The Cr ime of Criminology By G. K. Chesterton Eprror’s Note.—England has no more brilliant writer than Gilbert K. Chesterton. He puts a punch in every phrase; every paragraph is a knock-out for his side, and yet every argument is a clincher, for he loves a peradox. In this article he goes after the NE of the most curious things we must all have noticed nowadays is that people will not accept a statement if it is made upon authority, but they will accept the same statement if it is made with- out any authority at all. If you say: “But you know it says in the Bible that palm-trees spread leprosy” (I hasten to add that it doesn’t), most moder people will not only doubt it but dismiss it as some old Semitic superstition. But if you say, “Don’t you know that palm-trees spread leprosy?” you will meet your most cultivated friends ostentatiously avoiding palm-trees for months afterwards. If you say, ‘‘The Pope tells us that walk- ing on our heels will promote virtue,” your hearers will only regard it as another ex- travagance of a dying asceticism. But if you say, without any authority at all, ; , you know, can be promoted by walking on the heels,” you will detect num- bers of your fashionable acquaintances making the attempt; those of them, I mean, who are in pursuit of virtue. If you say, “My religion says that albinos are un- trustworthy,” you will produce no impres- sion; though, obviously, you ought to, be- cause you speak for a congregation. But if you say, ‘‘It’s been discovered that al- binos are untrustworthy,” you will produce an enormous impression; and see all sorts of harmless albinos wandering about with a discouraged air in consequence. This is owing to the great tyranny of our time, which is the tyranny of suggestion. There never was an age so critical about authority. people who refuse the word of authority and use the gossip of the science of Criminology for the tyrannous purposes of jailing a ‘man under an indefinite sentence till he be “cured” —which is always a matter of individual opinion. But there never was an age so entirely un- critical about anything without authority. In this credulous atmosphere of ours a great many foolish and evil things have grown up, especially in that central matter of human morality, the relations of the body and the soul. If any educated man will lay down this magazine and reflect on the matter, he will admit, I think, that a great many notions about sex, type, breed, or heredity have at various times passed through his mind, and even through his lips, of which he would be puzzled to find either the first principle or the final demon- stration. He has heard, he has thought, perhaps he has said, that drunkenness is mostly hereditary, that half-breeds are always dangerous, that a bulging back- head means animal passions, that some kind of bad writing means some kind of bad health, that this or that inherent character- istic always skips a generation, and so on, and so on. Now I am not talking of whether these things are true, but why these people say they are true; and I repeat that it would puzzle them to say. They have not been demonstrated to them from the facts, so that they could demonstrate them again. They have not been given them on the authority and word of honor of any great man of science whose pledge they might take in place of proof. They are not even a popular tradition which is anonymous only because it is old and universal. You might say, for in- stance, that there is such a popular tradi- tion as that being haunted by a ghost is hereditary. You certainly cannot say that st58 Hearst's Magazine there is any popular tradition that feeble- mindedness is hereditary. Last of all, these things are not the connected parts of a creed or moral system ‘that a man might accept as a whole, and take the parts, he had not verified, on the credit of the parts he had. They are scraps of rumor on all sorts of subjects; and they often, if anything, contradict each other. It is upon this sort of floating debris that is being erected to-day the towering fraud and tyranny that is called Criminology. Its political meaning can be quite easily stated, and is perhaps best stated in an historical form. The French Revolution, whatever we may think of some aspects of it, undoubtedly cleared the air. It com- mitted new and crude cruelties; but it utterly swept away older deceased cruel- ties which had become unsupportable be- cause they were old as well as cruel: or, what comes to much the same thing, were never by any chance cruel to. the right people. For some time after the Revolu- tion there was in Europe a fresher, saner, more direct style of government, whether despotic or democratic; things were gener- ally known; public servants were respon- sible; even autocrats had to be popular. In short, the pure parliamentary institu- tion beloved of the eighteenth century was in its prime. To-day it is in its dotage. The modern governments have become corrupt exactly as the old French mon- archy had become corrupt; and with this very vital and dangerous consequence: modern government, being as corrupt as the old monarchy, wants to be as secret and as strong as the old monarchy. The Bastille and the Jetlre de cachet are as nec- essary to the protection of the modern pol- iticians as they were to the protection of the most profligate of the old kings or car- dinals. Therefore the criminal law must be amended—and strengthened. But as men never bring back old tyranny under the old name (for even statesmen have some sense) the restoration of this powerful en- gine has been attempted through the doc- trines of popular science. ‘This is the great new science of Criminology: its aim is repression; its excuse is investigation; its method is espionage; its weapon is terror; and its foundation is gossip. To illustrate the looseness of the gossip, I will begin with the key-word of the con- troversy, the phrase that is constantly bandied about in books and magazines, and repeated in paragraphs and portraits until it becomes a sort of image in the ind: I mean the phrase “habitual Now, before we go any further it must be insisted that this phrase is chosen because it is misleading. It is used as if it always meant one thing; but it is used as actually meaning two or three totally dif- ferent things—whichever things it is con- venient for the enemies of freedom to talk about. The phrase “habitual,” the idea of “habit,” is introduced to give a scien- tific flavor and suggest something like the habits of ants or beavers. But it can also be used, when convenient, as meaning mere- ly the professional