Annie Besant

“ The ideals of conflict and of peace can never become identical, and while these two ideals, the ideal of the past and the ideal of the future, struggle for mastery in the present, ethics must remain in the transitory state in which we find it to-day. We are in the midst of one of those epochs during which the race passes from one stage of evolution to another. Happy those who, in the swirl of conflicting tendencies, can recognise, and aid in the development of, those that are being born, amid those which die. ”

“ Now, some degraded criminal is turned loose from gaol, rushes back to his old haunts, drinks himself mad to celebrate his release, drags some half-drunken prostitute into his embrace, and a new life is born of the union. What can that life be save one which while it lasts is stamped with the shame and the horror of its commencement? And so criminals are bred, and Society steps in to punish, but never to prevent. ”

“ Although in the social union no act of an individual is ultimately self-regarding only, yet society wisely only inflicts legal penalty on actions committed by one citizen which are directly injurious to the others. Thus a man who chooses to get drunk in the solitude of his own room commits a sin of the self-regarding order, and remains unpunished by law; but if he gets drunk in the street and becomes disorderly and a public nuisance, he then commits a crime, and incurs a legal penalty. ”

“ Responsibility means, literally, liability to answer; if a man, living in Society, injures Society, Society calls him to account and demands from him an answer. The "right" of Society to do so, is the right of self-preservation. Man's needs cannot be satisfied in isolation; he is a social animal, and his happiness can only be ensured by union with his fellows ”

“ Galileo to-day is honored and admired; he was a criminal in the seventeenth century. Many to-day hold views for which they are punished, but their views will be truisms in the twentieth century. All that the individual can do, in cases in which his own moral judgment conflicts with the moral judgment of the community to which he belongs, is to test his opinion by the calmest and most unbiassed reasoning of which he is capable; this is due from him as an individual to Society; once convinced that he is right, he is bound to hold to his opinion, despite all abuse and all penalty. ”

“ Where the environment is favorable to decent living, the child-brained adult is merely peevish or passionate, ill-regulated, illogical, prejudiced, narrow; the type is common enough, and, as might be expected, is more common among women than among men, because in them intellect has been more subordinated to feeling, and their education has been a mere farce. Where the environment is unfavorable, the child-brained adult becomes a criminal, hurried by his unregulated desires and thoughtless impulses over the barriers of conduct set up by society. ”

“ In other words, what is the responsibility of Society to the criminal? When the first crime is committed, generally in youth, and the criminal comes into the hands of the law, the first duty to him is to educate him if he be ignorant—as most criminals are. ”

“ When once we recognise the tremendous part played by heredity in the formation of the individual, and the dependence of the moral sense on physical and mental development, the question is certain to arise: What is responsibility? How far can a person be said to be responsible for his actions, if those actions largely depend on his inherited tendencies, and on the limitations proper to his evolutionary stage? ”

“ As barbarism grows towards civilisation, respect for human life is gradually developed; each man's objection to being murdered results in a general agreement not to murder within the limits of the community; and when this custom, or agreement, is crystallised into law, such murder becomes a crime. The recognition that the taking of human life is a sin is a plant of very slow growth. Such taking is only regarded as a sin in cases in which actual enactment has stamped it as criminal. Murder by duelling, until forbidden by law, was thought honorable ”

“ The tiger murders any living thing which comes in his way and suits him as food; the savage equally murders without remorse, but limits his murders by social custom. He slays the useless of the tribe, its aged and its surplus young; the struggle for existence is more successful when these non-producing consumers are put out of the way. Among some tribes murder is regarded as a virtue, probably by inherited tradition from the times when the most successful murderer had the best chance of survival. Büchner remarks: "Among the Fiji islanders the shedding of blood is a virtue, and not a crime. ”

“ Once again, Science bids us look backward at our ancestry when we seek the origin of evil.
The origin of self-regarding sins is as readily discovered. We may take as a type the sin of unchastity. The law, in the most civilised states, has marked some sexual actions as crimes; the word unchastity is applicable to all kinds of sexual actions which are injurious to the individual or to society, but ought not to be applied to acts which are really harmless to both, even though they be condemned by a tradition inherited from semi-barbarous times. ”

“ Putting the Bible on one side in our investigation, we next seek for the reason, or reasons, for the presence of sin and crime in our midst. The difficulty of the existence of evil in a world created by a good God is as old as philosophy; it has led to dualism in many forms, Persian, Egyptian, Christian, but it has never been satisfactorily answered by any religion. Only since Science has spoken has light been thrown on the reason for the existence, and therefore on the nature, of sin. ”

