Christian Muscle Substitutes for Law

Speaking of police brutality, and some of our Trotskyite professional protesters seem able to speak of little else, the matter is a bit more complicated than is easy for the youngsters to understand.

A Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman, now a commissioned officer but once a little Constable Snottynose, provides the following story. He tells it unemotionally and clearly, commenting only that life was different in New Brunswick in the 1950s.

“It was a village, one of those places where it was said that it didn’t matter if you didn’t know what you were doing because everybody else in town did.

“Part of our regular duty was to go to Ned’s house and prevent him from beating his wife so badly that she died. Nothing is more frustrating than battered women who refuse to press charges but that was always what happened. Never once, no matter what anybody could say to her, would she take him to court and the next time he got drunk, and it happened about once a fortnight, she got thumped some more.

“I was a young constable, Constable Snottynose as the Force always christens new boys from Depot, and I wondered why we couldn’t go ahead and prosecute him when the evidence was clear for anybody to see. The corporal, who was a lot older than I was, an old man of about 30 I imagine, told me that hell would freeze shore to shore before a court would find a man guilty of assault when the person he was supposed to have assaulted got on the witness stand and said it never happened, that she had a dizzy spell and fell face forward on the gravel on the rocks in the front yard. He had known a lot of domestic disputes

“However the corporal was not a man without ideas. Unknown to me, he phoned the local Roman Catholic priest and asked for his help.

“‘Tell me the next time we get a domestic dispute call from that house,’ the priest told him, ‘I’ll go with you.’

“On the occasion of the next beating, before we left the office the corporal phoned the priest and reported the new beating.

“The corporal and I went to the house together. It was the familiar scene. She’d been hammered so much her eyes were almost completely closed. The husband was sitting at the table beside a bottle of whiskey he had lowered almost to the bottom. He responded to questions by shrugging his shoulders.

“I for one couldn’t see how a priest was going to make him any more communicative and the kitchen, with the broken crockery on the floor and blood spattered around, was not the place for a prayer meeting or a confirmation class.

“The priest, I’ll call him Father Donald, stepped into the kitchen a few minutes later. He was a big fellow, almost six feet. He’d been a hockey player when he was younger and even now, nearing fifty, he was still a very solid man. Solid and silent.

“He looked at us. He looked at the wife. He looked at the husband. Then his eyes made the trip backward, he looked from Ned to the wife to us. He didn’t speak a word.

“He took off his winter coat and laid if over the back of a chair. He did not take off his leather gloves. He walked over and stood in front of the man.

“‘Get on your feet, Ned,’ he said.

“Ned, drunk and confused, got to his feet and stood, weaving, trying to bring the priest’s face into focus.

“Quick as a panther, Father Donald drove his fist straight into Ned’s face, square on the nose. You could hear the bone crunch. Ned went down on the floor and lay as if dead and I was afraid at first that he might be and that we were all going to be in court on murder or manslaughter charges.

“Father Don turned, went back to the chair, got into his coat, pulled up his collar, it being a cold night outside, and said to the corporal ‘Let me know if you have any more trouble in this house.’ Without another word, he walked out.

“As far as I know she was never beaten up again.

“God knows what would have happened to us all today. That great muscular Christian would have been hauled into court, no doubt and the corporal would have been demoted for setting a bad example to his men. But as I say, it worked, which used to be an excuse for many strange things happening.”

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April, 03