The island of anarchy: A fragment of history in the 20th century

“As for my particular, I am verily perswaded, that since that age (thirtie yeares), both my spirit and my body have more decreased than encreased, more recoyled than advanced. It may be that knowledge and experience shall encrease in them, together with life, that bestow their time well: but vivacitie, promptitude, constancie, and other parts much more our owne, more important, and more essentiall, they droope, they languish, and they faint.”—MONTAIGNE (Florio’s translation).

The ending of the nineteenth century, like that of the eighteenth, was a time of terrible and strange things, as if it were coming to be the law of human affairs that the sunsets of the centuries should be red with a “Terror” and dark with despair.

In England—then, as in the past, the refuge of banished men—social disorder reached a height that would soon have driven all her quiet dwellers to seek more peaceful homes on the other side of the globe, had not a new and strange thing changed the whole aspect of affairs.

It began to be perceived, and was soon widely acknowledged, that the cause of the great weakness and futility of our government lay in the advanced age of those by whom the most important offices were held. Age is wont to trifle, to take things lightly, and to study life, of which it can at best hope to possess so little, from a frivolous and temporary point of view.

“Things are well enough as they are,” say they; “a little tinkering here, a little fancy legislation there, and they will last our time; meanwhile, let us hear ourselves talk.”

The only wonder now seemed that the world had been so slow to perceive this, that it had taken the human race so many thousand years to discover a truth which now seemed as simple and patent as the converse one, that it would not be wise to entrust grave affairs to children in their first decade.

And so the younger men of England, by a sudden and united effort at the general election of 19—, secured the return of a House of Commons containing no man over the age of thirty-five, and no woman: (for women had begun to come in and to make matters worse).

This House of Commons, strong, in earnest for real work, and not divided by Party, that frivolous pastime of politicians who were too old for other games, passed without difficulty a wise “superannuation law.” And the government of the country, thus at last able to govern indeed, made the almost foundering ship of our unhappy State once more answer to the helm, and steered for that haven of peaceful order and settled rule which men remembered sadly as a lost Paradise or longed for as an undiscoverable “Atlantis.”

That laws are made to be obeyed had glided in those days from the place of a truism into that of a fallacy. It was the first principle of the new Cabinet.

To two classes this principle had to be made clear—Criminals, or law-breakers; Anarchists, or law-deniers.

Of the first of these we will speak first. It will now hardly be believed that there existed at that time in England what were called “the Criminal Classes”—thousands of men, women, and children known to be living in the continual commission of crime, as other people are engaged in commerce, husbandry, and the like, spending much of their time in prison, and never doing or desiring any honest work.

This state of things the young government set themselves to bring to an end.

Instead of progressing towards that universal slipshod leniency which the philanthropists of an earlier time had set before themselves as a goal—with capital punishment evaded for awhile and eventually abolished,—these rulers, with all the ruthless severity of youth, extended the area of crimes punishable by death. To those whose lives were hurtful to the innocent community, mercy could only be shown, so they held, at the expense of those to whom mercy, that is, protection, was really due. Not only all who compassed, or even attempted the lives of others, but all who after repeated smaller punishments still lived the lives of evildoers, were counted unworthy longer to live,—and this without any attempted distinction of sane or insane,—the existence of the latter being considered even more hopelessly injurious to the State than that of the former, and, on the other hand, less valuable to themselves.

But while the punishment of death was certain and frequent, it was no longer inflicted in the barbarous manner which continued, a ghastly anachronism, through the reign of the tender-hearted Victoria.

Those whose lives were forfeit were placed for a time—the length of which depended on various circumstances—in a place of solemn sequestration, to the care of which a society of holy men and women devoted their existence, and which was placed rather under the authority of the Church than of the State. The State, indeed, had done with them; they were already cut off from their place as citizens; it only remained for the Church to lead them with kind hand through paths of penitence and prayer to the door of a new life, a new hope—where this was possible. With some, with many perhaps, the soul seemed already dead before the body.

When the time came, surrounded by a serious company of the “Brethren of Death,” whose prayers and solemn hymns made the last moments beautiful to those who were repentant, and awful to those who were hardened, the condemned drank an opiate, which closed their eyes in a painless sleep from which there was no waking, while those about them still prayed for the departing spirit on its way to a higher judgment.

