Such as these—shameful barbarities done to helpless creatures—we suffer amongst us year after year. They are admitted to be anathema; in favour of their abolition there would be found at any moment a round majority of unfettered parliamentary and general opinion. One and all they are removable, and many of them by small expenditure of parliamentary time, public money, and expert care. It is pitiable that, for mere want of parliamentary time, we cannot get manifest sores such as these treated and banished once for all from the nation’s body; pitiable that due machinery cannot be devised to deal with these and other barbarities to man and beast, concerning which, in the main, no real controversy exists; scandalous that their removal should be left to the mercy of the ballot, to private members’ Bills—for ever liable to be obstructed; or to the hampered and inadequate efforts of societies unsupported by legislation. Rome, I know, was not built in a day. Parliament works hard, has worked harder during these last years than ever perhaps before; all honour to it for that! It is an august assembly of which I wish to speak with all respect. But it works without sense of proportion, or sense of humour. Over and over again it turns things already talked into their graves; over and over again listens to the same partizan bickerings, to arguments which everybody knows by heart. And all the time the fires of live misery that could, most of them, so easily be put out are raging, and the reek thereof is going up. It is I, of course, who will be mocked at for lack of the senses of proportion and humour. But if the tale of hours spent on certain party measures be set against the tale of hours not yet spent on measures of health and humanity, the mockers will yet be mocked. I am not one of those who believe we can do without party; but I do see and I do say that party business absorbs far too much of the time that our common sense and common humanity demands for the redress of crying shames. And if laymen see this with grief and anger, how much more poignant must be the feeling of members of Parliament themselves, to whom alone remedy has been entrusted! II THE NATURE OF LAWS (Written in 1914.) Among comments on the foregoing letter there occurred again and again criticisms conveniently summed up in a sentence from an American journal: “It is not the part of Government to make men moral.”