Recrimination

“ But, in the meantime, are you, whom I have made judges between Petilianus and myself, possessed of discrimination enough to decide in any degree between what is true and what is false, between what is mere empty swelling and what is solid, between what is troubled and what is calm, between inflammation and soundness, between divine predictions and human assumptions, between bringing an accusation and establishing it, between proofs and fictions, between pleading a cause and leading one away from it? If you have such power of discrimination, well and good ”

“ If the discrimination had not been made—in other words, if the necessary laws had been reduced to a level with the contingent laws—objects per se, or without any subject, would have been fixed as the object of our ignorance; in which case materialism would have triumphed, and all the higher interests of man, in behalf of which of man, in behalf of which speculation so zealously contends, would have been placed in jeopardy: reasoning at least could have done nothing towards their extrication and security. ”

“ Having divided existence, then, into two distinct kinds, the next question is—to what account do we propose turning the discrimination? If it is of no practical use in removing difficulties and in throwing light upon the obscurer phenomena of man, it is worthless, and must be discarded as a barren and mere hair-splitting refinement. ”

“ Are your crimes against society less, that they are written down only in God's book of remembrance? Are you less guilty that you have been politic enough to commit only those that a short-sighted, unequal human law sanctions? ”

“ And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise. ”

“ Can it be that a jury of Christian men will find no discrimination should be made between them? Are the tempter and the tempted the same in your eyes? Is the beguiled youth to die the same as the old offender who has pondered his crimes for thirty years? Are there no grades in your estimations of guilt? Is each one, without respect to age or circumstances, to be beaten with the same number of stripes? ”

“ Give but the conscience justice, let common sense have but the slightest voice in the decision, and you might as easily attempt to gain a man’s assent to the broadest of contradictions, even to the admission that a part is equal to the whole, or that two and two are five, as to feel guilty for another man’s crime, to feel remorse for another man’s wrong-doing, to be penitent or humble for that in which we had no participation, or to confess the justice of punishment by a sentence which made him criminal before his existence. ”

“ Such are the ideas conveyed by the word prejudice; and I fearlessly ask you, is it a crime to impute to his Grace these notions which you yourselves entertain? Is he calumniated—is he libelled, when he is charged with concurring with you, gentlemen of the jury? Will you, by a verdict of conviction, stamp your own political sentiments with the seal of reprobation? If you convict my client, you do this; you decide that it is a libel to charge any man with those doctrines which are so useful to you individually, and of which you boast ”

“ I would rather stand the consequences of my first error, than carry it to a judgment that must disgrace my prosecution, or the court. We ought to examine these things in a manner which becomes ourselves, and becomes the object of the inquiry; not to examine into the most important consideration which can come before us, with minds heated with prejudice and filled with passions, with vain popular opinions and humours, and when we propose to examine into the justice of others, to be unjust ourselves. ”

“ Banish all prejudice and suspicion from your minds; apply your reason and judgment and consciences to the law and the evidence in this case, and I am sure, then, that these young men will be acquitted, as they ought to be. Remember that in your hands rests the lives of these men. Remember that one day you will be called upon to give an account for every act and deed done in this life. ”

“ My justification it would be needful to make before a much wider tribunal, for I have perpetrated an act which the whole conventional world have leagued together, in ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy, to denominate a crime, and I could expect little or no sympathy from that wide bar of public judgment that knows nothing of me nor of my surroundings, and which never could be made to comprehend my nature ”

“ To me, it seems eminently a practical principle, Annette. We must act, in all important matters in life, with a just discrimination; and how can we truly discriminate, if we are not versed in those principles upon which, and only upon which, right discriminations can be made? ”

“ Nothing is more vain, than, at a distant time, to examine the motives of discrimination and partiality; for the inquirer, having considered interest and policy, is obliged, at last, to admit more frequent and more active motives of human conduct, caprice, accident, and private affections. ”

“ Doubtless "everywhere" in Scripture the idea is kept before us of judgment in its fullest, largest, most natural sense, as "importing" not merely passing sentence, and awarding reward or penalty, but "discrimination and discovery. Everywhere that discrimination or discovery is supposed to be exercised over the man himself, over his internal character, over his meaning and will." ”

“ However just the original sentence may have been, the crimes and characters of so numerous a body must necessarily be very unequal, and it is desirable that some discrimination should be exerted in favour of those who show the disposition to redeem their character. ”

“ We must know why the discrimination is desired, to what end it is directed, and the relation between end and means. If the motive is vindictiveness, ensuing in mere oppression, the result may be one thing. If the motive and the end attained are the advancement of the public good, the result may be quite another, unless preference and repression go so far as to outrun the bounds of reason. ”

“ It even passed into a proverb that "the law was ended as a man was friended," and contemporary writers declaim against the mischief which men suffered "from the facility with which an accusation could be lodged against an innocent person." ”

