Who Is Responsible?

IT has become almost a custom to excuse the individual — but by no means the corporation or larger social body — asleep or viciously awake while on duty. The fault lies not in him, they tell us, but in the system, in our society. If the adulterator think he adulterates, or if the bribed think he is bribed, he knows not well the subtle ways of society, our new Brahma. The condemnation should never fall on him who seems the offender.

This current of thought, which I earnestly believe must be stemmed, could be measured and mapped in several ways. But we feel its true sweep and force if we mark it, not in the careless speech of street and newspaper, but in the utterance of men against whom it is impossible to say that they merely echo, insensitive to the meaning of the words they use. Let me illustrate this spirit of the day — a spirit unnamed, but which is a kind of moral socialism — in two careful essays in a single recent number of the Atlantic, by men of special knowledge and tempered judgment.

Mr. Fielding-Hall, for many years at the head of the great Rangoon prison, says of the criminal, that he is ‘not ashamed, because he knows he cannot help it. And punishment exasperates him because he has not deserved it.’ That ‘crime is no defect of the individual. It is a disease of the nation, nay of humanity, exhibited in individuals. You have gout in your toe, but it is your whole system which is wrong.’ The criminal, then, like the toe, might well feel aggrieved but not remorseful; he has suffered, rather than caused a wrong. Whatever there is of evil has been borne in upon him from without. ‘There is not, there never was, in any one a tendency to crime,’ says this writer, ‘until either jails or criminal education created it.’

My other illustration is from a writer high in the service of one of the Atlantic steamship companies, who also defends the individual under a cloud. Speaking upon ‘ The Unlearned Lesson of the Titanic,’ he makes it clear that the great liners are still unsafe. And who is at fault? Certainly not the man whose one business it is — so it appears to the poor landsman — to see that the vessel is equipped. ‘Was the shipowner,’ he asks, ‘or the traveling public, or were the legal authorities, to blame for the shortage of boats aboard the Titanic?’ ‘Without hesitation,’ he answers, — ‘Without hesitation I exonerate the shipowner, and place the responsibility on the legal authorities and the traveling public.’ For the shipowner gave them in full measure what they asked. ‘If the law calls for a certain number of boats of certain capacities, the shipowner invariably goes beyond what is required of him. The public demands luxurious suites of rooms, Venetian cafés, lounges, buffets, reading, writing, and music rooms, swimming baths, gymnasiums, and so forth, and the shipowner meets the demand.’ The public asked only for a stone, it would appear, and the shipowner readily gave it them.

The responsibility is here laid wholly upon ‘the legal authorities and the traveling public.’ But the legal authorities could doubtless show that they had fully and faithfully administered the law, and that not they but the source of law, the public, was the cause of the lack of boats. Thus at the door of society, whether traveling or at. home, lies the fault; but on no account at the door of the man who actually owned and controlled the ship.

These are apologies in the growing spirit of the hour; utterances of the belief that the man who did the act is not responsible; skillful and intelligent expressions of a creed held widely and daily used. Arguments like these are no longer the web of casuists, the recreation of fallen angels, as Milton has them, reasoning upon fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, finding no end, in wandering mazes lost. They are thoughts, rather, which are trying —and too often with success — to become flesh and blood in the practice of shop and office and court. On such a plea well-known men, bribers of public officials, as well as the officials they bribed, have escaped punishment. And this very day in my community comes its fresh rising in an abhorrent form. A mature man of affairs and of money is proved in court to have abandoned wife and daughter and to have carried into a distant city a young girl for his lust; and in his public defense there is the passionate plea that not this man himself, but society, should answer for his foul offense.

We must see the inadequacy of this and of all like vindication. It shows, not that this man is guiltless, but that others share his guilt; others offered occasion and inducement for his wrong. Yet a responsibility shared need not, in all justice, be lessened. If two soldiers are to watch at a post, and both sleep, it may well be that instead of no guilt, or at most but half-guilt attaching to each, there is for each of them full guilt. Under such circumstances, it is true, one and both may be wholly innocent; but this should not blind us to the quality of the act in every case, and should not lead us to relax all distinction and judgment. For let us imagine a man free from unconquerable fatigue, knowing his orders, who pleads that his sleeping was no fault of his, because the other man was asleep; and why should one be expected on such a night to do what his fellow was not doing? Would this man’s shame and shortcoming be but one half, perhaps, or nothing? It would be one and entire. Likewise, if a rich shipowner finds another rich shipowner putting luxury before safety in his ship, he cannot merely on this plea be excused. He may perhaps have other and better defenses, but surely this one is thin air. It is, at heart, like that of the convicted satyr we have just seen, who pleaded that in his city not he alone but many men of business debauched young girls. A shared responsibility, a common responsibility, need not be a divided, a diminished responsibility.

Nor does it surely exonerate a man, that others offered him fat opportunity and temptation. The thieves on the Jericho road might thus have been acquitted. Would it ever have entered their heads to rob the traveler, had he not come their way with signs of wealth? And if the proper officials had been on hand, would there have been a theft? Blame the legal authorities, the traveling public, not the thieves!

