7 MAY 1864, Page 9

BELLIGERENT COMPASSION.

THERE are few things more interesting in the economy of nature than to study how in different men the same nutri- ment will nourish exactly opposite constitutional peculiarities ; nay, how sometimes the food which in almost all other persons promotes one habit of body or mind shall be made subservient to a habit of body or mind precisely opposite by the predominant assimilative peculiarities of an individual constitution. Thus exactly the same class of views which in such good men as the late Joseph Sturge tended to what we may call moral pulp, tend in Mr. Bright to militant muscle and belligerent passion. Mr. Gilpin secretes conciliatory suavity and mild fleecy feelings on exactly the same moral creed which in the member for Birmingham nerves the haughty arm of a modern Romulus against any one who dares to jump over the low wall of his political logic. Of cubs suckled on the same milk one will show that the milk has been a mere conductor for the savage hereditary nature of the breed, the other that the mother's breast has transmitted to the offspring no- thing but the temporary softness of the maternal love. So the Quaker Creed, which seems to have in it something of almost emasculating gentleness, is capable of yielding iron to the muscle and ruthless audacity to the purpose of one who values his religious inheritance chiefly as an opportunity for waging war on the authoritative doc- trines received in high places. It was very curious to note in the debate on capital punishments on Tuesday night how Mr. Bright's soft compassion for criminals under sentence of death became in his hands a formidable missile for the assault on English manners, law, authority, and justice. Shakespeare likens mercy to a gentle rain dropping on the thirsty soil :—

" The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven Upon the place beneath."

Looking at the use Mr. Bright makes of it, it would be nearer the mark to liken # to snowflakes which he catches before they drop " upon the place beneath," and strains in his powerful grasp into the hardest of snowballs, to hurl with all his force against the authorities above. We do not mean to deny that Mr. Bright does really pity the "poor wretches," as he oils them, whom the law "barbarously strangles ;" but the impression produced upon all who hear and read him is that his pity never dissolves itself in genuine sorrow for them, but that he sees from the first in these poor strangled corpses and in "the scaffold and the gallows," cheap offensiveweapons forbombarding the law and wounding the Govern- ment, rather than final causes of grief and objects of commiseration. Mr. Bright's tears over condemned criminals are scarcely formed before they are crystallized into a plague of hail for the Secretary who permits their execution.

Pity has habitually made its objects feel a little sore, from the time, we suppose, when the Psalmist deprecated a too liberal allowance of it even from the righteous lest their "precious balms" should "break his head," to the present day. But it is chiefly in politics that it has been found available as a reflected blow at a third power, and we never remember to have heard any one who achieves more successfully and unconsciously this art of cannoning, as it were, against the miserable the ball ultimately meant to strike the great and powerful, than Mr. Bright. Does Mr. Bright's pity for the wretched spring from his grudge against the mighty, or does his grudge against the mighty spring from his pity for the wretched? It would be hard to say ; but, as with all other tribunes of the people, we imagine that his ruling feeling has always been a burning desire to cast down the dominant, to smite the haughty to the ground, to bring low the pride of aristocratic government ; and that this ruling feeling oftener catches at the hope of doing this by awakening sympathy for the miserable, than is itself startled into life by the intensity and vigilance of that sym-

pathy. The gi eatest defect, however, of this kind of belligerent compassion is that, sincere as it no doubt is in Mr. Bright's and many other cases, it is apt to lose sight of the object of compassion in the deeper interest of the campaign to which that compassion. is subordinate. When, for example, Mr. Bright is so eager in his attack on the " barbarity " of English criminal law that he holds up to our admiration and imitation the lenity of Russia, where criminals are so seldom executed, he seems to us utterly to have forgotten his clients, the unhappy " wretches " who are "strangled" every year, in the fervour of his onset. Surely these unhappy wretches would not prefer a life of captivity in the freezing mines of Siberia to capital punishment. Surely it would not inspire that deeper reverence for human life of which he speaks, if we punished those who destroy it by a chronic torture far from every civilizing or humanizing influence, instead of terminating their existence at once. If the Russian punishment is more effective than capital punishment, we suspect it is because it is more dread- ful and more dreaded, not because it proceeds from a deeper "reverence for human life." The satisfaction of representing English law as more "barbarous" than that of a half-barbarous country has led Mr. Bright quite away from his attitude of sympathy with the sufferers. In exactly the same fashion he uses his compassion for the fate of the criminal to heighten the con- trast with the indurated hearts of the judges and the Home Secre- tary, who can still endure to justify and inflict what ought to give them so much pain. Speaking of the times when capital punish- ment was commoner, he says, "If you turn back to the Secre- taries of State, or to the judges, or even the bishops of those times, you will find that they used just the same sort of arguments in favour of the barbarism in which they were concerned as the right hon. gentleman—forced, I suppose, by the necessities of his office—has used to-night. Why, after all that the right hon. gentleman has gone through in these painful cases, I wonder almost that he has not been driven stark mad many a time—at any rate I wonder that his experience has not driven him to rise at that table and propose, under the solemn feeling with which he must often have been impressed, that this House should take into consideration whether this evil, as I hold it to be, might not be put an end to ?" No doubt that is spoken with sincere sympathy for the sufferers, but the insinuation that judges and Home Secretaries must be very flinty-hearted to discharge their duties quietly, is certainly even more conspicuous in the st ntence than com-

