Page:Dostoyevsky - The House of the Dead, Collected Edition, 1915.djvu/199

 and abstractly. Even those who express it have not all been able to extinguish in themselves the lust of power. Every manufacturer, every capitalist, must feel an agreeable thrill in the thought that his workman with all his family is sometimes entirely dependent on him. This is undoubtedly true: a generation does not so quickly get over what has come to it as a legacy from the past; a man does not so easily renounce what is in his blood, what he has, so to speak, sucked in with his mother’s milk. Such rapid transformations do not occur. To acknowledge one’s fault and the sins of one’s fathers is little, very little; one must uproot the habit of them completely, and that is not so quickly done.

I have spoken of the torturer. The characteristics of the torturer exist in embryo in almost every man of to-day. But the brutal qualities do not develop equally. If they develop so as to overpower all the man’s other qualities, he becomes, of course, a hideous and terrible figure. Torturers are of two kinds some act of their own free will, others involuntarily, of necessity. The voluntary torturer is, of course, more degraded in every respect than the other, though the latter is so despised by the people, inspiring horror, loathing, an unaccountable, even mysterious terror. Why this almost superstitious horror for one torturer and such an indifferent, almost approving attitude to the other?

There are instances that are strange in the extreme. I have known people good-natured, even honest, and even respected by society who yet could not with equanimity let a man go until he screamed out under the lash, till he prayed and implored for mercy. It was the duty of men under punishment to cry out and pray for mercy. That was the accepted thing: it was looked upon as necessary and proper, and when, on one occasion, the victim would not scream, the officer, whom I knew personally and who might, perhaps, have been regarded in other relations as a good-natured man, took it as a personal insult. He had meant at first to let him off easily, but not hearing the usual “your honour, father, have mercy, I’ll pray to God for you all my life” and the rest of it—he was furious, and gave the man fifty lashes extra, trying to wring cries and supplications out of him—and he attained his end. “It couldn’t be helped, the man was rude,” he said to me quite seriously.

As for the actual executioner who is not a free agent but acts under compulsion, he is as every one knows a condemned convict