4. The Theory of Scapegoats - Page 2

"Truly,
my name is Cinna," says the unsuspecting author. "Tear him to pieces!"
cries the mob; "he's a conspirator!" "I am Cinna the poet," pleads the
unhappy man; "I am not Cinna the conspirator!" But the mob does not heed
such delicate distinctions at such a moment. "Tear him for his bad
verses!" it cries impartially. "Tear him for his bad verses!"

Whatever sort of misfortune falls upon persons of the lower order of
intelligence is always met in the same spirit. Especially is this the
case with the deaths of relatives. Fools who have lost a friend
invariably blame somebody for his fatal illness. To hear many people
talk, you would suppose they were unaware of the familiar proposition
that all men are mortal (including women); you might imagine they
thought an ordinary human constitution was calculated to survive nine
hundred and ninety-nine years unless some evil-disposed person or
persons took the trouble beforehand to waylay and destroy it. "My poor
father was eighty-seven when he died; and he would have been alive still
if it weren't for that nasty Mrs. Jones: she put him into a pair of damp
sheets." Or, "My husband would never have caught the cold that killed
him, if that horrid man Brown hadn't kept him waiting so long in the
carriage at the street corner." The doctor has to bear the brunt of most
such complaints; indeed, it is calculated by an eminent statistician
(who desires his name to remain unpublished) that eighty-three per cent.
of the deaths in Great Britain might easily have been averted if the
patient had only been treated in various distinct ways by all the
members of his family, and if that foolish Dr. Squills hadn't so grossly
mistaken and mistreated his malady.

The fact is, the death is regarded as a misfortune, and somebody must be
blamed for it. Heaven has provided scapegoats. The doctor and the
hostile female members of the family are always there--laid on, as it
were, for the express purpose.

With us in modern Europe, resentment in such cases seldom goes further
than vague verbal outbursts of temper. We accuse Mrs. Jones of
misdemeanours with damp sheets; but we don't get so far as to accuse her
of tricks with strychnine. In the Middle Ages, however, the pursuit of
the scapegoat ran a vast deal further. When any great one died--a Black
Prince or a Dauphin--it was always assumed on all hands that he must
have been poisoned. True, poisoning may then have been a trifle more
frequent; certainly the means of detecting it were far less advanced
than in the days of Tidy and Lauder Brunton. Still, people must often
have died natural deaths even in the Middle Ages--though nobody believed
it.