Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/59

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Crime and Punishment
39

will eventually help the spirit of man to a better and larger understanding of the follies which are committed when men substitute the Will to Power for the Will to Love.

And if we can—as we are going to—if we can leave injustice when done in conspicuous high places to the natural and logical consequences, without applying the penal code, why cannot we trust natural consequences a very great deal more, where smaller and more humble misdemeanours are concerned, and give to those natural consequences a greater unity of effect by irradiating them with the true spirit of man—love, joy, gentleness, peace, against which there is no law?

One of the reasons why we dare not be humane and curative instead of punitive to our criminals lies in the fact that the standard of life in which we have allowed honest and hard-working millions to subsist outside our prisons, has been so inhuman and degraded that if we made our prisons really humane, really curative, they would be a reward instead of a punishment.

We dare not offer so beautiful a temptation.

And so it is separation again—the separation of class from class, of rich from poor, which makes impossible the standardising of our prisons from living tombs into genuine reformatories and sanatoria. If we had not separated ourselves in our national life from a sense of responsibility for the poverty and misery around us, we should not be driven