THE BRIBERY SYMPATHISERS.
ACORRESPONDENT, who disapproves of the Bribery sentences, insists, in another column, that you cannot make an act infamous, by punishing it as if it were infamous ; and, on the other hand, that when any act is really infamous, you cannot make it less so, by punishing it with very light punishments, or not punishing it at all. That this general principle is true we earnestly believe ; and true as we think it, we only wish that it were more invariably and absolutely true than it is, for the quiescence of the individual conscience under the shelter of the countenance of Society,—say, for example, the quiescence of the conscience of slaveowners who had re- peatedly sold away the offspring from the mother, under what should have been the most cruel stings, so long as the approba- tion of the class to which they belonged sustained them,—is one of the most painful and mysterious of the moral phe- nomena with which the student of ethics has to deal. On the whole, however, we believe, and gladly believe, that you cannot by artificial penalties make a crime of an act which is not disgraceful ; nor can you by artificial exemptions from criminal punishment make a disgraceful act seem other- wise than shameful, even though certain bodies of men combine to commit it. But when this is admitted, nothing is admitted
that goes to prove the undesirability of punishing by law what is intrinsically disgraceful, what is capable of ample proof, and what is, nevertheless, only recognised as disgraceful by a sufficient social majority to legalise the penalties to which it
is liable. Our correspondent maintains, if we understand him rightly, that bribery, when it is directed to such a person as a freeman of Sandwich, is not in the least disgraceful, and can only be regarded as in any degree disgraceful when it is intended to persuade a man who believes one creed to vote for another. He might almost as well say that to obtain a breach of contract by bribery is not disgraceful, unless the person bribed to break his contract happens to be seriously convinced that breaking his contract is wrong. The social sin of bribery is grounded on the public duty of giving an honest political opinion as to the most suitable representative in Par- liament of the place for which you have a vote. If you have such an opinion, you ought to express it. If you have no such opinion, you ought not to express one which you have not got ; and the very worst reason you can produce for giving an opinion that you have not got is that you are paid for doing so, because that is a confession that you weigh the matter in a false balance. Until Society recognises that there are at least as sacred social duties,—duties towards the State as a whole,—for which men have given no explicit contract, as any of those which they have bound themselves by explicit contract to discharge, no society can have any healthy life. Hitherto, every one has recognised patriotism as one of these duties. A man who betrays his country to an invader has been regarded, from the time of Leonidas to our own, with a far greater horror than a man who simply refuses to fulfil an explicit contract to which he has pledged his word. The one is looked upon as the worst of crimes, the other only as a serious civil offence, which must be discouraged, if a society which lives by mutual trust is to have any healthy confidence in the promises of its members. And as it is a punishable offence to bribe any one to break his contract with his neighbour, so it clearly ought to be, as well as is, a punishable offence—and a much more serious one—to bribe any man to break his solemn obligation to discharge his public duty to the best of his ability ;—and this may, of course, not unfrequently involve the refusal to discharge it at all. A man who has no political opinions is as bad a traitor to his country when he gives an opinion that he has not got, as an engineer who knows that he has no real knowledge of engineering is, when he builds a bridge which, for anything he knows, may tumble down next day ; or, to come nearer to the exact analogy, as a bricklayer who takes a bribe to substitute bad bricks for good, in a building in which he has undertaken to place the good. Such a man does what may cost any man, or even a large number of men, their lives, by his corruptly bad work. And the political voter who hardly knows what politics mean, and cares not a jot whether Mr. A. or Mr. B. goes to Parliament for his con- stituency, puts in a bad brick to the political structure, where his duty to his country required him not to put in any brick at all, if he could not put in a good one. And if the bad brick does not always endanger life,—as it easily may do, if the corrupt state of political feeling in the electorate produces, as it is pretty sure to produce, an unhealthy state of public feeling in Parliament such as ministers to the taste of vulgar ambition,—it endangers, what is as important as life itself to the social body, hap-hazard, insincere, and rancorous party divisions, founded on vulgar self-interest, instead of on political conviction. And it is too obvious to need remark that, if the bribed bricklayer commits a disgraceful act, the bribing agent commits a much more disgraceful act. Our correspondent maintains that the true penalty for unworthy constituencies is their disfranchisement. That is all very well for small constituencies like Sandwich, but, as he knows perfectly, it is utterly inapplicable to large con- stituencies like Huddersfield. But besides, this penalty, though it hits the local evil, entirely misses the much more important general evil which we desire to remedy. That evil is, of course, the light treatment of this sort of obligation by the electors. We want to make every man feel that his political duties to the State are as sacred as his patriotic alle- giance to his country, and that there is a serious social treachery in trafficking in these duties. If we cannot impress that general conviction, we have done nothing at all. And we certainly shall not produce that general conviction by disfran- chising any number of corrupt constituencies. Every elector is really a political juryman. And it is as absurd to say that you cannot deepen the impression of what Englishmen owe to their country by punishing those who offer him a bribe to bias his
political verdict, as to say that you cannot deepen the impression of what Englishmen owe to their country, by punishing them for offering an ordinary juror a bribe to give or withhold a criminal verdict.
