The Declining Disrepute of Murder

ONE of the most interesting facts about our shifting moral currency is the decline in the disrepute of murder.

Murder, like gold, reached its highest valuation (only, of course, the valuation of murder is negative and that of gold is positive) about the year 1896. It has been declining ever since; and, unlike gold, it has not had any rise since 1928 and docs not seem likely to have one. It is now one of the more unimportant of human actions, and several other crimes seem to be well on the way to taking precedence over it in the popular estimation of heinousness.

It is true that not murder alone, but all crimes have diminished in disrepute since 1896. This general tendency is probably due to the enormous increase in the number of different crimes which it is now possible to commit. There is a quantity theory, a law of supply and demand, in the ethical sphere as well as in the economic. It was not difficult to get people interested in the matter of obedience to ten commandments, but it is fearfully hard to get them really concerned about ten thousand and ten. But, even so, I think the decline in the social estimate of the importance of murder is disproportionate and highly significant.

In that idyllic era which ended with the closing years of the nineteenth century, murder was, in all Englishspeaking countries, and in France and Germany and Scandinavia, a tremendously important thing. And when I say murder, I mean just murder. The killing of anybody by anybody — common or garden assassination. Not regicide; not parricide; not the slaying of husband by wife. These particular kinds of murder had been held in deep abhorrence ever since the dawn of human history, for the very simple reason that the makers of the public opinion of those times were kings, priests, fathers, and husbands, in that order of importance. But at the same time the slaying of wife by husband was a peccadillo, and that of child by father was a mere exercise of a normal property right; and the slaying of a stranger by a stranger was a thing to be settled for on a financial basis or by reprisals.

But in the nineteenth century public opinion ceased to be made by kings and priests, and began to be made by owners of property. And the owner of property takes a very special view of murder, for precisely the same reason that the kings and priests did — namely, that he is peculiarly liable to be murdered. He always views the subject from the point of view of the victim. And to the victim, or the prospective victim, murder is always an exceedingly heinous crime.

The type-murder of the pre-property era is Macbeth — the murder of a king by a person who wants to get his kingship. The type-murder of the nineteenth century is The Bells — the murder of a man with stealable property by a man who wants to get that property. The audience which sat through Macbeth saw the crime with the eyes of a king; they had been trained by generations of royalism to do so. The audience which sat through The Bells saw the crime with the eyes of a property owner; they lived in a moral atmosphere which had been created by property owners. In neither case were they kings or property owners; but that made no difference — they reacted just as if they were.

But the kings had an advantage. They were the anointed of God; and it was quite easy to establish the belief that they were a special kind of person, and that the killing of them was a special kind of crime. The property owners were not anointed of anybody; and, in order to establish the idea that to kill them was a serious matter, they had to include the idea that to kill anybody was a serious matter. They incorporated that idea into their ethical code without enthusiasm, but without too great reluctance. After all, while a rich man was highly likely to be killed by a poor man, in an era when wealth consisted largely in gold and plate and jewels and was kept in the family home, it would not often happen that a poor man would be killed by a rich man who would consequently have to pay the penalty. There would be cases of self-defense, but they were amply provided for, anyhow; and on the whole the killing of poor men would mostly be done by other poor men, and it would do the police no harm to chase around after a few poor killers of the poor; it would keep them in practice for chasing after the really important criminals — namely, the poor killers of the rich. So, by a public opinion almost entirely manufactured by property owners, the killing of anybody by anybody, except in defense of life or property, became an exceedingly heinous action, and there grew up that moral detestation of murder in which I myself, along with almost everybody of my generation, was solicitously and effectually trained.

Our attitude was entirely personal, but it was the attitude of one who is imagining himself into the position of the victim of the crime. We looked at John Smith weltering in his gore — that was the correct technical term in those days — and we said: ‘There, but for the grace of God, lie I, one B. K. Sandwell, a potential property owner. To murder me would be one of the most atrocious of crimes. But the man who murders John Smith today may murder me to-morrow. We must therefore see to it that John Smith shall not be murdered, or that, if murdered, he shall be so adequately avenged that fewer John Smiths will be murdered thereafter.’ And we did see to it, as earnestly as we could.

Now this is not in the least like the attitude of the present generation. They also look at John Smith weltering in his gore — and, owing to the improvement in newspaper illustration, they have far better opportunities for doing so. But they do it with entirely different emotions. What they say is more like this: ‘There lies a man who almost certainly deserved to be murdered. Probably he was arranging to murder, or had already murdered, somebody else. Or he was unkind to Ins wife and to the man whom (doubtless rightly) she preferred to him. Or he refused to give his money and his watch to somebody who (doubtless justly) thought himself entitled to them. Or he was snooping into somebody else’s business. Or he was making irritating remarks. Anyhow, he managed to provoke some enterprising and courageous individual into doing away with him, incidentally running all the risks attendant upon murder and thus committing one of the most sporting and fascinating of crimes.’