“ What the effect upon society in general must be, of letting it be understood, that there is a crime which must not, or cannot, be restrained or punished, because peers and ‘gentlemen’ think proper to commit it, while the law declares it to be felony, we leave those to judge who know the power of example, and the aptness of the lower orders to learn evil from their betters. ”

“ A prominent Socialist writer has told us that it is necessary to “get out of the body to think.” As he explains, “that means that when a problem is before you, you should not let any personal prejudice, or class feeling, come between that problem and your mind; that you should consider a case upon the evidence alone, as a jury should.” ”

“ In vain may you plead laws and precedents; inferiority of race, or christianizing influences if that were possible; you cannot abate one iota of the crime you commit when you take from a single human being, however degraded or debased, one of the absolute rights that are the birthright of humanity. ”

“ To approach a subject full of a prejudice you have not got, but which, as a jury, you ought to have, and gradually by listening to your own judicial remonstrances to lay down the cherished prejudice you never really had, and still to let a little of it appear in the final sum you award—​that, I take it, is an attitude of mind not to be achieved without serious study. ”

“ The people, possessed of strong political and religious prejudices, were left in a state of physical destitution and moral ignorance, such as were calculated to produce ten times the amount of crime which was committed. ”

“ We must, if prejudice be not too strong, lean to the view that man makes the constitution he defends, and that it is the lethal agent, speaking as it were through him, on which a defense of all these agents, common or uncommon, rests for its support. ”

“ For the sake of these crimes and for the sake of these accusations, every man may well pause at the threshold of this trial and carefully search his understanding and conscience for any vestige of prejudice, and, finding it, cast it aside as an unclean thing. ”

“ The casuists have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed,–the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot. ”

“ And they who denounced it, and labored for its suppression, had not only inveterate prejudice and long custom to contend with, but found arrayed against them many of the strongest passions that animate mankind. ”

“ But reasonable men will see that the place, the age, and the subject suffer me not to inquire into the nature of such a crime. It would be too long and remote from my subject to show, how a perfect uniformity of thought ought, contrary to the practice of many countries, to be a necessity in a State; how opinions, which only differ by the most subtle and imperceptible degrees, and are altogether beyond the reach of human intelligence, can [232] yet convulse society, when one of them is not legally authorised in preference to the others ”

“ The Enquiry has answered all his Lordship's Expectations; the Evidence is clear, and the Proof is full. But for this his impartial Enquiry, made for the sake of Justice only, he is attacked by Calumny and private Prejudice: The envious Hint he must be interested in it; while others, whose Honour is as far beneath his, as their Abilities are inferior, wish the Convict guilty, that he may sink into an Equality. ”

“ The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion. ”

“ Their only controls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling, in every man makes a part of his nature. An offence against these is punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the case is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it concerns. ”

“ But after all deductions for prejudice, mistake, inaccuracy and every other shortcoming, there is left a strong, an invincible consensus of testimony, honest, independent and full of undesigned corroborations, to the development of the mind of all races in the lower culture along the lines here indicated. ”

“ Totally distinct, however, from this trifling with justice, whether it be wilful or voluntary, is the unconscious bias of each member of the human family due to race, religion, education, and character. ”

“ There would have been of course the case of the Strether prepared, wherever presenting himself, only to judge and to feel meanly; but he would have moved for me, I confess, enveloped in no legend whatever. The actual man’s note, from the first of our seeing it struck, is the note of discrimination, just as his drama is to become, under stress, the drama of discrimination. ”

“ If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former judicial massacres, but people of all ranks ”

“ See how, confounding the weakness and the folly of the human heart with direct and actual criminality, you have suffered the probable or the possible to usurp the place of the inevitably true; have been so carried away by prejudice or by passion as to sentence an innocent man!—see, I say, that your judgments are fallible and your tests are weak ”

“ In short, in my view of the matter, the standard that is in fact applied to determine right from wrong is to be found in public opinion, whether the community that evolves it is a savage tribe or the race as a whole. ”

“ Finally, it is our social sentiment on the one hand, and our reason on the other, which cause us to think that beings such as we should take the responsibility of their acts. Such is the principle of remorse, revenge, and penal justice. ”

“ I read again and again arguments to prove that criminals have claims and rights against society. Not long ago, I read an account of an expensive establishment for the reformation of criminals, and I am told that we ought to reform criminals, not merely punish them vindictively. ”

“ Even in the cases in which such impure motives seem absent, it too frequently happens that other influences beside a just and honest discrimination appear to have taken a part in regulating the distribution of public, favour. ”

“ Again, how can I, as a leader among my people, teach them237 to distinguish between the criminal and the innocent of their race so long as mobs of white men indiscriminately lynch the innocent and the criminal of my race alike on the barest suspicion? ”

“ Occasionally we patched up and varnished our reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones rattle—and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting notoriety thus conferred upon it. ”

“ I am convinced the chief obstacle to my success is the prejudice against 'rebels.' That is fearful, and I feel its effects every day. I was lately employed as a referee to report the facts in an application for the discharge of a prisoner by the process of habeas corpus. ”