“ A word is needed to signify wrongdoing, outside, as well as including, the scope of the criminal law, and the word sin is useful for this purpose. It includes, but goes beyond, all crimes, and I define Crime as breach of a special kind of moral law, of law which is enacted by some authority and enforced by penalty. A crime will therefore necessarily be a sin, but a sin need not be a crime. ”

“ We have seen that the will is determined by sensation and intellect, and if we affect these we shall affect the will. Take the case of a man who commits a theft; his will is moved to the action of stealing by the desire to possess an attractive object, and his judgment being uninformed and his imagination defective, the desire to possess proves stronger than his representation of punishment following on discovery, and his balancing of advantage and disadvantage ends in pronouncing the theft to be advantageous. ”

“ This change in moral judgment, due to growth, to evolution of thought, is continually giving rise to conflict between the individual and Society. A man in advance of the thought of his time comes into conflict with it, just as does a man who is behind it. The criminal and the heretic have often been found in the same gaol, from the one being an unevolved savage, and the other being too highly evolved for his surroundings. ”

“ The trampling out of the weak will be a necessary incident in the struggle and the stronger and abler surviving, they will transmit to their posterity the qualities which rendered them victorious in the fierce fight for life. Thus selfishness, absolutely necessary to survival in the earlier stages of the struggle, was one of the qualities hammered into and welded with the brute nature, till it became an integral part thereof; an unselfish beast of prey, could such a thing be found, would have a very short life, and by no means a merry one. ”

“ If a human unit objects to live in Society he can leave it, and so escape from social control; if he remains in it, enjoying its advantages, sharing in its benefits, he cannot be allowed to commit actions which rend asunder the bands holding Society together. Murder, violence, robbery, fraud, undermine the social order, and must be prevented if the social order is to be upheld. Herein lies the justification of holding the individual answerable to Society for injury committed, and of using means to prevent him from inflicting further injury. ”

“ To the first, it should yield complete liberty, showing no displeasure towards, imposing no social penalty on, those who differ from itself in their moral judgments. Recognising that in the past the dissentient minority has often been right, and that all progress in morality, as in all else, must be initiated by variations from the ordinary type, it will leave all such free to develop their theories, to live after their convictions, leaving time to show whether the variations survive, being on the line of progress, or die out as useless aberrant types. ”

“ But take the case of a man in whom intellect is stronger than sensation; who remembers clearly the pain which resulted from some previous action, and in whom the representative are stronger than the presentative feelings; such a man will be guided by reason and judgment rather than by impulse, and, surrounded by temptation, the memory of his past experience will control his volition, and men will say of him, "his will is strong". The strong will is determined chiefly by intellect; the weak will by feeling. ”

“ It is idle to express horror at the annexations of the ordinary thief, and to express admiration at the annexations of the extraordinary gambler. In the court of morality the common thief and the speculator in Egyptian loans stand on the same level; both inherit the old thieving instinct; the fox and the gipsy still survive to rob the henroost, and people ask why theft is so common, when our progenitors were predaceous brutes and predaceous savages. ”

“ Unhappily, men to good for the trade often slip, or are dragged, into the army, and suffer as the civilised must do when condemned to live among men of a type lower than their own. Men of the savage type, who are not fortunate enough to be drafted into the army, recruit the numerous ranks of the "criminal" population. Their predatory instincts lead them into conflict with a society whose normal moral standard has been evolved past the level which they have reached. ”

“ Thus female incontinency has come to be regarded as a most serious, and male as a most trivial, sin. Even when it becomes a crime, as in adultery, sex decides the amount of criminality; if a wife is seduced, the husband may claim freedom from the wife whose value has been diminished, and damages from the seducer to recompense him for the loss; but if a husband is seduced, the wife can obtain neither freedom from her bad bargain, nor monetary consolation. ”

“ Legal enactment makes a distinguishment in crime on the ground of sex, and the public conscience, being formed by legal enactment, of course endorses the distinction. Morality stamps as sin any sexual action which inflicts any real injury on an individual or on society, whether the act be incepted by man or woman, or be done with the full volition of both. ”

“ The congenitally deficient brain is the brain of the low-class savage, approaching the brute, or the brain in which some part is wanting, rudimentary, or stunted. The possessors of these brains must inevitably be criminals in civilised society, belonging as they do to a lower plane of development. Where the intellectual deficiency is very extreme, idiocy or lunacy is admitted, and the sufferer is regarded as "irresponsible"; but where he shows any comprehension of causation he is held as a criminal when he disregards law. ”

“ All individuals have not risen to the same point of evolution; sin and crime are the relics in modern society of our brute and savage ancestry; sinners and criminals are persons who have not developed up to the normal standard of their own time. ”