In a nutshell, while we Victorians put ourselves in the place of the victim, the post-war generation puts itself in the place of the murderer.

In order to be able to do this, the people whose individual opinions constitute public opinion must, it seems to me, be able to assure themselves with pretty complete confidence that they are never going to be murdered. And I think they do so assure themselves. And on the whole, at present, I suppose they are right. Whether they will be right if murder goes on getting less and less heinous and more and more frequent is another question.

For there is a tremendous difference between the class which formed public opinion before 1896 and the class which forms it to-day. The people who form public opinion to-day are not the rich; they are the enormous mass of the decently comfortable. They keep their money in the bank, and their stocks, if any, in the deposit box, and they seldom have more than three small diamonds and a silver-backed hairbrush to a household. They may be robbed of their motor car, but their motor car is insured. They may be robbed of their furs, but that will be by a sneak thief. Their home will never be invaded by the kind of prowler who shoots to kill. There is little in it except the iceless refrigerator, the radio, the electric washing machine, and the drawing-room rug, and these are hard to take away and not very valuable when taken. So the people who run the country nowadays do not have to bother very much about robbery with violence. The millionaires may have something to worry about on that score, but let them worry! And anyhow they can hire their own bodyguards.

As for the other provocations to homicide, how easy to avoid giving them! Gangsters are often murdered, but nobody is obliged to be a gangster. Negroes are often murdered, but if one is a moulder of public opinion one is not apt to be a Negro. Policemen are occasionally murdered, but who wants to be a policeman? So, although thousands of American citizens are murdered every year, the average American citizen can with some measure of reason look himself in the face and say: ’I am not the sort of person who gets murdered.’

Now a murder is a dramatic situation, and there is a very strong human instinct to put one’s self imaginatively into any dramatic situation that comes to notice. And if one does not put one’s self into the position of the victim, how tempting to put one’s self into that of the murderer! It is, of the two, much the easier to occupy. For the victim is dead, and the longer he remains dead the harder it is to imagine him as he was when he was alive. But the murderer is alive, and fleeing or fighting for his life against the avenging forces — such as they are — of an outraged society, which still acts officially as if it were outraged, although very uncertain whether it really ought to be. This is an exciting and interesting position to be in, and there is no doubt whatever that it is the position into which the imagination of modern youth most readily enters.

An enormous literature has grown up in the last quarter of a century in which homicide is the necessary preliminary to a very exciting conflict of wits between the murderer, the suspected person, the professional detectives, the amateur detectives, the lawyers, the jurymen, the members of the press, and other related interests. Throughout this literature, in order to avoid distracting the reader’s attention from the conflict of wits, everything possible is done to avoid attaching any emotional significance to the murder itself. Its function is simply to serve as a technical cause for a man hunt. Frequently the victim is never seen alive, and almost always everybody concerned is thoroughly glad of his death.

Nor is the element of remorse, which was an essential part of the psychology of the old murder stories, allowed to obtrude itself into these post-homicidal chess games. The public of the nineteen-thirties evidently does not expect murderers to be remorseful. Perhaps they have actually ceased to be so; or perhaps the extent to which they are so was much exaggerated, for moral effect, in the older criminal literature. At any rate, the demand for perfumes of Araby is now strictly limited to cosmetic purposes, and individuals who hear the sound of bells when there are no bells are sent to a psychiatrist to have their repressions attended to. The average literary murder in these easy-going times has all the shine of a good deed in a naughty world. At its best it is the removal of an undesirable; at its worst it is a move toward the correction of an admitted excess of population.

Intellectually I can quite understand this attitude—of which the murder literature of the day is merely a symbol. Ethically I cannot share it, because my ethical concepts were moulded and set and hardened in the nineteenth century, of happy memory. But I am not greatly distressed at it. If the cheapening of homicide goes beyond reason, it will ultimately cure itself. The kings, when they were on top, were not much concerned about the killing of common people. The property owners, when they were on top, were not much concerned about the killing of common people. The common people, now that they are on top, are not much concerned about the killing of anybody, because they think that only rulers and owners of property and certain special classes of people are likely to be killed.

But they will find that they are wrong. There are so many of the common people that some of them are sure to get killed, mistaken, no doubt, for rulers and owners of property, for gangsters or immigrants. Machine-gun bullets are very undiscriminating. Already the common people are showing signs of annoyance when a round of fire intended for a gangster happens to take in a baby or two in its sweep, or a bomb intended for an enforcement officer gets in the way of a milkman. These little incidents will become more and more common, so long as the shooting of gangsters is held to be fundamentally lawful and the bombing of policemen is not considered as antisocial conduct. The common people will eventually realize, as the people of property realized in the last generation but one, that under a democratic form of government the only way to keep the ruling class safe from murder is to keep everybody safe from murder. And then they will take murder very seriously indeed.