with a nature so saintly, that under conceivable unfavourable circumstances the evil in him might not have been developed into crime ; and we are quite sure that there are thousands of criminals far less guilty in the sight of God than numbers of respectable and even eminent men of the world, to whom we all owe, and feel that we owe, a great debt of gratitude. When the Marquis of Salisbury talked in this rash and narrow way of education as having no influence on _crime and moral depravity,' he either meant what is utterly false,—that the mere widening of the tastes or opening up of new employments and of hosts of pure and healthy interests, has no effect in diverting men's minds from the morbid and dangerous veins of disposition that may be in them,—or he only meant what is something very different from what he said, that it is no credit to men to be kept out of sin or crime by happy circumstance,—that the respectability which is born of situation and the moral atmosphere around us, though it may be a fortunate thing for society, is no merit in the sight of God. That, of course, we admit. The ticket-of-leave man who resists a strong temptation to thieve may be infinitely better than the most popular millionaire who yields to a strong temptation to adultery. But though what we hope from education is not, in any considerable degree, the purification of the will, it is undoubtedly the opening of a thousand wholesome safety-valves for human energy and hope, which will divert men from the wish for criminal pursuits. That in all classes there is about an equal amount of moral goodness and moral evil,— using these terms in the strict sense of resistance to temptation and yielding to it,—we firmly believe ; in this respect we doubt if the House of Peers or Commons has much advantage over any equal number of men taken from the Union workhouses. But in all classes there is certainly not an equal amount of crime. Every one knows how much fewer middleclass criminals there are than pauper criminals, and how extremely rare the prosecution of any peer for positive crime is in our generation. Of course, that shows that prosperous circumstances,—of which education is perhaps the most important of all,—make the difference between crime and no crime. The Marquis of Salisbury should consider his worda
better before he imperils his well-deserved reputation for ability and statesmanship, by talking as if nothing could affect the amount of crime in a country which does not go direct to the conscience. The civilization which widens and tames men by no means universally makes them morally better. Still, it is none the less a great object to widen and tame them, if it does not make them morally worse.
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