whose work has taken them not only into slums but into prisons and police-courts, that the oppressive sense of Evil triumphant, strong and proud of itself, has weighed more heavily upon them in the prison and in the police-court than in the slum; for the slum only represents the neglect of Society, but the administration of our penal code represents its stereotyped preoccupation (with sympathy and understanding almost entirely eliminated) on a problem which nothing but sympathy and understanding will ever solve. There Society is in its trenches fighting against the human nature which it first violates and then fears.
We, law-makers and law-abiders, are in league with—and are dependent for our material prosperity and protection upon—a system which is very nearly as bad as the crimes we denounce. And until we have made our system very much more beautiful, very much better, and more convincing to the criminal and the revolutionarist—it is only by fear and a punitive code that we can keep it going.
It is not possible to maintain such adjuncts to our social system as profiteering, exploitation, class privilege, wage-slavery, race-subjection, international jealousy, without a penal code and its logical outcome, war. If we want to get rid of the one we must have a whole mind to get rid of the others too. Do not let us pretend to separate them, for we cannot. Not only does the attempt produce
