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I do not say that the Russians mean it to be so, but when Bashi-Bazouks torture their prisoners in cold blood, and show fiendish delight in the most diabolical acts of cruelty, even going the length of roasting people alive, is it strange that a brutalising effect is produced on the Russians, and that they retaliate in a somewhat similar spirit at times?
We abolished dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and other brutalising spectacles. We undertook a reform of our industrial and penal systems which, however imperfect it be, was very considerable in itself, and was inspired solely by motives of humanity.
Charlie saw that he had committed an unpardonable blunder, which he hastened to repair. "How, sir?" he cried; "I suspect, do you say? I suspect nothing. Only where I find strength abused and a man brutalising his inferiors, I take the liberty to interfere." As he said these words he made a sign to Harry, which the latter was too dull or too much troubled to understand.
Such men detested the coarse and brutalising dogmas which might be expounded as the true 'scheme of salvation' by ignorant preachers seeking to rouse sluggish natures to excitement; but they held to religious conceptions which, as they thought, really underlay these disturbing images, and which, indeed, could hardly be expressed in any more definite form than that of a hope or a general attitude of the whole character.
One might enlarge further upon this topic, on the brutalising influence of beer, the sedative quality of lettuce, the stimulating consequences of curried chicken; but enough has been said to point our argument. It is, that such facts as this can surely indicate only one conclusion, and that is the entire dependence of literary qualities upon the diet of the writer.
The man is John Howard, who travelled tens of thousands of miles, and spent many years in visiting gaols all over England and the Continent, and in endeavouring to render prison life less degrading and brutalising. Wherever he went prison doors were unlocked as if he possessed a magic key; and by his life and books he did more to help prisoners than any other man.
Whatever may be said by foreigners of the brutalising effect of the Spanish popular game, it certainly has no more effect on those who witness or practise it than fox-hunting has on Englishmen, and it is doubtful whether there is any more cruelty in one sport than in the other.
There were other critics—Borrow always had plenty of critics—who found it difficult to make his admiration for the prize-ring fit in with his denunciation in one passage of “those disgraceful and brutalising exhibitions called pugilistic combats.” The explanation has been suggested that for once the “John Bull” Borrow, with his patriotic exaltation of all things English, gave way before the proselytising agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
These dates refer, of course, to legal proceedings. Examples of the existence of this belief are continually being recorded in newspapers, although they now only rank as solitary reminiscences of one of the most degrading and brutalising beliefs that European history records.
Its monotony was like the monotony of an irritable man, he thought, always angry, always expressing his anger. Beneath bridges, in tunnels, the anger was dashed with ripples of fury, with spurts of brutalising passion. And then the normal current of dull temper flowed on again as before. Maurice wished that the windows were not merely thick white blinds completely shutting out the night.
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