criminal; as if we should say that the writer of this article has a habit of writing, or that his solicitor has a habit of soliciting. Lastly it can be used (and, as I shall show presently, is being used) as meaning the mere repetition of a thing at odd intervals of one’s life, as when we speak of a man as too fond of lawsuits, or as unlucky in many of his investments. In short, the term may be used to mean a habit of crime like the habit of stammer- ing; a thing that the man can’t help. The term may be used to mean a habit of crime like the habit of hunting or fishing for food; which the man won’t abandon. The term may be used to mean a habit of crime like an intermittent habit of whistling; a thing a man could abandon and is not specially concerned with, but which he finds himself dropping into here and there in the varied concerns of life. Here we mark the first piece of muddle- headedness in this business. Brown is a man of cramped intelligence and abnormal passions; he may be literally mad, or he may have only heavier temptations to murder babies than you or I have. Jones is a cool-headed and cynical man of the world who has come to the conclusion that he will get more out of life by the continual and dexterous enjoyment of other people's property; and that even one or two terms in prison, if he cannot elude them, will still leave the balance of the fun in his favor. Robinson is a very poor, worn- out, and distracted person whose life is a series of rather wild compromises about rent and creditors and the Lloyd George Insurance; and in this long course of shuf- fling and stop-gap finance, he finds himself on three totally different occasions, forGilbert K. Chesterton “The modern governments want to be as secret and as strong as the old French monarchy, and therefore the criminal law must be amended by the popular science of Criminology. the aim of which is repression: its method espionage: its weapon terror, and its foundation gossip”60 Hearst's three totally different reasons, just on the wrong side of the letter of the law. By an Act which was, to the disgrace of the English Parliament and the double dis- grace of Liberalism, recently put on the Statute Book, these three independent and almost accidental improprieties of the wretched Robinson will cause him to be classed with the criminal lunatic and the professional thief under this one shapeless and senseless phrase “habitual criminal.” In plain words, his punishment will be ex- tended atcording to the taste and fancy of his jailers, exactly as if he were the captive of Italian’ brigands. ‘Though the first is a bodily malady; the second is a moral choice; the third is an economic state of things. And they are all drilled alike, dressed alike, fed alike, and flogged alike, because scien tific men are incapable of thinking clearly about the word “habit”! It is the object of the Criminologist, of course, to prove that the two latter types can be made to fall under the definition of the first type. Brown is the medical criminal, mad and cunning, in the pursuit of a fixed idea. Nobody could possibly be less mad than Jones, who calmly calcu- lates his chances in this world, with a healthy agnosticism about the other. No- body could possibly be less cunning than Robinson, who is simply distracted and defeated all his life by things he does not understand. But those who are promoting the new police inquisitions wish to class them all as physiological criminals; and that for a very simple reason—that medical seclusion, unlike legal seclusion, can be unlimited. If you punish a man you must state what the punishment is. If you once start “curing” a man you can be as long as you like in finding the cure. So far the despotic Criminologist has it all his own way. But even here the touch- ing confusion of his mind does not desert him. The second great knot or tangle which we find in his train of thought is this: That even when he has got his letire de cachet and locked a British subject up for- ever, he sometimes says it is because the man can be cured; sometimes because the man can’t. be cured; sometimes both. When the Indeterminate Sentence was intro- duced to Parliament in the abominable bill to which I have alluded, I remember that its supporters began by explaining how much more humane it was to cure the faults Magazine of criminals than to avenge them, and how certain mysterious “modern methods” (which noonemade any attempt to describe) would turn bad men into good men in no time. But when Mr. Hilliare Belloc pro- tested that the worst wrong you could do anybod; +4 good or bad, was to remove him from all’ appeal to the tribunals of his country and put him helpless in the hands of individuals, the defence of the bill swung completely round. Its supporters told Mr. Belloc he was too tender with ruffians of this sort; that if they came out again it would be to follow their evil natures. Now this mental muddle is very impor- tant, because it shows that what the cam- paign aims at is not scientific theory but solely police arrest. The Criminologists practically say, “We want this man out of the way. Why? Oh, because a doctor would do him good. Something wrong in that? Oh, very well—because no doctor can do him good, then.” The whole of the new criminal experiment is like that. It is a game of chuck-farthing played with the public headsman, on the fundamental legal principle of ‘Heads I win your head; tails you lose it.” If any one thinks this exaggerative, let him consider the case of the Mental Deficiency Bill—which actu- ally provides that a man acquitted of a crime may immediately be examined by police-doctors as a suspect imbecile. The police say, almost in so many words, “We will try to imprison you for pinching watches, or piracy on the high seas, or anything that occurs to us. If you prove yourself innocent of everything, we will then imprison you for not being capable of anything.” There is no science of Criminology. There is only the very ancient art of tyr- anny—one of the decadent arts which come when statecraft has succeeded states- manship, when secret power seems easier than open law. They come like a tropic wind out of all that languid barbarism that has never had rights, or written laws, or clear courts of justice; where the master of slaves flicks an idle whip, or the Sultan gives wild sentences half asleep under a palm-tree. These are the fathers of the Indeterminate Sentence. Their violent verdicts are fulfilled and forgotten; they have never written a word upon the rock, “because they despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay therein.”