THE HORROR OF TORTURE.
ENGLISHMEN read news like the latest received from Abyssinia with a sort of stupefaction. It is declared in letters to Rome, written doubtless by Italian officers at Massowah, and summarised in a telegram to the Daily News of Monday, that the Negus or Emperor of Abyssinia, recently detecting one of his pages in a plot against his life, ordered the unhappy man's tongne and his right hand to be cut off, and one of his feet to be sawn away, and that the mutilated sufferer should then be exposed in the desert under the glare of the sun, to be eaten by the hyenas, who might take hours in bringing death. It seems to Englishmen so impossible that a Monarch should exist capable of giving such orders, or attendants willing to execute them, or a people capable of witnessing such atrocities without insurrection, that they take refuge from their own pain in a semi-disbelief in the accuracy of the story. It may be a pure invention for what we know, though it is believed by the Roman correspondent of the Daily News ; but every one familiar with Asia is aware that it may be true, and that, if true, it is nothing out of the way. Asiatic rulers—we class Menelek among them, though, by geographical habitat, he is of Africa—have from the earliest ages punished the crimes they dislike with tor- ture, and do, when they can, so punish them now. A Prince in Persia has, within the lifetime of living men, bricked-up brigands in a wall with their heads exposed for the vultures to eat ; and the Chinese cut-up serious criminals —people, for instance, who kill Mandarins or rebel—slowly into little bits. Under the old Burmese regime, the children of traitors were pounded with heavy pestles in wooden mortars—we write on the testimony of an eye-witness ;—and even in India, where men are milder, though they will commit massacres, the old penalty for larceny, the chopping-off of the hand, would still be revived in independent States. The regular punishment while the Tartars were sovereign in Turkestan for a slave who attempted to fly, was blinding ; and if rumour lies not, the authority of the Ameer of Afghanistan has repeatedly been sustained by acts which in Europe would be condemned as deliberate tortures. The practice, in truth, extends throughout Asia—often, as in China, under the direct sanction of the law—and we may take it as certain that in popular opinion it is not condemned. There are, no doubt, in Asia many individuals who, rising com- pletely above the usual moral standard, detest torture as heartily as any European, and there is often a vague dislike for the practice among those who may suffer from the King's tyranny or the malice of the laws ; but there is no general indignation, no effort to put a stop to it, no horror of the King or Minister who gives the devilish orders. The people do not think it either unnatural or wicked to inflict torture, do not, in fact, care, and would think it very foolish to risk their lives or upset society in order to compel their rulers to more humane administration. We do not think they exult in the victims' sufferings as the Roman patricians probably did when Christians were exposed in the arena, but they are utterly callous and indifferent, do not feel even the beginnings of the sentiment of pity, and would not stir hand or foot to rescue those whom they know to be enduring the torments of the damned, often for offences which the spectators regard as purely offences against law. They do not themselves suffer from knowing that such things are done, half as much as the Englishmen who read the statements in this article, and who, in their horror, probably become Hebraic, and talk of "the dark places of the earth" as "full of the habitations of cruelty,"—a magnificent sentence as full of truth now, as far as Asia is concerned, as it was three thousand years ago.
