TREASON. T HE remarkable position of our countrymen at this moment
as at once subjects of a Monarchy and citizens of the most democratic State in the world, occa- sionally influences them for mischief. There are great subjects on which they grow puzzled, not to say bewildered, and in their perplexity see no way either of thinking definitely or of transmuting thought into action. Treason is one of the most prominent of those subjects. The mass of Englishmen have given up the notion that treason to a Sovereign is a crime, without fully accepting the alternative and indispensable notion, that treason to a nation is, in a citizen of that nation, a criminal offence. They cannot bring themselves to believe, as a multitude of Germans and a great party even in France still do, that disobedience to a person is either sinful or socially wrong, or that it is worse to attack the head of the State than anybody else ; and they have not accepted, like Americans, Swiss, and the majority of Frenchmen, the idea that attack on a nation from within is one of the gravest of social offences. They are half-inclined to think, yet in the fluid condition of their minds do not completely think, that neither act can be considered crime ; that for a citizen to shoot at his Sovereign is only to commit an attempt at murder, while to attack the State, even when that State is free, is no more wrong than to attack a particular Government, and. only becomes wrong under special conditions like those of soldiers, or when the deed is attended by any peculiar baseness. They would probably shoot a soldier who joined the enemy, if he were ever so convinced of the enemy's right, and they would. certainly hate a politician who sold his country—we never now say "betrayed his Sovereign "—for hard cash ; but they would condemn an ordinary "traitor," such, for example, as Mr. Davitt pro- claims himself to be in relation to the authority of the whole nation over Ireland, only for the inexpediency of his utterance. If Mr. Davitt headed an armed revolt, they might shoot him in the course of the business of putting down the rising ; but they would not regard him, as their forefathers would have done, as a dreadful criminal, and would think of his execution or close imprisonment for life as exceedingly harsh. The desire to "hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple-tree," which rose so instinctively to Northern lips, would not inspire them at all, unless, indeed, Mr. Davitt proved cruel, and the proposal so to hang him before he took up arms, because he was, say, advising that they should be taken up, would strike them as quite monstrous. The horror of treason, which was once as great as the horror of murder, has, in fact, died out, like the horror of atheism or of witchcraft.
We should have no wish to revive it even if we had the power, for we quite acknowledge that with the change of sentiment which marks our modern life, the mental condi- tion is changed which alone could justify the old emotion. Sir Matthew Hale probably held with all his heart the belief that a witch was a person who leagued herself with the Devil to defy God and deprave man—certainly that was the belief of the community he represented—and so believing, he was perfectly right in applying to witches the whole severity of the law he was appointed to administer.
But the Judge of to-day who, disbelieving in the possibility of witchcraft, sentenced a witch to death, would be nearly a.
criminal himself, would be quite one unless, as sometimes happens, he had completely persuaded himself that as Judge he had no free will, but was only a funnel through which impersonal Law issued its decision. In the same way, with the present universal admission that when sufficient reason exists insurrection is justifiable, it would be wrong for a community to treat it as they were justified in doing while they felt the ancient horror. Churchmen might as well send atheists to the stake, for community and Churchmen both alike would know that they were suppressing their own consciences, and helping to do acts which at heart they regarded as grave, or it might be wicked, oppressions. The arguments we wish to press on our readers are of a different kind from that, and will one day, we are convinced, be regarded as truisms, though they will for the moment be almost as unpopular as the older and sterner doctrines would be.
