Of Cowardice the Mother of Cruelty

I have always found that between valour and cruelty there is a great distance, and that what passes for severity in conquerors and judges is very often no more than fear. The man who tortures his prisoner is not demonstrating strength — he is demonstrating that he is afraid of what the prisoner might do if left whole. The executioner who makes the business last, who invents refinements of suffering, is not enacting justice — he is enacting dread. It is the coward who prolongs a death; the brave man finishes it.

This is why I have observed that the cruelest peoples are generally not the boldest. The Romans were fearsome enemies on the field of battle, but their spectacle-cruelty at the arena, their delight in prolonged suffering, speaks of something else — a collective anxiety that needed to see others brought down and kept down. The Spanish in the New World, whatever their military qualities, behaved in a way that tells us less about their courage than their terror: terror of a land they did not understand, of peoples who would not fit into their categories, and so they destroyed what they could not contain.

Cruelty is always a form of confession: the torturer tells us what he fears by showing us what he punishes.

For my part, I think the quality most to be admired in an enemy is the courage to show mercy at the moment of victory. It is easy to be magnanimous in safety; the true test is whether a man can treat a defeated opponent with dignity when he has no reason to except his own honor. I have read of generals who behaved this way and I have read of those who did not, and there is no doubt in my mind which kind produced the more lasting peace. Cruelty breeds cruelty in return, and the cycle has no natural end — it must be broken by an act of will, which is to say an act of courage, the very thing that cruelty cannot produce.