passion itself. Again, the judges have "been in all times past,—

not all of them, but a majority of them,—generally opposed to an amelioration of our criminal code." And Mr. Bright speaks irreverently and quite irrelevantly also of their wigs. He cer- tainly has no dislike to "smite friendly" and "reprove,"—nay, more, his "precious balms" do unquestionably break the heads of his pupils.

One of the most curious features about this kind of compassion, which seems to come out strongest when it ministers to the stimulus of a strong indignation, is that it generally implies a very much lower degree of practical insight into the situation of the persons compassionated than the more common-place pity which centres in the object of pity. We do not mean to repeat that sneer of Can- ning's at the democratic rage against oppression, which he ex- pressed so happily in the conversation between the "Friend of Humanity" and the needy " Knife-grinder :"—

" Have you not road the rights of man by Tom Paine? Drops of compassion glisten on my eyelids, Ready to fall as soon as you have told your Pitiful story."

In that sense it would be most unjust to call Mr. Bright a "friend of humanity." But it is true that the kind of pity which always contains an arriere pensie of indignation in it, the kind of pity which turns quickly to wrath, and very eloquent wrath too, seldom enters very deeply into the practical condition either of the object of pity or of the object of wrath. Mr. Bright's pity for the wretched always seems a warm and even passionate feeling ; his wrath with the oppressor is still warmer and more passionate, but he never seems to us to enter really into the heart of either's situa- tion. Indeed, political passions are all more or less abstract, and when they occupy a large part of a man's mind, we may be sure that the characters of men are rather classified under general heads in that man's mind than understood in detail. This is, we think, eminently true of Mr. Bright. His pity would not, indeed, be less if he entered more thoroughly into the moral situation of those whom he pities, it would probably be much greater, but it would not be near so stimulating to his anger. Political animosities are in his case certainly consistent with a vivid imagination, but never with a really penetrating imagination

Directly you get beneath the surface of the position you see so much which won't admit of any clear conclusion, least of all, of feeding real anger against a whole class, that the stormy part of pity is merged in the more personal, searching, and sickening part. Mr. Bright's very language in speaking of these last clients of his, the condemned prisoners, "miserable wretches condemned to be publicly strangled," shows how completely he has fixed his mind on the mere exterior of the situation. To any one who goes deeper, who reflects on what the worst enormity of human guilt is, what the inner state Of mind of a Manning, or a Courvoisier, or a Greenacre, or a Catherine Wilson must be,—how deeply it excites, and ought to excite, the moral loathing of men, how hopeless must be the attempt of men to dry up the sources of such moral poison, how imperative the duty to shut them off from amongst men for all their future lives,—how much more hopeful their cure, if cure be possible, must be with God than with men,—it would be impossible at all events, whatever view he might take, to think of them merely as "mise- rable wretches " exposed to the horrible fate of being strangled. It is the same, too, with Mr. Bright's other compassions. We have heard him speak in most eloquent and glowing 'words of the state of the wretched agricultural labourer supporting a family on ten shillings a week, and yet in words every cadence and rhythm of which was calculated to recoil in stern anger on the oppressors who deny them electoral votes. Now, there again, it is but a super- ficial imaginative impression of misery of that kind which could glance off into political anger against, to say the least, so very small an aggravation of their miseries. The pity which ferments rapidly into indignation, like the wine which most easily ferments into vinegar, has but a light body after all. The more eloquent political passions, strong, and fierce, and picturesque as they seem, are almost always founded on mere abstract feelings, on less complete insight into the full motives and characters of opposite parties or contending classes in the State, than the largest sympathy or the most intelligent insight would give. Mr. Bright realizes with a fervour shared by few members of the House the various doctrines of his political creed,—but, after all, the very eloquence and streugth of his political animosities show that he does not penetrate very deeply. The passionate political partisan's is a cha- racter founded on deficiencies of human insight and sympathy, rather than on an abundance thereof. Its peculiarity is an unequal concentration of heat on the surface, and though it is better to have plenty of warmth on the surface than none at all, there can be no doubt that a deeper gift of compassion than Mr. Bright's would probably rob that compassion of its most picturesque aspect and certainly most effective sting.