Guy A. Aldred Archive
Written: 1912.
Source: RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Shortly after the two Press Acts, described in the last chapter, had come into force, Carlile assumed, from the Dorchester jail, the position of responsible publisher of four character studies from the pen of Philanthropos. The shopmen who sold them were liable to imprisonment for so doing, but Carlile was also liable to further detention for responsibility for their publication. It was open to his shopmen to plead that they were only “agents,” had they wanted to. Each of these character studies were published at two-pence. They were unstamped, and, admittedly, both “seditious” and “blasphemous.” The authorities never learned the real name of their author. In the first of these essays the latter impeaches the thronged congregation of rogues, slaves, and fools who worship at the shrine of avarice, and estimate merit in the terms of money. He adds :—
“The passions of distrust, revenge, fear, hatred, malice, and cruelty district the rich, that thrive by treachery, hypocrisy. tyranny. and rapacity. Conscious of turpitude, stung by remorse, alarmed for the safety of ill-gotten gains, the robbers and impostors are afraid the people will claim a restitution of rights and property.”
Our author then proceeds to defend human nature and the poor against' the slanders of the interested defenders of despotism, the pampered and bloated hypocrites who riot upon the poor man's industry, carouse upon the sweat of his brow, and sack the spoil of the criminal their rapacity has created. He concludes with the following advice to these gentlemen :——-
"Tyrants and impostors, remember you are splendid at the expense of honesty, pain. disease, and death! Give the people justice and they will be laborious; if they are laborious they must have plenty, and if they have plenty they will be honest. Men are naturally innocent, passive, and pacific; false information and injustice are the sources of violence and crime. Remember this, you corporate impostors and tyrants, and correct your -own errors before you brand the innocent with infamy. Cast the "beams out of your own eyes before you shed acrimonious calumny upon the virtuous and the just."
But Philanthropos’s best effort was the pamphlet in which he delineated the characteristics of a soldier. The latter defines as being a brute, a biped, an erect, unique, and horrible monster; the most cold-blooded animal; a bloody automaton or infernal machine having the power of locomotion and a great thirst for human blood. He denies it the name of man, and refuses to disgrace man by putting it by his side. It meditates “upon its work of destruction, of voracity, upon its sanguinary repast for years before its preternatural appetite is feasted with human gore,” and “hires itself out for a small sum to be the butcher of the human race”; “to slay men, to slaughter the innocent or the guilty, as it may be ordered”:
“to shed blood; to push its saber of death into the breast of innocent men, women, and children; to see the blood follow its blow; to withdraw the scythe reeking from the wound; to see the heart's blood bubble up in crimson froth; to see the victim fall, distorted, convulsed, agonized, and every pore pouring forth the cold, clammy sweat of death."
All this is “ecstasy” to the “male animal that hires itself out to slaughter the human species . . . wholesale or retail, in units or in thousands." That is why "privileged rogues work with it.”
"It engages to cut any man’s throat when ordered; to level with cannon, to mow down with the sword or with musketry, unarmed or armed men. The more wounds and blood, and mutilations and deaths, the more honors; the more shrieks and screams, and widows and orphans, and gore, the more laurels, medals, and rejoicings. The heart of the soldier is as cold as lead, as callous as flint; all the finer energies and soothing sympathies of the human soul are frozen up; an exsiccated feeling, a phlegmatic apathy, obscures and eclipses the dignified sensations of man."
Philanthopos hesitates to style this mechanism of murder a "ferocious, carnivorous brute,” only because of the tiger’s protest :-—
"Stop, not so long, sir," the tiger would say, "I have credit of bloody ferocity, of carrying devastation through the woods, of spreading terror in my way, of desolating my course. I scorn, I despise, I disown the parallel, and loathe the sanguinary automaton soldier. I am driven by my form, by my wants, to feed upon flesh, but not the flesh of my species. I never destroy what I do not want to eat. I never shed oceans of blood I cannot suck. I never commence a wholesale carnage upon the whelps of my kind, as was done at Manchester. I never hire myself out to others who want to carry on public devastations."
The tiger is then made to point out that he “knows no such climax of infamy, cruelty, and villainy as the manslayer glories in. Neither age, nor sex, nor hunger, nor disease, nor extremes of temperature impel the tiger to attack wound or mutilate his species." Even the lamb is sacred during satiety. Consequently, the tiger asks not to be disgraced by so unnatural a comparison. “There is less difference between a lamb and a tiger than between a soldier and a tiger.” The comparison covers the tiger with ignominy and shame. His very nature requires that he should be rescued “from such infamous imputations.”
Our author goes on to desire an ingenuity that shall “make manifest the terrific, the murderous workings of the soldier’s heart” ; a transparency that shall reveal “his servility, his sneaking sycophancy, and his mutual tyranny; his daily hope of slaughter for the sake of promotion and of gathering crimson-blooded laurels.” If only the soldier changed his person on the day he entered the ranks; if “but as great a metamorphosis took place in body as in mind . . . he would be one of the most hideous objects that could be conceived or pictured”; if only his “breast was diaphanous, his ebony heart would show all those horrible, those base, those degrading passions."
"He prays to see fields deluged, the earth fertilized with blood; the birds, and grass, and herbs fat and luxuriant from feeding upon human flesh and fluids; . . . to hear the winds loaded with the sighs, the sobs, and groans of helpless wives and orphans; . . . to see the pearly eye bedewed with tears, swollen, red, and wild, in its watching and distraction; . . . the cold, haggard, motionless, oblivious hand of death . . . fall upon his companion, his superior, his commander."
Philanthropos concludes with advocating the boycott and manifestation of contempt for the soldier :-—
“What child can respect such a father? What father can respect such a son? What wife, possessing all the generous sympathy of human kindness, can caress such a husband? . . . If the soldier should be so misled, so ignorant, so barbarous, so bloody-minded as to hire himself out as a man-killer to some regal impostor; if he is so foolish as to sacrifice his life, his health, or his family, other men should not countenance him, should not associate with him, should not in any manner be connected with a monster that has turned their enemy, the common destroyer of human life. The soldier should be scouted by every citizen, whose common enemy he is. A standing army is a legalized banditti, inasmuch as it "robs and murders under the name of law, and so evades the gibbet; the last may be extirpated and the body politic may be relieved of the nuisance, but the former is a cancer corroding the vitals of the country. . . . Regimental: are the livery of the licensed murderer of mankind."
If Carlile had done nothing beyond publishing this pamphlet he would have deserved our regard as an anti-militarist pioneer.