And that is going to cost the State more money than it is prepared to spend on anything—except on War.
Crime is sometimes a very shameful thing But is not the record of the way powerful States have dealt with crime in the past more uniformly shameful even than crime itself? Has not that record stood out as a ghastly blind spot in the conscience of Christian Society?
People of conservative mind are so extraordinarily ready to make excuses for organised Society which they will not make for the individual. "That was a cruel age," they will say, when you recall the judicial horrors perpetrated against human nature three hundred, two hundred, one hundred years ago; it was tradition, it was custom. But there were nations, professing Christianity—a doctrine having exactly the same basis then as now—the same creed, the same gospel, the same divine life of compassion and mercy exemplary of what Heaven required in the conduct of man to man; and there were rulers and administrators with minds and power of reason just as capable as our own—giants of intellect some of them—who, with all their profession of Christianity—interpreting it to the supposed needs of the State—have left to us this ghastly record of a penal code worse than the crimes it was set to remedy That penal code—the obsequious servant of State-authority—stood hundreds of years behind the average individual conscience of the