Beautiful histories were told of some who in the quiet of their cells, aided by the gentle ministrations of the Brothers and Sisters, came to see with an anguish of repentance the sinfulness of their past, and to rejoice in the thought of passing, sprinkled with fresh dews of penitence and forgiveness, away from a world whose temptations had been too strong for them. Of their forfeit lives they made a willing sacrifice, and they were glad to be allowed to lay them down.

Children who had committed crimes, after fitting punishment were placed in settlements where they were kept under strict discipline and carefully instructed, the rudiments of some useful art being added to a simple education in general subjects. Girls were trained in household work, and all, as soon as they were grown men and women, were removed from these settlements to places where their past was unknown, unless they showed themselves so dyed with their early habits and so resolved to return to them that this would have been harmful to the State.

In these cases, which were very few, they were treated in the same way as the hardened offenders of whom I have just spoken.

There were not wanting intelligent persons to whom the punishment of death for a misused life seemed a terrible and even a wicked thing. Yet, not only had such punishment been in use for just such offences in the time of Queen Elizabeth and of other sovereigns, but at so late a time as the commencement of the present century, war among civilized nations was considered justifiable, and the profession of a soldier was even held to be a noble and Christian calling. The very women whose tender hearts cried out against the new law would send their young sons away with their blessing to face death in compassing that of other innocent and unwilling victims in a cause for which, often, none of them cared. Those who thus perished in war, believing that it was for their country’s honour that they fought, were among the best and bravest of the nation—men to whom discipline and order were their very breath. Those whom the new law excluded from life were scarcely worthy of the name of men, and more hostile to their country than any of the soldiers of other states.

This then was the course adopted with reference to the Law-Breakers. We must now speak of the Law-Deniers. Anarchy, Socialism, free-land leagues, communistic democracy more or less indigenous, and every shade of Nihilism and Dynamitism introduced from the East and the West, had so long had free course that a large mass of the population had come to believe practically that might was right, and the problems of the earliest stages of barbarism were staring men in the face as the products of an over-ripe civilization.

It was true, and the young rulers recognized this, that much of the discontent of the poorer classes had had just ground in the indifference and selfish luxury of the rich, but that cause was already in great part removed, and in two ways.

Women as highly educated as men, and now wise enough to see that they were made for better things than the dust of politics, turned their thoughts to home reforms. Their higher standard of principle and refinement of taste led to a contempt for what was gorgeous or costly in dress or equipage, food or furniture, as essentially vulgar, or at best barbaric. Thus their quiet ways and simple attire left little space to be bridged over as regards outward show between them and the thrifty women of a humbler class, and that space was bridged by kindly intercourse, by knowledge shared, and by the ready sympathy which is the gift of the highest intelligence.

This was one great power for good. The other was the fact that so many owners of land had devoted large portions of it to sites for Industrial Villages, and even those who had no sympathy for the poor or enthusiasm for the good of their country, partly for fashion’s sake, and partly because these schemes proved not only useful to the poor but beneficial to the landowner, joined to aid the great work of withdrawing the population from the towns into the country.

The gradual disuse of steam, with all its dismal accompaniments of blackened skies and unlovely chimneys, allowed of almost all manufactures being carried on under healthy and cheerful conditions. On every hill, rows of windmills gathered the force which produced electricity and stored it for the use of the village below; while by every stream, and on every shore visited by tides, the forces of water were in the same way brought into a service which, being no longer intermittent, was of permanent and continuous value.

Thus the real misery of the honest poor in England was becoming a thing of the past, and the large class of people whose stock-in-trade was the discontent of others became at once more reckless and more dangerous when, flinging away all disguise and separated from those whose wrongs had lent colour to their schemes, they appeared under their true flag as the enemies of all law and duty, industry and religion.

The young Cabinet saw at once the way to meet them. Those who would not obey the laws of one country must seek a home in another. Banishment seemed at once the mildest and the most reasonable punishment (if indeed it can be so called),—not transportation to some special spot, but simply exile from England and from all British dominions and colonies—the Great Federation being absolutely united in this important matter—under penalty of death if the banished returned.