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the brutes! or who tells you with innocent obscenity  what he would do with a certain man always
supposing the man's hands were tied.
This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two
types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern
babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy.
The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually
doubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be  done to criminals, he feels bitterly
how much better it would be if nothing need be done. But something must be done.  I s'pose we 'ave to
do it. In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man
who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
. . . . .
Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem of the proper treatment of criminals is that
both parties discuss the matter without any direct human feeling. The denouncers of wrong are as cold as
the organisers of wrong. Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity.
Let me take one practical instance. I think the flogging arranged in our modern prisons is a filthy torture;
all its scientific paraphernalia, the photographing, the medical attendance, prove that it goes to the last foul
limit of the boot and rack. The cat is simply the rack without any of its intellectual reasons. Holding this
view strongly, I open the ordinary humanitarian books or papers and I find a phrase like this,  The lash is
a relic of barbarism. So is the plough. So is the fishing net. So is the horn or the staff or the fire lit in
winter. What an inexpressibly feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack a relic of barbarism! It is
as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow, and we said that his clothes were not quite in the
latest fashion. There is nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Man is a relic of
barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism.
But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is simply a relic of sin; but in comparative
history it may well be called a relic of civilisation. It has always been most artistic and elaborate when
everything else was most artistic and elaborate. Thus it was detailed exquisite in the late Roman Empire,
in the complex and gorgeous sixteenth century, in the centralised French monarchy a hundred years
before the Revolution, and in the great Chinese civilisation to this day. This is, first and last, the frightful
thing we must remember. In so far as we grow instructed and refined we are not (in any sense whatever)
naturally moving away from torture. We may be moving towards torture. We must know what we are
doing, if we are to avoid the enormous secret cruelty which has crowned every historic civilisation.
The train moves more swiftly through the sunny English fields. They have taken the prisoners away, and I
do not know what they have done with them.
XXXIII. The Prehistoric Railway Station
A railway station is an admirable place, although Ruskin did not think so; he did not think so because he
himself was even more modern than the railway station. He did not think so because he was himself
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feverish, irritable, and snorting like an engine. He could not value the ancient silence of the railway station.
 In a railway station, he said,  you are in a hurry, and therefore, miserable ; but you need not be either
unless you are as modern as Ruskin. The true philosopher does not think of coming just in time for his
train except as a bet or a joke.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be late for the one before. Do this, and you
will find in a railway station much of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral. It has many of the
characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building; it has vast arches, void spaces, coloured lights, and,
above all, it has recurrence or ritual. It is dedicated to the celebration of water and fire the two prime
elements of all human ceremonial. Lastly, a station resembles the old religions rather than the new
religions in this point, that people go there. In connection with this it should also be remembered that all
popular places, all sites, actually used by the people, tend to retain the best routine of antiquity very much
more than any localities or machines used by any privileged class. Things are not altered so quickly or
completely by common people as they are by fashionable people. Ruskin could have found more
memories of the Middle Ages in the Underground Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations.
The great palaces of pleasure which the rich build in London all have brazen and vulgar names. Their
names are either snobbish, like the Hotel Cecil, or (worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole.
But when I go in a third-class carriage from the nearest circle station to Battersea to the nearest circle
station to the DAILY NEWS, the names of the stations are one long litany of solemn and saintly
memories. Leaving Victoria I come to a park belonging especially to St. James the Apostle; thence I go
to Westminster Bridge, whose very name alludes to the awful Abbey; Charing Cross holds up the symbol
of Christendom; the next station is called a Temple; and Blackfriars remembers the mediaeval dream of a
Brotherhood.
If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of the crowd. At the worst the uneducated
only wear down old things by sheer walking. But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture.
I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty railway station, where I have no business of any
kind. I have extracted a vast number of chocolates from automatic machines; I have obtained cigarettes,
toffee, scent, and other things that I dislike by the same machinery; I have weighed myself, with sublime
results; and this sense, not only of the healthiness of popular things, but of their essential antiquity and
permanence, is still in possession of my mind. I wander up to the bookstall, and my faith survives even
the wild spectacle of modern literature and journalism. Even in the crudest and most clamorous aspects
of the newspaper world I still prefer the popular to the proud and fastidious. If I had to choose between
taking in the DAILY MAIL and taking in the TIMES (the dilemma reminds one of a nightmare), I should
certainly cry out with the whole of my being for the DAILY MAIL. Even mere bigness preached in a
frivolous way is not so irritating as mere meanness preached in a big and solemn way. People buy the
DAILY MAIL, but they do not believe in it. They do believe in the TIMES, and (apparently) they do not
buy it. But the more the output of paper upon the modern world is actually studied, the more it will be
found to be in all its essentials ancient and human, like the name of Charing Cross. Linger for two or three
hours at a station bookstall (as I am doing), and you will find that it gradually takes on the grandeur and
historic allusiveness of the Vatican or Bodleian Library. The novelty is all superficial; the tradition is all
interior and profound. The DAILY MAIL has new editions, but never a new idea. Everything in a
newspaper that is not the old human love of altar or fatherland is the old human love of gossip. Modern
writers have often made game of the old chronicles because they chiefly record accidents and prodigies;
a church struck by lightning, or a calf with six legs. They do not seem to realise that this old barbaric
history is the same as new democratic journalism. It is not that the savage chronicle has disappeared. It is
merely that the savage chronicle now appears every morning. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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