THEMORALITY OF LAWS AGAINST REGICIDE. T HE recent attempt upon the
Queen's life revives the old question as to the morality and expediency of special laws for the protection of the Sovereign. Why, it is asked, should any such laws exist ? If the Queen is attacked or threatened, she has the same remedy as any other individual, and why is that not sufficient ? So far from being less protected than other persons, she is much better protected, and there is no greater natural criminality in firing at a Queen than at any other human being. If the law is adequate for the protection of private persons, no further law is necessary for the protection of the Chief Magistrate, and the additional penalties imposed on her behalf must be pronounced to be either absurdities, or -vindictive laws, partaking largely of the nature of cruelties. We believe that this opinion in this country has become so widely spread that, if the law of treason were like the Mutiny Act, renewable every year, a good many changes might be made, and although the matter is of little practical conse- quence, every one being willing to protect the Queen, it may le worth while, in a dull week, to examine the grounds upon which the existing law in all monarchical countries really rests.
It is ultimately a law of public safety, and its justice or injustice rests entirely upon the moral limit to the right of the community to protect itself. That this right exists in some degree is self-evident, if the right of self-defence exists in the individual; and if it exists at all in the community, its extension to the right of slaying is an inevitable corollary. No lesser right would be of any worth. No nation could continue free -which refused to kill invaders, and if it is lawful to kill invaders who are under no contract to abstain from in- vading, it is more lawful to kill members of the com- munity who, in spite of their own recognition of an obligation to abstain from such acts, do invaders' work. -Guy Fawkes and his accomplices, assuming their intention, were not merely murderers, but also assailants of the com- munity, who added to a hostility which would, had they entered from abroad, have justified their slaughter in battle, a high degree of treachery. Their execution was legitimate, and would have been so, had they only proposed to paralyse Parliament, -say, by imprisoning or besieging, instead of murdering it. We cannot perceive, and we have tried hard, where the answer to this proposition can be, except, of course, in the dogma of non- resistance; and if it is true, then the nations are morally justified in making treason a capital offence, as is now done by all Repub- lics as well as all Monarchies. The United States does not protect the President by special enactments, nor, we believe, does France ; but in both countries, treason amounting to active hos- tility against the •State is punishable with death. The ques- tion is, therefore, narrowed to this,—is it lawful to punish attempts on the Sovereign as if they were attempts on the State, to inflict death, for example, in cases of attempted regicide in which, had the person assailed been a private in- dividual, the law would only inflict imprisonment. We think it is lawful, and that the only point open to discussion is one of expediency. Every State must decide what offence it considers to menace its own existence, and while deciding honestly cannot do wrong. If, for example, it honestly conceives that blasphemy endangers it by creating wrath in Heaven, not against the blasphemer, but against his compatriots (which was the Athenian idea), it has a right to make blasphemy a capital offence, and execute Socrates. It has a right to kill its enemies, and a right to decide what act constitutes an enemy. This is the principle upon which that most per- plexing of all laws, the law of military discipline, must ulti- mately rest. It is simply impossible to justify the execution of a soldier for throwing his cap at an officer, except upon the theory, obviously true, that he has thereby become an enemy to the State, that he has dissolved discipline, and so inflicted just the injury, the liability to lose freedom, which an invading soldier inflicts. The man is not killed for injury done to the officer or to the Army, but to the whole com- munity, whose existence in freedom depends upon the obedience of its soldiers to lawful commands. If the State has a right to decree that assaulting an officer deserves death, it has a right to decree that assaulting a Sovereign deserves death,—precisely the same right, and for precisely the same reasons. Neither right is good against the non-resistance theory, when that is once accepted as divine, ,but as against any other it is, we believe, impregnable. If the people of the United States chose to protect the President by a law making it death to strike him, they would be within their right; or, at least, if they would not, their law making it death for a private to strike an officer is a law of murder.
But then, is it expedient to pass special laws for the protection of Sovereigns ? We think it is, though not for the reason usually assigned. Such laws probably do not help much to protect them. On the contrary, they probably help to conceal the grand truth that assassination is only murder, aggravated by the absence of any warning which the Monarch can understand. It is like a murder of a blind victim, and that it is not considered such, but something separate and, as it were, above murder—something which a fanatic, otherwise honourable, may commit, and yet not be overwhelmed by shame—is due, in a measure, to the specialty of the laws. Thousands besides Victor Hugo deemed the erecu. tion of the murderer of Alexander II. of Russia " unmerciful," who did not deem the execution of Alexander himself " unmer- ciful" at all. If we could get rid of special laws, try the assassin, and punish him like an ordinary murderer, and suppress all extra feeling, indignation, and notoriety, we should, we sus- pect, protect the Sovereigns best; That, however, is as impos- sible as the infliction of inevitable toothache for theft; and if we could do it, we should pay a very singular and a very high price for the change of system. It is most highly expedient, almost indispensable, that while the world keeps Monarchs—while, that is, any country is not prepared to govern itself altogether—we should create on behalf of those Monarchs the feeling which is best described, though the expression is too strong, by the word " sacredness." A church is only a building, but religion is not benefited by the abolition of the offence of sacrilege. A monarch who is not respected, even though he is of the strictest constitutional kind, is a monarch made useless, or positively injurious, just as a standard regarded with contempt as a piece of silk is nselesa, or, from the sense that it ought to be followed, but is not, positively injurious, to the Army. It is in the popular sense that he is something more than a Magistrate, that he symbolises something sacred, that in him is in some way each of us, that insult to him is insult to each and all, that the utility of the Sing consists. When that feeling has died away, as, for instance, it has died away in France, the monarch is no longer useful, or at least useful only like any other person in whom is deposited a portion of the administra- tive power. It is vain, of course, to try to create such a feeling by external measures, but while it exists, it is, we believe, greatly fostered by these exceptional laws, and by the general prevalence of the notion, derived from them, that assault on the Sovereign is something other and more than assault on a Stipendiary. Something impersonal, and in a way sacred, is attacked in him,—a belief which, after all, is in exact correlation with the fact. Maclean, if sane, fired at the Queen solely be- cause she was, to his mind, the symbol of the community, which had so neglected its primary duty of making him com- fortable. Whether it is beneficial to keep up such an idea may be doubted, and will be doubted for ever ; but we have no hesi- tation in expressing our own opinion. We hold the Republican form of government to be the best, because it compels the com- munity to do its own work, and take upon itself the respousi-
bllity for its own failures, and consider, therefore, that Monarchists who claim self-government are not only in an illogical, but an undignified position. But we are perfectly sure that while Monarchy exists, the Monarch should be surrounded with reverence, should be guarded by special laws and a distinctive etiquette, should be treated in all ex- ternals with the respect belonging to the nation's representa- tive, as if sacrosanct for their sake. We should be glad, granted certain conditions of society, to have done with monarchs, but we are not glad to see them reduced into ordinary persons, invested with imaginary attributes, but, nevertheless, not re- garded with any special respect. A Constitutional Monarch is either a surplusage, or a symbol of something a good deal higher than a magistracy ; and it is, we are convinced, good for a community to recognise that fact, and act on it up to the very moment when it decides to transmute the form of its national life. Loss of self-respect never benefited any commu- nity yet, and the community which, calling itself or thinking itself monarchical, treats its King as " Louis Capet," and suffers a red cap to be thrust on his head, loses its self-respect. lts business is to decide, before that, that it no longer wills a King.
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