The first of them is, that although treason cannot be regarded as always and everywhere a moral offence, it is always one when committed without adequate ground. No true act of treason can be done without endangering the lives or the happiness or the prosperity of sections of the community, and no citizen can have a right to do one without adequate reason, as great reason as would justify him in similarly imperilling the life or happiness or property of an individual. We should all hold the man criminal who, out of wantonness or impulse or scientific inquisitiveness, imperilled the life or property or happiness of another man ; and a community does not lose its rights because it is a noun of multitude. If Sir Wilfrid Lawson next week raised an insurrection in Cumber- land in order to suppress the sale of liquor, he would be just as criminal—morally, we mean—as if he set fire to Carlisle in order that Carlisle might be rebuilt under better sanitary conditions, and would deserve not only punishment by the State, but the abhorrence of all good men. The insurgent, or the preacher of treason for inadequate reason, is precisely in that position, and ought in pre- cisely the same way to be abhorred. He is not only doing wilful injury of the gravest kind without reasonable cause, but he is breaking a tacit compact which, while a State exists, binds its citizens to help the community when in danger, and is so clearly accepted, that the man who does not fulfil it is branded by instinctive opinion as either coward or infamous. What constitutes adequate reason is, of course, a most difficult question, and one on which political casuists have violently differed, but there is one broad rule which seems to us to have only one exception of a serious kind. To justify treason, the treason must be conimitted on behalf of a large community so oppressed that they are justified in giving up life rather than con- tinue to endure. The slaves of the Southern States, for example, would have been at any time justified in treason, as was also John Brown in treason on their behalf ; and so would be any numerous class condemned to death or torture or an intolerable existence on account of their creed. So also would be any people openly refused justice, and unable without treason to secure that elemen- tary right. But we could never see that the Southern planters were innocent in their war upon the Union for the sake of slavery, and should hold French Monarchists utterly criminal if they rose in insurrection merely to change the method of their government. The first coup etat of the Bonapartists under Louis Napoleon was, so far as they employed force, a crime, and we do not see that, except as to its consequences, it was pardoned by the ple'biscite, even granting, as we should grant, that the plebiscite was honest. There must, one case excepted, be oppression to justify treason, and the Bonapartists were not oppressed. The exception is, of course, the conquest of a nationality. Much is permissible in defence of life ; the life of a nation is as sacred as that of an. individual ; and we are not prepared to say that if Alsace-Lorraine were kindly governed by Germany, yet could break away from Germany or defeat Germany, the Alsatians would be guilty of the treason which is immoral. In such a case it is the method of treason, not the treason itself, which involves, or may involve, breach of the moral law. That is the reason why we have always held, to the surprise of some of our readers, that the old Nationalists of Ireland who demanded independence, and looked to insurrection as their means, and who pleaded not an imaginary oppression, but a right to be independent, were better men than the Parnellites, who commit treason only in order to be governed by themselves uncontrolled, instead of by themselves and a nation whose joint right they acknow- ledged when they entered her Parliament. And, that is the reason why, if we could forget his approval of Patrick Ford, we should agree with the body of Englishmen in holding Mr. Davitt to be a better man altogether than Mr. Parnell.
Secondly, the present English view of treason is absurd upon purely social grounds. A community has just the same right of self-defence as an individual, and is just as much bound to exercise it. A man has no right to offer his throat to a murderer, or a community to allow itself to be dissolved or dismembered by traitors within its circle. It is entrusted with a function, and is bound to fulfil that function, the obligation involving, of course, the necessary right. It is bound, for example, revenue being a con- dition of its existence, to put down smuggling, and has consequently the right to do it even if, as used to be the ease in England, and is still the case in Spain, in the Pyrenees, it has occasionally to shoot smugglers in order to fulfil the law. One need not abhor smugglers particularly —though smuggling by a citizen is very like theft from a partner—but it is a duty to stop smuggling, and with the duty must be involved the social right. We cannot see how this conclusion is avoidable it there is any right to enforce laws at all, and especially laws, like the Educa- tion Acts, intended only for the advantage of the com- munity, and not commanded by the internal conscience ; and if it is not avoidable, then treason is the offence a community should punish first of all. It is an offence aimed at its very life, which .the community, is bound to preserve, and has a right to preserve, like an indi- vidual. The punishment may be as light as you will, and as little bloodthirsty as 'you choose—we ourselves should say that the old penalty of forfeiture was in many eases the very best, as it is always the most just, the order threatened being the only guarantee of property- -but it must be sufficient to prevent the offence, and make treason what it should be, an act to be committed by good men only on the gravest possible grounds. There was much of positive right as well as of political expediency in. the old idea that the man who advised insurrection should do it on peril of his head, just as he would attack an enemy in the field under the same liability. Nothing can be more wrong in a State, as well as more injurious, than to treat treason as a kind of eccentric political action, and to consider the man who would deprive a nation of a province like a man who was proposing an unwise law. The community might just as well decree, as Fauntleroy thought they had decreed, that a man could not rob his partner, or that to cut off a neighbour's foot or hand was, if his life were 'spared, a trivial offence. Of course, the present lax opinion on this point is only temporary, and will disappear the moment the community is alarmed or injured, as it disappeared in America during the Civil War ; but its existence even for a time is a very singular and a most regrettable phenomenon.
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