WHAT HAS BECOME OF ORIGINA 1 - 4 SIN ?
AWRITER in the October number of Macmillan's Magazine, who does not give his name, but who is evidently a schoolmaster, has been so struck, and perhaps so provoked, by the new disposition to attribute all the faults of schoolboys to their instructors, that he asks this singular question. He does not answer it very clearly, and does not quite perceive that it is included in a much wider puzzle, why the world has begun to believe that everybody is potentially good, and, indeed, actually good, if only other people would let them alone P Formerly it was believed by all the wise that the great mass of mankind, if not actually bad, had at least tendencies which prompted them to become so. A few persons, indeed, were admitted to be naturally good, subjects, as the theologians used to say, of prevenient grace; but the majority required training, careful watching, legal restrictions, and sharp punishments whenever they went astray. Their " in- stincts " were not to be trusted at all. Not only was education based upon this theory, but public law also, and much of the old social law besides, that institution being worked with a rigour which those of the new generation have almost forgotten. The social precautions against bad- ness were endless, one of them, for example, being that attendance at church was compulsory if you were to be con- sidered respectable, and offenders of many kinds were boy- cotted with a severity almost Irish. Now, the dominant idea is that all this rigour is needless, that the vast majority are very good, and that if you will only concede liberty and abolish restrictions, and allow everybody to govern himself according to his own inner light, the Millennium will speedily arrive. Fewer laws, gentler punishments, a general 1-gilne of love, are now the panaceas for all wrong-doing; and there are men among us only a little more advanced than the rest, who would educate criminals instead of restraining them, and abolish the police as a sort of insult to a generation which must, on the dominant hypothesis, be well-intentioned. The very idea that men are wicked shocks not only the philosophers, but many good Christians ; and persons otherwise sensible reply to the suggestion that without forcible preventives certain bad things would happen, by the remark : "The world is beyond all that." It is as if they honestly believed that the monkeys had not only developed into men, but into nice men, for whom law was unnecessary, or rather, to whom it was injurious, perverting their "healthy natural instincts." It used to be believed that impulse was sure to be bad—revenge, for example, being of all impulses the most frequent and ina:. perative—but now it is assumed that everybody will forgive. What is the cause of that change ?
It certainly is not any accumulation of evidence. Violent crime decreases in a few places—very few—mainly because a comparatively educated population realises the unpleasantness of punishment better than an ignorant one did, and also, perhaps, because punishment, being more lenient, has become more certain ; but the general wickedness of man—we mean, of course, his desire to be wicked when he dares—suffers no perceptible diminution. No one can take up a paper with- out half-a-dozen murders in it ; new classes of outrage, those with explosives, have suddenly become frequent; the work of the burglar, the swindler, and the thief never ceases ; and all over the Continent, violent crimes from sexual motives dis- tinctly increase in number. The police are strengthened from decade to decade in every city in the world. The growth of a new disorderly class, the " hoodlums " of California, the " larrikins " of Australia, the boy-roughs of our own streets, is a subject of anxious consideration by philanthropists; for those classes, not being whipped, are acting on their "in- stincts," which turn out to be inconvenient. Prostitution perplexes magistrates and the clergy at least as much as ever—it probably does not grow worse, that idea springing rather from its fuller recognition by the good —and suicide not only increases, but shows a tendency to spread among the young, and to be employed as a sort of defence against any kind of restraint. As for the folly of the world—that kind of folly, we mean, which suggests that man is neither reasonable not' good—it is as great as ever. There is not the smallest evidence that mobs do not lose their heads under acitement just as they used to do, while the fury of orators, the sort of fury which implies a defect in moral restraint, unquestionably increases with the admission, through the labour disputes, of furiously interested classes into the ranks of the articulate. Moreover, and this is the strangest fact of all, the best men of the new generation admit this, and are straining every nerve to increase the number and the strength of certain restrictive laws. There never were so many laws of inspection, all with penal clauses behind them. The good do not trust anything to improved human nature, but propose to prevent mothers from insuring their babies, to imprison fathers for starving or torturing their children, to punish those who sell liquor to drunkards, to fine heavily all who from selfishness spread infections disease among their neighbours. New rules against oppression, especially pecuniary oppression, are started every day ; and if the philanthropists had their full swing, the prisons would be choked. This means that the benevolent, and the experienced -do not trust the reformed human nature a bit, but think with the old divines that nothing will arrest cruelty, fraud, selfish- mess, and lust so perfectly as the equivalent of the good bard whipping of the elder time. Nevertheless, these very men in a great majority assent to ideas and proposals which imply that "original sin," the instinctive propensity of men for evil, is, as Mr. Lowell's hero would say, "an exploded idee." How is that?
The essayist in Macmillan says it is all the progress of science, which is diminishing the belief in personal responsi- bility; but we do not see how that notion works. Grant that free-will is an exploded superstition, and that all bad people are automata ; still, when automata knock furniture about, or steal spoons, or fire the ricks, they have to be tied to the wall as much as if they governed themselves. We nowadays hold homicidal lunatics to be wholly irresponsible, but we lock them up more than ever we did, so much that the liberty enjoyed by Charles Lamb's unhappy sister would nowadays be wholly impossible. We quite admit that the progress of science is injuring the sense of personal responsibility, but that cannot produce the theory that automata will be good if they are let alone, which is the theory just now raging. We are not at all sure that part of the change is not due to mere love of ease, a positive dislike to take a great deal of trouble, and witness much pain, and impede human life with a great number of precautionary fences ; but that will not explain the whole change, because it is felt by many who are among the most active, not to say the most fussy, of mankind. The true cause of it is, we believe, not so much the decay of the sense of responsibility, as the transfer of that sense from the individual to society. The spirit of collectivity has invaded the moral region, and good people honestly believe that it is the collective body which is re- sponsihle for the sinner; or, to put it in another way, that society taints the individual, and not the individual society. '‘‘ Please, Sir," said a drunken cabman to Mr. Montagu Williams last week, "Tworn't my fault. 'Twas my fare as kept giving of me drink." "Is your throat a gutter, then," retorted the Magistrate, "that everybody can tip filth into? Your throat is your own. Fined 10s." Mr. Williams, we fear, is elderly ; certainly be is behind his time. Men of thirty, though they would not blame the fare, would assert that the cabman's throat had been made a gutter by society, when the -collective body failed to teach him how to reserve it for pure water alone. He, poor man, was a victim of the social system, and society, in punishing him, was selecting the wrong object. It ought first of all to have punished itself, or, at all events, to have set itself to learn how to avoid making such victims. Influenced by this feeling, society blames itself, and not only does not believe that the individual is or can be tainted with original sin, but can hardly bear to punish him, even in self-defence, for what it deems to be, in truth, its own misdoing. It itself, its own organisation, is Original Sin, the predisposing impulse which makes such a number of individuals so disappointing. If it could only make itself perfect—an advance for which it trusts mainly to education, inspection, teetotalism, and high wages—the in- dividual would be perfect too, and even schoolboys woald betray none but good impulses, their disposition towards lies, for example, being the result of fear generated by the over- harsh discipline society has enforced on them. But for society, schoolboys would always be truthful, on the hypothesis, even towards their masters, and about their comrades. The tendency is towards collectivity on all sides, collective responsibility, collective improvement, collective ease, and consequently a decay of action except for the benefit of the collective mass, which must be set free because it has everything to do, and is alone possessed of the capacity to do it. It is a phase of feeling and thought which will, we imagine, pass, because, after all, every man is himself, and knows it ; but while it lasts, it will suspend belief in the ancient dogma, because society will attribute to itself everything which the individual does. "The individual dwindles," and society is all.
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