have been abolished off the face of the earth for doing it, or for allowing it. We manage to forgive them, because after all they were—our ancestors. When it comes to a State-act, the individual shares the responsibility with so many that he is able to shift it from his conscience.
But in that process what had the State done to itself? In so dealing with the criminal—it had become a criminal, making of itself a moral monstrosity—all the more foul because in the perpetration of such acts it declared that it was doing no wrong!
How, one may ask, was it possible for such penalties as these, and others even more savage than these, to become embedded in the penal code of a civilised and a Christian State?
Mainly for two reasons I believe: first the fact (referred to before) that the doctrine of unreformative punishment, as expressive of the Justice of God, was part of its religion; and secondly, that the State based itself then, as now, on the Will to Power, and not on the Will to Love. And seeking its safety in terms of power it perpetrated these atrocities. From those two premises the results were only natural.
Are we going to salve our consciences to-day by mere degrees of comparison, by saying: "We are not so bad as that now"? Perhaps we are not so bad; but the basis on which we continue to act has not altered. The Will to Power (for which the State still stands) must always lag behind the Will to Love in its under-
