"The Beloved Sinner" by Agnes Repplier is an extended essay in social criticism that examines the paradoxical human tendency to sympathize with criminals, lawbreakers, and political offenders while remaining indifferent to their victims and to the orderly institutions of justice. Repplier opens by observing that while universal love of a lover is a myth, love of a sinner is a near-universal reality, rooted perhaps in humanity's inherited inclination toward transgression dating from the original disobedience in Eden. She illustrates this through cultural touchstones such as Robin Hood, the Master Thief of folklore, and the enduring popular fascination with bold and audacious crime. Repplier surveys the then-fashionable criminological view that the criminal is essentially a sick man, his prison a hospital, and his judge a physician. She treats this view with sharp irony, quoting the dean of a Michigan medical school as a representative of its overreach, and juxtaposing his theory with the sardonic common sense of actual convicts who have little interest in being classified as patients. She examines a debate published in the Nineteenth Century review in which a judge, a senior law enforcement official, and a self-identified ex-convict argued competing positions on criminal justice, with particular emphasis on the question of restitution. The two legal authorities insisted that thieves, especially large-scale ones, should be compelled to account for stolen property and imprisoned indefinitely upon refusal; the ex-convict flatly rejected this as an intrusion upon what he regarded as the rightful proceeds of criminal labor. Repplier finds the convict's position logically consistent with the broader public sentiment he exemplifies, noting that sympathy routinely attaches to the thief and never to the robbed. Moving from individual crime to organized and professional criminality, Repplier traces the increasing specialization of criminal enterprise in America, citing statistics from Chicago, cases from Philadelphia, and the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency stretched so broadly as to encompass infanticide committed by a fourteen-year-old girl. Throughout, she maintains that the law exists not to punish or reform the offender but to protect the public, a principle she regards as having been obscured by sentimental reformism. She then turns to political offenders, finding them distinctly less sympathetic than ordinary criminals because they lack humor and possess an excess of self-righteous indignation. She examines hunger strikes by Industrial Workers of the World prisoners in Tacoma and by detained radicals on Ellis Island, treating both episodes with comic detachment while noting that the legal resolution in Tacoma, which simply held the authorities blameless for any self-inflicted harm, represented a rational and overdue correction of a long-exploited vulnerability. She contrasts the grim solemnity of political prisoners unfavorably with the lively responsiveness of ordinary convicts to theatrical entertainment, citing a pageant staged at Sing Sing as evidence of criminal cheerfulness. The essay broadens further into a critique of wartime and post-war sentimentalism. Repplier addresses humanitarian protests against American munitions sales, the condemnation of British treatment of suffragists invoked as a moral disqualification for protesting German atrocities in Belgium, and the efforts of British and American women to block the restitution of cattle stolen from northern France on the grounds that German children needed milk. She identifies in all these positions the same fundamental inversion: sympathy extended to the aggressor and withheld from the victim. She then engages directly with Bertrand Russell's wartime pacifism and with a Christmas sermon by the English writer Arthur Clutton-Brock, published in the Atlantic Monthly, which called upon Americans to forgive Germany in a spirit of universal good humor on the grounds that all nations and all people fail equally. Repplier rejects this argument with controlled fury, pointing out that describing Germany's conduct in France and Flanders as mere absurdity is an offense against both fact and moral proportion, and that to deny meaningful distinctions between degrees of wrong is to place aggressor and victim on the same moral plane. She concludes by returning to the domestic question of criminal justice, examining appeals for the release of political prisoners and finding the advocates curiously silent about what the released prisoners will do with their freedom. Her final position is that sympathy for the lawless, however emotionally satisfying, is not a sufficient basis for policy and cannot be permitted to override the legitimate claim of law-abiding citizens to security. The title figure, the beloved sinner, is not finally condemned but is recognized as a permanent feature of human sympathy whose indulgence, when institutionalized, subverts justice and abandons the innocent victim to indifference.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1916 · Genre: Biography, Religious Studies, Literary Criticism