Now what is the cause, intellectual or moral, of that radical difference of feeling? Half of those who read us will exclaim, " Christianity ; " but the answer, though we would gladly believe it true, does not fit all the facts. Not to mention that King Menelek is nominally a Christian and probably a full believer, Christian communities have only acquired their pre- sent horror of torture in comparatively recent years. Many sincere priests of the Roman Catholic faith sanctioned the tortures of the Inquisition ; nor for ages did the Southern peoples, more especially the Spaniards, feel or show any dis- gust for practices of whose existence they must have been fully aware. The autos da le were festivals in Madrid down to 1750. A poisoner was boiled alive in England, or, at all events, sentenced to that awful doom, after the nation began to feel the great moral revival of the fifteenth century ; and it is only a bare hundred years since prisoners convicted of certain crimes were broken alive on the wheel in France. Torture was legal in Denmark within the writer's lifetime, and, as he can testify, its abolition was regretted by decent Judges in a Danish dependency; and even now it is declared to be prac- tised, though not allowed, in the prisons of Orthodox Russia. In the Western States of America, Negroes who have insulted White women are still frequently burned alive ; and all over Spanish America, Dictators, as they arise, have shown them- selves not unwilling to recur to the ancient practice. That Christianity prohibits torture, we not only admit, but affirm with our whole hearts; but the mere acceptance of that creed by a community is not sufficient to make all men regard tor- ture as hateful or even monstrous. All the Bishops of France cannot have been lax livers, or indifferent Christians, when convicts were broken on the wheel ; and not one of them would have been punished for a respectful, but determined, remonstrance uttered in the name of Christianity. Nor has the impulse its only origin in a new perception of the "sacredness of humanity," for that has not prevented war, and animals are beginning to feel, at least as much as men, the benefit of the new departure. Nor, for the same historic reasons, can we believe that difference of race has much to do with the matter. The Latin races are probably more careless of the suffering of enemies than the Teutonic, as witness the still-existing bagnes of France and Italy, but no race can say with truth that it has never tortured, except the Jew, and the Jew has never had the power. Nor, as we conceive, can the differences be fully explained by differences of mind or imagination. The imagination of the East is as vivid as that of the West, on points such as the sense of insult or of honour, more vivid and more quick, while several Asiatic races have an average intelligence at least as keen as that of the average European. That there is a difference between the nervous excitability of Europe and Asia, producing a much less degree of sensitiveness in the latter we admit, and should attribute in part, at all events, to a difference in the drill of circumstances continued for tens of centuries. No European could treat himself as an Indian faquir or sunyasee does, or could bring his nervous system into such absolute subjection to his will. But that sugges- tion, though it explains much, and especially the absence of resistance or suicide among the victims themselves, does not explain everything, for the mass of Europeans must, as regards nerves, be very much what they were two hundred years ago. There must be some separate moral impulse which has arisen apart, or in a certain degree apart, from any teaching of the creeds ; and we find it difficult not to believe that it is a ne w impulse, that man's moral nature has on this side made in Europe a distinct stride forwards. It is an advance the extent and depth of which has not yet been -fairly tested, for the masses of Europe have not of late years been provoked to furious anger, as they once were by heresies or treasons, or, as they may be by-and-by, by Anarchist ex- plosions ; but it is an advance which it is impossible not to recognise, and one that has gone far down, reaching classes whom the spirit of practical Christianity has hardly touched. If that is true, it is the most hopeful thought suggested by any of the social phenomena around us ; and after much - observation, continued for many years, the present writer can hardly doubt that it is true. An addition, as it were, to the .moral capacity even of one division of mankind seems far too good to be anything but a dream, and yet what else will explain what we see P Read the Daily News' telegram ,(Monday, p. 5, last column) to the hardest sections of the community, such as miners, labourers, sailors, or soldiers, .and the response will always be the same,—a shudder w hich has in it a strain of moral anger and abhorrence. it is easy to say that is a result of education ; but all through the ages it is the best educated who have till now given the orders for torture, and the least educated—the women—who have felt what little pity there was. A new sense has, as it were, been born, and will, both for good and -evil, work out great results,—for evil, we say also, because the impulse will, probably after painful experiences, have to dear itself of a confusion between punishment, which has its justification in the unalterable scheme of things, and torture, which has not. The callousness which has -succeeded cruelty, now a dying vice, is disappearing slowly in Europe ; but it lingers still in Asia, with the results which travellers and telegrams occasionally reveal. It might -die out ' even there, as the tolerance of cannibalism is dying out in Polynesia, but that the brown races seem to have been arrested, morally as well as socially, by some impediment which as yet they cannot pass. If they over pass it, a subject .on which those who know them best will most resolutely withhold a, final judgment, the very first sign will probably be that abhorrence of inflicting pain for pain's sake, which at present is confined to the white races, and is hardly universal among them. Vaillant expressed, and probably feels, no more pity for his victims than an ordinary Abyssinian will feel for the fate of the King's page.
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