Men of exceptional moral force and even ordinary people, when strengthened by intense conviction, have demonstrated over and over again in the course of history the power of non-violence to overcome evil, to turn aside anger and hatred. The hagiographies of every religion are full of accounts of such exploits, and similar stories can be found in the records of modern missionaries and colonial administrators, of passive resisters and conscientious objectors. Such sporadic manifestations of non-violence might be put down as exceptional and of no historical importance. To those who raise such an objection we would point out that, in the course of the last century and a half, the principles of non-violence have been applied, ever more systematically and with a growing realization of their practical value, to the solution of social and medical problems regarded before that time as completely insoluble. It was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it began to be realized that such problems—the problem of the insane, the problem of the criminal, the problem of the ‘savage’—were insoluble only because violence had made them so.
Thus, the cruel treatment of the insane resulted in their disease being aggravated and becoming incurable. It was not until 1792 that Pinel struck the chains from the unhappy inmates of the Salpêtrière. In 1815 a committee of the House of Commons investigated the state of Bethlehem Hospital and found it appalling. Bedlam was a place of filth and squalor, with dungeons, chains and torture chambers. As late as 1840 the great majority of asylums in Western Europe were still prisons and their inmates were still being treated as though they were criminals. Towards the middle of the century a considerable effort at reform was made and, since then, doctors have come to rely in their treatment more and more upon kindness and intelligent sympathy, less and less upon harshness and constraint. For a full and very vivid account of life in a well-run modern hospital for the insane, W. B. Seabrook’s Asylum may be recommended. Compare this testimony with the description of life in the Salpêtrière before Pinel’s day or in unreformed Bedlam. The difference is the difference between organized violence and organized non-violence.
The story of prison reform is essentially similar to that of the reform of asylums. When John Howard began his investigations in the middle of the seventies of the eighteenth century the only decent prisons in Europe were those of Amsterdam. (Significantly enough, there was much less crime in Holland than in other countries.) Prisons were houses of torture in which the innocent were demoralized and the criminal became more criminal. In spite of Howard, no serious attempts were made even in England to reform the monstrous system until well into the nineteenth century. Thanks to the labours of Elizabeth Fry and the Prison Discipline Society (yet another example of the good work that can be done by associations of devoted individuals), the English Parliament was at last induced to pass two Acts in 1823 and 1824, Acts which enunciated the principle of a new and better system. It is unnecessary to describe the further course of reform. Suffice it to say that in all democratic countries, at least, the movement has been in the direction of greater humaneness.
There has been general agreement among all those best qualified to speak that if criminals are to be reformed or even prevented from becoming worse, organized violence must give place to organized and intelligent non-violence. This humanitarian movement has always been opposed by those who say that ‘criminals should not be pampered.’ The motives of such opposition always turn out upon investigation to be thoroughly discreditable. People need scapegoats on whom to load their own offences and in comparison to whom they may seem to themselves entirely virtuous; furthermore, they derive a certain pleasure from the thought of the suffering of others. Still, in spite of much concealed sadism and much openly displayed self-righteousness, the humanitarian movement has gone steadily forward. Only in the dictatorial countries has it received a check. Here, the idea of reformation has been abandoned and the old notion of retaliatory punishment has been revived. This is a significant symptom of that regression from charity which is characteristic of so much contemporary activity.
Like the alienist and the gaoler, the colonial administrator and the anthropologist have discovered that organized and intelligent non-violence is the best, the most practical policy. For some time the Dutch and the English, like the Romans before them, have known that it was wise, wherever possible, to ‘leave the natives alone.’ During the last thirty years professional anthropologists have left the libraries in which their older colleagues fitted together their mosaics of travellers’ tales and missionary gossip, and have actually taken to living with the objects of their study. In order to be able to do this with safety, they have found it essential to apply the principles of non-violence with a truly Tolstoyan thoroughness. In consequence, they have won the friendship of their ‘savages’ and have learned incomparably more about their ways of thinking and feeling than had ever been discovered before. During recent years, the administration of the Belgian, Dutch, English and French colonies has become on the whole more humane and, at the same time, more efficient. This double improvement is mainly due to the anthropologists, with their doctrine of intelligent and sympathetic non-violence. The hideous methods employed in the conquest of Abyssinia are unhappily symptomatic of the new, worse spirit that is now abroad.
So much for the power of non-violence in the relations of individuals with individuals. We have now to consider mass movements in which the principles of non-violence are applied to the relations between large groups or entire populations and their governments. Before citing examples of these it will be as well to reconsider briefly a matter already touched upon in an earlier chapter, namely, the results which follow attempts to carry through intrinsically desirable social changes by violent methods. History seems to demonstrate very clearly that, when revolution is accompanied by more than a very little violence, it achieves, not the desirable results anticipated by its makers, but some or all of the thoroughly undesirable results that flow from the use of violence. During the French Revolution, for example, the transfer of power to the Third Estate was accomplished by the regularly elected National Assembly. The Terror was the fruit of sordid quarrels for power among the revolutionaries themselves and its results were the extinction of the republic and the rise, first, of the Directory, then of Napoleon’s military dictatorship. Under Napoleon a revolutionary fervour that found its natural expression in acts of violence was easily transformed into military fervour.
French imperialism resulted in the intensification of nationalistic feelings throughout Europe, in the almost universal imposition of military slavery, or conscription, and in the systematization of economic rivalry between national groups. It would be interesting to construct a historical ‘Uchronia’ (to use Renouvier’s useful word), based upon the postulate that Robespierre and the other Jacobin leaders were convinced pacifists. The ‘non-Euclidean’ history deducible from this first principle would be a history, I suspect, innocent of Napoleon, of Bismarck, of British imperialism and the scramble for Africa, of the World War, of militant Communism and Fascism, of Hitler and universal rearmament. What follows is a Uchronian account of very recent history as it might have been if the Spanish Republic had been pacifist. ‘Even though we know well that pacifism was as impossible to the working-class psychology of 1931 Spain as to that of the United States in 1917, it is important to point out that, if the Spanish Republic had actually been pacifist in theory and practice, the present counter-revolution could never have arisen.
A pacifist republic would, of course, have immediately liberated the conquered Moors and transformed them into friends; it would have dismissed the old regime generals and returned their armies to civil life. It would have done away with the fears of Church and peasants by requiring from Communists and Anarcho-Syndicalists the renunciation of violence during the period of the Popular Front.’ (From What about Spain? by Jessie Wallace Hughan, Ph.D., War Resisters League, New York.)
Returning from Uchronic speculations to a consideration of actuality, we find that in Russia the original aim of the revolutionaries was the creation of a society enjoying the maximum possible amount of self-government in every field of activity. Unfortunately, the rulers of the country have persisted in making use of the violent methods inherited from the old Tsarist regime. With what results? Russia is now a highly centralized military and economic dictatorship. Its government is oligarchical and makes use of secret police methods, conscription,
