thing but a legal fiction; and it is a legal fiction still. The
doctrine of Divine Right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a piece
of realism, a practical way of ruling amid the ruin of humanity; a very
pragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not so
much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not
put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly
institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were
never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary
evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern
business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very
horrible; but how else can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholastic
regarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modern
business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death:
"It is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?" It
is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the
question by hunger as we have done without the question by fire. It
is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society may
reestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack and fagot.
The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague savor
of science, a method which it calls "the third degree." This is simply
the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonly
close to their extortion by bodily pain. And this is legal and
scientific in America. Amateur ordinary America, of course, simply burns
people alive in broad daylight, as they did in the Reformation Wars. But
though some punishments are more inhuman than others there is no such
thing as humane punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in
any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even
mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating
one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always
felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, the
jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but
with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights
and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even
admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully
was unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish his
weapon. Bu