I do not forget that a man who yields may be less guilty than the man who offers the occasion, the temptation; or that of two who yield, one may be far less guilty than the other. But if mere temptation were a full excuse, then no deed, not even the foulest, would be culpable; for it is never unsolicited from without. Other men’s large or small possessions, the limits which their presence inevitably puts upon our freedom, the antagonism which they unintentionally arouse, every woman by her very sex, — these are all calls to some primitive instinct in us, stirring it to slip leash and be off. And this is all that crime is. It is merely an unrebuked temptation, a natural instinct running at large, —a very natural thing. We do not need prisons and special education to give it birth, as Mr. Fielding-Hall declares, although these may foster it. It is already there in native untouched passion and impulse. Life and manhood require that each one of us shall civilize a wild horde within, shall set instinct against instinct, until there is rule and obedience, and they recognize the bounds fixed by the need and right of our fellow man. This requirement cannot be avoided by the common criminal, by the guilty father, or by the millionaire shipowner.

But to the rich shipowner is offered more than mere occasion and opportunity, it would seem. He is overtly tempted; he would gladly give lifeboats, but the public demands Venetian cafés. Therefore he is innocent when men drown. And yet we can hardly give him honor if he pull down safety and pile luxury high, even should passengers demand this of him. He is there, like a captain, to resist such demands.

But do the travelers in any strict and vital sense demand this; are they the prime tempters? Did the passengers think out Venetian cafés beforehand, and refuse to cross the ocean unless the ship contained what no ship had held before? Or was it not, rather, that the shipowner hired men he could trust to devise yet unimagined luxuries, knowing that there would be more money in his pocket from swimming baths and gymnasiums on shipboard than from life-boats? Only in this sense has the public ‘demanded’ his gaudy substitutes. The owner offered swimming baths, and, pocketing his reward, is pronounced blameless when on that Sunday night, no swimming baths were needed. And the very shipowner who offers the most glittering temptations is not the one driven to the wall, offering these in a forlorn hope of escaping ruin. He is the wealthiest, the strongest, the one best fortified to say, ‘I cannot give you Venetian cafés and safety; and from me you receive safety or nothing. Go to my rival if you want tinsel vessels on a perilous sea. For should there be disaster, I could not even think of the tattered excuse, that you asked me for such things and I gave them against my judgment. I am responsible. Mine is the work of carrying men and women without loss of life. If after seeing to that, I can add to their enjoyment, well and good. But never luxury first, and only such safety as then can find a place! ’

We can feel the generous strain in these defenders of the man who fails at his post. They wish us to keep far from anything like pharisaism. He is no worse than we, they say; he is not at fault. What he did is ours, done because of what we have done and left undone. And there is more than generosity in what they say; there is truth. They utter one-sidedly the truth which comes with the growing social consciousness. For it is true that the social order contributes to many evils for which it has not been held to answer. Crime can be decreased by education and by reducing sickness and hunger; and we who do not bestir ourselves to teach and heal and feed must stand condemned. We who choose passage on liners that flaunt their crowding luxuries must answer for the missing life-boats when the vessel sinks.

But unbalanced truth is untrue, whether one or the other side be light. To say, after the newer manner, that the man who robs, or poisons with the food he sells, or battens on another’s body and soul, is blameless and that society alone is wrong, — this is as untrue, as unjust, as was the older way of saying that only he was guilty, and that we who stood by were innocent. We must not drop old truth whenever we come to new; we must grasp it with the other hand.

For if the criminal is not responsible, society is not. If the shipowner is not responsible, neither is the traveling public. The traveling public is of individuals like the shipowner; it is Brown and Smith and Sullivan buying passage on luxurious liners and asking no questions for safety’s sake. The acts of society are ultimately personal acts; its neglects are neglects by one or many persons. Only by a mental laziness and confusion do these persons swim before our eyes and in the mass lose their individuality. The responsibility cannot be shifted forever; in the end it rests upon me and you and men like us; upon men in groups, men organized, perhaps, but yet upon men. Or else in all consistency we must acquit every one concerned—shipowner, legal authority, traveling public; criminal, judge, jailer, teacher, merchant, voter.

It is certain, however, that men will never finally surrender their belief in personal obligation. The inner declaration is far too strong. Nor is there anything in our growing science of mind to force the surrender. We know to-day in somewhat more detail what men have always known, that each is influenced by things and forces around and behind; each is not the sole cause of what he does. And yet he is not idle in their presence. He moulds and modifies, resists them, invites them on.

The great of the race, too, throw contempt on antecedents and surroundings. They submit and receive, and yet defy. Your lad from the cotton mill of Rochdale comes to a perception of public right and duty as clear as is found in the best trained and best ancestored of all Britain. Your backwoodsman of Illinois has a mastery of human longings and a purpose and vision that are wanting from the best blood and culture of New England.

Out of the living sources of mind there constantly issues the wonderful, the impossible, silencing our chatter and dogmatism about the natural bondage of all conduct. There then revives in us the old conviction, enforced anew by democracy, that creative energy with all its inherent responsibilities is not the possession merely of a few rare men. In some measure each is given this with his manhood. Each parleys and is heeded at the barriers of fate.

We heap the measure of our share in his guilt if we lull instead of rousing the man at his post. If we tell him he is right in his feeling that he cannot avoid failure, we have done what we could to insure his failure. The untoward externals should be smoothed out by every means that can be discovered or invented; but to all this outward aid should be added the word from a generation more jealous of personal power and responsibility,

‘ You and I can, because we ought.' The common human heritage of duty with its meed of praise or blame is not to be denied either to the Rangoon prisoner or to the Sacramento wanton or to the great shipowner of London or New York. Each of these has certain things put in his charge; he has his post. And if we preach powerlessness and irresponsibility to him personally, and to other individuals like him, we invite at a high price even so great a good as the new social conscience.