CRUELTY IN EUROPE AND ASIA.
IN considering the differences, radical or aceidental, which divide, and, as we believe, always will divide, Asiatics from -Europeans, one of the most perplexing is the different estimates they apparently form of cruelty. The horror na,turalis for that form of criminality which undoubtedly marks English- men, and in a less degree all European peoples, seems not to 'extend to Asiatics at all. The Chinese officials constantly sentence political offenders to the most awful tortures,—to be dulled, for example, by a slow chopping into little bits. The King who ruled in Burmah in 185O habitually sentenced the 'women of any family whose head was convicted or suspected of treason, to be ripped up—the great American missionary, Dr. Kincaid, saw it done, and risked his own life by felling the executioner—and their children to be pounded up in the mortars 'used for pounding grain. The wife of Theebau, the King whom we dethroned, is said to have delivered fearful sentences, 'which we do not recount because the evidence is still so imperfect and so impaired by the wish to attribute extra ,cruelty to a dethroned House. The charge against the late Guicowar of having offenders stamped to death by elephants, -appears however to be true ; while every traveller in Persia =relates horrible stories of brigands and others being built -alive into stone walls, the head alone protruding. Jung Buhadoor, we all know, shot with his own hands a large com- Tany of his opponents beguiled into a royal hail; and only within this month telegrams have been received asserting -that the Khan of Khelat had slain three thousand of his sub- jects—not in battle—and had "murdered" sixty-five persons of distinction, including five of his own wives, and. had in con- sequence been deposed by the Government of India. There are scores of such stories, most of them true ; and the point we wish to discuss is why punishment so seldom follows from within? 'Why do not the people depose these bloodthirsty rulers for themselves? It is certainly not because they are afraid. Nobody is, or can be, braver than a Mahratta or a Persian. 'They insurrect, if they are moved to insurrect, whenever they 'choose, often, as in the Bab insurrection, when they have no chance at all ; and must be aware that they are giving their lives for a cause lost beyond redemption. Nor is it because insurrection is hopeless. In most of the countries specified, and, indeed, in all countries throughout Asia except -Turkey and, of late years, China, the armed people, if in .earnest, could master their rulers speedily enough ; while, in -all, if the army rebelled, the Sovereigns would have no alterna- tives but submission, flight, or suicide. Yet popular insurrec- tion against cruelty is an, unheard-of event. The truth is, the .people do not care; and the point we want to arrive at is the ulti- mate reason why. Is it that they feel some singular indifference -to the murder of others, or that they are inherently callous, or that cruelty in some inexplicable way rather contents than horrifies them? All these explanations so constantly put • forward are in a measure true, but behind them all is another .probably more potent than them all put together. That Asiatics regard life differently from Europeans is, of course, a Patent fact. If it were not, all Asiatics could not have -adopted creeds in which contempt for life, amounting often to a distaste for separate consciousness, is a cardinal dogma. The Buddhist and the Hindoo alike base their creeds upon the latter feeling ; while the Mahommedans, without exception, hold death for the faith the one direct passport to immortal bliss. It is also true that Asiatics are callous, lacking that side of the imagination which we call sympathy, and which has become so dominant among ourselves, that we are apt to for- get how comparatively recent its development has been. It is not two hundred years since Englishmen allowed untried prisoners to die of typhoidal disease, produced by starvation and neglect ; not twenty years since Englishmen across the water maintained the Black Code ; and not two months or two days since the same people in the Western. States defended and practised burning alive as the fitting penalty for strongly suspected rape. Sympathy is still imperfect even among White men ; and in Asia, with individual exceptions of the most extraordinary kind— inexplicable, indeed, if there be no such thing as prevenient grace—sympathy has yet to be born. Nor should we deny that among Asiatics cruelty, and especially cruelty in putting to death, did excite a certain kind of admira- tion as a conspicuous and unmistakable exhibition of energy. Mr. Morier, who probably understood Persians as no other European ever understood them, takes great pains in all his books to assert and reassert this trait in Persian character ; and it comes out strongly in the Sikh admiration for Runjeet Singh, and the Afghan reverence for Abdurrahman Khan. Still, after making these admis- sions, there remains something else ; which is this. The Asiatic substitute for law is the will of the ruler, a will which, believing that power comes from God, he reverences even in his thoughts. We are apt to think that be only submits to a tyranny which he cannot help ; but, as a matter of fact, when he can help it, he does not do it. There have been more revolutions in Asia than in Europe ; but there has never been a case in which the brown man or the yellow man has de- prived his new ruler of the power of inflicting death by fiat. He regards his will as law in its true sense, and is no more offended when he orders executions than the Frenchman was offended when traitors were broken on the wheel, than the Spaniard was offended when relapsed heretics were burned, or than Englishmen were offended when criminals were hanged for larceny or breaches of the revenue law. The law, as the Asiatic understands it, has sentenced those whom the Sovereign dooms, and he is satisfied, even though the law, in its severity or capriciousness, should threaten himself. So may the lightning or the smallpox ; yet both of them are the manifestations of a will that cannot err, resistance to which is futile and, in some sense, impious. It is not that he approves murder, or does not fear murder. He sets up governments, and pays taxes first of all to be pro- tected against murder ; but when the murderer is the ruler he submits, as we submit to law. We are not sure whether the same sentiment, though it sprang from a different origin, did not once prevail in Europe,—whether, that is, the Roman did not hold the murderous fury of an Emperor like Nero or Valentinian to be a legal fury, something which, proceeding from the rightful possessor of the dictatorship, became from that fad alone legally right and incontestable. We do not find that Romans bore wrongs from each other, much less murders, without complaint, nor were they always cowed by the Pra3torians.
Why the brown man and the yellow man thus exalts the ruler's will is, we confess, still to us a nearly unsolved mystery. It is not altogether because he is Asiatic, for the average Russian—who is as purely White as we are, that talk of his Tartar origin having no historic basis—did it too, and regarded Ivan the Terrible as a Monarch of singular force of character and ability. Nor is it from any deficiency of intelligence. The Asiatic restrains the Monarch completely upon the points he chooses—religion, for instance, and general taxation—and he not only comprehends a regime of written law, but he is of all men the most ready to take advantage of it. Only he never likes it ; and from the days of Saul to the days of Rajah. Brooke, whenever he has accepted a King, he has wished his authority to be unrestrained. He will change the ruler if he is intolerable, but he never chains him,—though he oould chain him easily enough, ordering him to ' respect his subjects' lives as he respects their religious ceremonials. The Asiatic says himself—or at least we have heard a great Asiatic thinker say so a hundred times—that a regime of law is a regime of injustice, that no law can meet individual oases ; and that, in particular, no law can be constructed so as to reward the good, which is half the work to be accomplished. But we are not sure that this is his real belief. The religious law is open to precisely the same objections; yet he reverences that and reduces it to writing, and in most countries invents a "case book" for its further application and explana- tion. We suspect he is much more influenced in his strange practice, from which in three thousand years he has never deviated, by a wish to make the State as like the universe as he can—the universe which is controlled by some irresponsible, self-depending deity or spirit or fate, whose will, as seen in action, it is often impossible to explain. The bolt strikes the tiger or the lamb; and as is the bolt, so is the will of the ruler strong enough to keepihis throne. The fact that the lamb is dead is no argument against the system of the universe ; it is only an argument that we do not understand it. We all acknowledge that in theory ; but with the Asiatic his theory is a practical guide in life, and he no more considers his ruler's cruelty immoral, unless indeed specially directed against himself, than he considers the earthquake or the flood.
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