But then, it is said, you cannot punish disproportionately to the education of the public conscience, without demoralis- ing criminal justice. If you go beyond what ordinary men think right, juries will not convict, and will declare men not guilty whom they know to be guilty, rather than see them punished with what they think oppressive punishments. We quite admit that to be true. But we entirely decline to believe, in the absence of adequate evidence, that a penalty which Parliament has deliberately authorised,—of which the Judges have given careful notice, — and which, when in- flicted, they inflicted with the remark that it was " the least which they held it right to pass," is one entirely in advance of the public conscience. No doubt, the array of signatures to the petition for a relaxation of the sentence is somewhat startling. But then we must remember that there is, in a certain stratum of political society, an arti- ficial induration of conscience on this subject which does not apply to the community at large. We do not mean, of course, that all, or nearly all, those who have signed the memo- rials for a relaxation of the sentence, are indifferent to the moral evil of bribery. Some of them have, we believe, a pro- found horror of it, and are acting as they do solely from the feeling that when so many are enjoying themselves in perfect freedom who lreve done worse, it is very hard upon these men to be made examples of. And this we have never denied. Only, if this is to be sufficient reason for letting them off, when and where are we to begin to enforce the deep convic- tion of the people at large that this political corruption is at bottom a mean and even impious sort of offence, if we may call the ignoring of all the higher duties to the State impious, as the older races of the world, with less reason for it than we have in the belief of the divine guidance of commonwealths, used to do ? We are quite incre- dulous of the assumption that the public conscience is so utterly indifferent to the crime of bribery, as those who plead for a pardon of the bribers maintain. There are, no doubt, a great many men, in station respectable enough,— who, remembering like offences of their own, are enthusiastic for mercy, partly to make atonement to their own minds for their inner sense of their own offences, and partly from a sense of justice to their more unfortunate successors in the art of political corruption. But so long as bribery is punished only by fines, so long this class will hold its ground, and so long, therefore, it will remain impossible to punish bribery by any severer penalty without raising the shriek of protest afresh. We do not, as at present advised, believe that beyond this class which has itself dabbled in political intrigue, there is the least sense of outrage in the general public conscience at the imprisonment for a few months of gentlemen, some of whom have deliberately falsified their accounts to cheat justice, and all of whom have attempted to stimulate that disgraceful treason to a patriotic public spirit involved in the act of bribery. We do not at present believe that Parliament has made an artificial crime. We do believe that it has struck at a real crime, of which a considerable, though not a great, class holds artificially demoralised views. It is a base thing, a very base thing, to corrupt a juryman ; and the bribing of an elector is nothing in the world but the corruption of a political juryman, who, if he has no opinion, is bound to say so ; and if he has an opinion, is bound to express it honestly, and to reject a bribe for expressing it as he would reject a bribe offered to induce him to use fair weights and measures, when he was using fair weights and measures already. It will not do to compare the offence with that of poaching. In the first place, nothing can persuade the class from which poachers mainly come that game is property ; and till they so regard it, they will not regard poaching as stealing. In the next place, this is a subject on which. poachers distrust the fairness of the class who administer the law, since it is too often administered by those whose game is the matter in dis- pute. Neither of these difficulties applies in the present case. Most. electors do know, and know very well, that it is a shame to take money to bias them in the discharge of a public duty. And in the next place, they do not in the least dis- trust the pure motives of the Judges who administer the law, or ascribe their sentences to any selfish feeling. At all events, this is clear :—If the public conscience is not up to the mark of punishing this disgraceful offence as it ought to be punished, the law should not give the Judges any dis-
cretion on the subject. If Sir W. Harcourt should think it right to commute the sentences, he should at once introduce a Bill to abolish the punishments which he has been obliged to commute. It is playing the game of hypocrites, first to legalise penalties which imply social disgrace, and to impose on the Judges the duty of passing sentences which inflict those penalties, and then to remit them in a passion of sympathy with the offenders. If we mean to declare that Bribery is not shameful, let us do so with all speed. If not, let us not pardon those who have committed it, only because there are some others who ought to be in the neighbouring cells, instead of enjoying themselves on ample fortunes, and railing at the puritanical rigour of the Bench.
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