IRE facts relating to the supposed incendiarism at Sand- i-
hurst, and the punishment by rustication of twenty- nine cadets, among whom whoever is guilty of the crime of arson is imagined to be included, are, not pleasant reading. Possibly all that is known to have occurred, or even alleged to have occurred, has not yet been made public property ; but if the story of the fires as it has been published is substantially correct, it is as difficult to understand the action of the authorities as it is easy to find in it one more illustration of the supreme injustice which can be . inflicted by cellectiie punishment.. The facts, shortly stated, are these. Five fires have occurred. The first two happened on April 23rd in the quaitere of C Company. The third fire broke out on May 7th in the quarters of A Company, the fciurth on June 7th in a room between the quarters of B and C Companies, and the fifty on June 25th in a room occupied. by three cadets belonging to C Company.. Although an investigation was held in eital: of the five cases, the guilt was not brought home_ to any individual. The whole affair, in fact, was a mystery, and so it seem04
likely to remain. .
What was the position in which the War Office authoritiqs found themselves on June 26th, and what were the questions which they had • to solve ? It • is interesting to look at the matter for the moment from their point of view, rather than from that of those among wl-em the guilty person is believed to be numbered, because the problem which was before them is an admirable instance of the difficulty in which responsible persons occasionally find themselves. Something had gone wrong, and it was their business to set it right; there was a guilty person to be punished, and it was their business to inflict punishment; further, there was clearly a serious danger to be feared, and that danger it was imperative for them to avert. First, then, they knew for certain—or practically for certain—that the fires were not accidental, but were caused deliberately. Second, they knew that they must have been deliberately caused by one or more of a certain number of persons ; that is, that if all the cadets and servants at Sandhurst could be collected inside a ring-fence, then the guilty person or persons would be inside the fence. Third, they knew that they had to fear, awl that it was their duty to avert, the very serious danger that the College might be burnt down. Each of these pieces of knowledge suggested a corresponding question. First, if the fires were the deliberate work of an incendiarist or incendiarists, was there evidence to show that this was due to general disaffection, or to the wickedness of one or two individuals ? This question seems to have been answered. There was no disaffection ; the cadets had been work- ing in good relations with the officers in authority over them. The fires, then, were the work of an individual, whose attitude towards the authorities would not represent that of his companions. Could they, then, find out who this guilty person was ? Apparently they could not, for lie had not been discovered even after five separate investigations on the spot. But if they could not find out who he was, how could the danger that the College might be burnt down be averted ? It could be averted, they seem to have decided, by doing their best to ensure that the incendiarist was sent away from Sandhurst. Therefore they rusticated twenty-nine cadets of C Company in the belief that one of the twenty-nine was guilty.
Lord Palmerston once said that there was no more dangerous frame of mind than that of the man who, having it borne in upon him that "something must be done," was in a tremendous hurry to do something, no matter what. Without going io far as to say that the action of the War Office authorities could not be defended on any grounds whatever, we certainly think that their action was wrong. Nobody would deny, of course, that in a military institution like Sandhurst the strictest and severest discipline must be preserved. But has it been preserved? It has not, and could not have been. Discipline is preserved when the guilty are promptly punished. It is subversive of discipline when the innocent suffer. But in this particular case it is, in the first place, not even certain that the guilty person has been punished. He may or may not have been among the twenty-nine cadets punished: it is not proved that he must have been. Still, even if he were among them, even then the injustice done to the innocent is so overwhelming as absolutely to outweigh any advantages which may be gained by the punishment of the guilty. In one or two cases, we are told, the prospects of a career in the Army have been destroyed; in many cases the pecuniary loss entailed to the parent. by having to send the boy back to Sandhurst for another term will fall heavily upon purses already overburdened; in every case the loss of six months' seniority will considerably hamper the young officer in the future. And in the case of every cadet at Sandhurst—boys who in after years will have to command men, and must win their respect and preserve discipline by showing a strict sense of justice—all these have had it indelibly impressed upon their minds, before their career can be said properly to have begun, that in certain cases discipline can only be maintained by the punishment of a large number of persons who are innocent to ensure the punishment of one who is guilty. That is a bad lesson to have learned. Lastly, even if it could be maintained—as we think it cannot—that it was necessary to uphold discipline at whatever cost, and that discipline has been actually upheld by this punishment, still there remains the fact that the danger which was believed to be present at Sandhurst before these twenty-nine cadets were rusticated has not been removed. The guilty cadet, if he is one of the twenty-nine, will return to Sandhurst next term.
Apart, however, from the particular question of the Sand- hurst fires, the general question arises,—Is collective punish-
ment justifiable at all ? If so, when can it be justified? The answer seems to us plain. Collective punishment is justifiable only in the case of collective crime. When, for instance, din. satisfaction in a regiment has led to saddle-cutting, and when it is certain that not one soldier alone has been running amuck, but that the regiment as a whole is in a state of in- discipline, it is right and necessary that the regiment as a whole should be punished. If, again, at a public school the Head-Master has reason to believe that the school as a whole is insubordinate, or sympathises with an act of insubordi- nation committed by a particular boy, then be is justified in punishing all the boys by stopping leave," or by any other means he thinks right. But to punish collectively when it is certain that the act for which punishment should be eiaCted is the work of an individual, for which no one else is respon- sible, is merely a confession of weakness. We are not strong enough to prevent this offence being committed,' the authori- ties, in fact, say to those whom they punish, nor have we the power to find out who committed it; but to show you that we have at all events some power, we shall punish you all.' That is the attitude of the incompetent governess, and it is almost impossible for any person in authority to adopt it and to maintain the respect of those under him. Occasionally, of course, an extremely strong man can afford to do what a weaker man cannot; but in the vast majority of cases the attempt to bring a guilty individual to justice by punishing innocent and guilty alike means sheer disaster. The simple fact underlying the whole matter is that it is unjust. To reduce the thing to an absurdity, suppose that a certain kind of "Hooligan" outrage continued to be committed in a certain street night after night, and that nobody could find out the offender. Suppose that the Home Secretary were suddenly to swoop down on that particular street with a large body of constables, and have every person in it, man, woman, and child, dragged off to prison, with a view to making sure that im- prisonment should be inflicted on the one "Hooligan" who committed the outrage. Of course the idea is farcical. But it is a very fair parallel to what has happened at Sandhurst, and the attendant circumstances at Sandhurst call for far more serious attention than those in which injustice is inflicted by other forms of collective punishment, those, for instance, with which schoolboys and undergraduates are familiar. When the " leave " of a school is stopped nobody is really hurt; it is only an inconvenience which the boys think a nuisance, and which they would gladly see removed,— yet which, by the way, they usually prefer to suffer rather than " sneak " of one of their companions. Again, when a large number of undergraduates are "sent down" at the same time the affair is commonly regarded more as a joke than anything else. But when the prospects of a number of boys starting on a career are damaged for life it is another thing altogether Collective punishment for an individual crime is always, strictly speaking, unjust; but the injustice is not always grave. There are occasions, however, when injustice is so flagrant as to be intolerable.
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