Liberty - Saturday, June 15, 1895

The Criminal Jailers of Oscar Wilde

The Fabian "Daily Chronicle" of London, organ of a brutal political philosophy, has consistently outdone even the Philistine press in its brutal treatment of Oscar Wilde. But Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, editor of the London "Church Reformer," whom economic error still holds in semi-bondage to the same brutal philosophy, has been led, by his natural love of liberty and his sympathy with the persecuted, into the magnificent inconsistency of becoming Oscar Wilde’s surety. Just as Mr. Headlam scored his consistent fellow-Socialist, John Burns, for his tyrannical treatment of the London music halls, so he befriends this later victim of a still more cruel tyranny. And even bolder and more admirable than Mr. Headlam is one of his contributors, Mr. Selwyn Image, for whose following words, reprinted from the "Church Reformer," Liberty offers him heartiest thanks:

The law of the land has found Mr. Wilde guilty of the charges laid against him, and has condemned him to two years imprisonment with hard labour. Some of our papers have clapped their hands over that, and shouted: "Thank heaven, a scoundrel has got his due!" Some of our papers, with greater delicacy and justice, have felt the tragedy of the situation and exclaimed: "How terrible a fate! here closes forever the career of a man whose promise was so brilliant." For the former papers I have no expressions of scorn contemptuous enough; for the latter, I can understand their view and appreciate their spirit. But both those and these are wrong. During the past days of his overwhelming trouble I have come to know Mr. Wilde far better than I ever knew him before; and I have no hesitation in saying that, whatever in past days may have been his weaknesses, or follies, or sins, he has behaved in the hour of trial with a manly courage and generosity of spirit which I fear few of us under similar circumstances would have been virile and self-sacrificing enough to exhibit. As regards his future, so far from being in despair, I am full of hope. My acquaintance is not altogether a small one, nor an unrepresentative one, and I know that their are men and women amongst them, thank God, true enough to champion his name and memory during the months that he is undergoing his imprisonment, and ready, when that imprisonment is over, to welcome him as their friend, and to help him recover his spirit and to do good work for the world. I do not believe for an instant that Mr. Wilde’s career is over: I rather believe that, if his health lasts out under the sentence imposed upon him, he has far better work to do than he has ever done, and a far better audience awaiting him to appeal to. And if in any way my friendship and services may be in some measure of use in helping him to this end, I shall esteem it as one of the privileges and honours of my life.

Good as this is, there is still something to be added, — namely, that the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde is an outrage that shows how thoroughly the doctrine of liberty is misconceived. A man who has done nothing in the least degree invasive of anyone; a man whose entire life, so far as known or charged, has been one of strict conformity with the idea of equal liberty; a man whose sole offence is that he has done something which most of the rest of us (at least such is the presumption) prefer not to do, — is condemned to spend two years in cruel imprisonment at hard labour. And the judge who condemned him made the assertion in court that his was the most heinous crime that had ever come before him. I never expected to hear the statement of the senior Henry James, uttered half in jest, that " it is more justifiable to hang a man for spitting in a street car than for committing murder" subtantially repeated in earnest (or else in hypocrisy) from an English bench. Whatever Mr. Arthur Kitson may think of the need of a standard value in finance, he surely will admit, after this judicial utterance and sentence, that we are sadly in need of a standard of value (or its opposite) in crime. Men who imprison a man who has committed no crime are themselves criminals.