The Feel Of The Lash (February 1963 | Volume: 14, Issue: 2)

The Feel Of The Lash

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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February 1963 | Volume 14, Issue 2

Speaking of a man who could see nothing really disturbing in the institution of human slavery, Abraham Lincoln once remarked that this person was so constituted that he could not feel the lash that landed on somebody else’s back. Only if it hit his own back could he understand that a flogging was going on.

The insensitivity Lincoln was talking about is one of the commonest and most disastrous of all human traits, because it consents to cruelty and injustice; and it consents largely because the insensitive person does not even realize that these things exist unless they touch him personally. He can live next to monstrous wrong because he does not really know that it is there; it affects another person and so he does not feel it. Society approaches a respectable level of civilization only when it develops an active spirit of compassion.

Measuring by that yardstick one is forced to conclude that civilization has been rising rather slowly. Some of the darkest chapters in human history are in the books largely because simple compassion was lacking. There is always enough ill will, malignancy, and greed to give cruelty a start, Heaven knows, but what these qualities start would soon die if society as a whole insisted. Society usually does insist, once it understands what is happening, but there are times when understanding is tragically long in coming.

Cecil Woodham-Smith examines a most horrifying illustration of this point in her new book, The Great Hunger , which is a study of the terrible famine that afflicted Ireland in the 1840’s. This famine was one of the worst in history. It killed at least one and a half million people and drove about a million more to emigrate. Descending on a land that was already one of the most poverty-stricken in Europe, it created still more poverty, bringing in its train the manifold diseases that go with poverty. Its final legacy was hatredhatred so deep and lasting that Britain finally lost southern Ireland altogether.

In 1841 Ireland was one of the most densely populated regions in Europe, and one of the most thoroughly exploited. It had almost nothing in the way of industry. A few years earlier, a British economist reported that during most of the year, 2,385,000 persons had no employment because there was no work whatever to offer them. (This was in a country whose total population was a little more than 8,000,000.) Unless a man could somehow find a patch of land to grow potatoes on, he and his family would starve.

The natural result was that the land was divided and subdivided, over and over. It was not at all uncommon for a whole family to subsist on less than one acre of ground. Rents were high, most tenants could be turned off their land at the whim of the landlord, and the evicted tenant had no recourse at all