"Not nearly so tough," replied the doctor, "as the former society had
found it. In the first place, the former society, being itself based on
injustice, was wholly without moral prestige or ethical authority in
dealing with the criminal and lawless classes. Society itself stood
condemned in their presence for the injustice which had been the
provocation and excuse of their revolt. This was a fact which made the
whole machinery of so-called criminal justice in your day a mockery.
Every intelligent man knew in his heart that the criminal and vicious
were, for the most part, what they were on account of neglect and
injustice, and an environment of depraving influences for which a
defective social order was responsible, and that if righteousness were
done, society, instead of judging them, ought to stand with them in the
dock before a higher justice, and take upon itself the heavier
condemnation. This the criminals themselves felt in the bottom of their
hearts, and that feeling forbade them to respect the law they feared.
They felt that the society which bade them reform was itself in yet
greater need of reformation. The new order, on the other hand, held forth
to the outcasts hands purged of guilt toward them. Admitting the wrong
that they had suffered in the past, it invited them to a new life under
new conditions, offering them, on just and equal terms, their share in
the social heritage. Do you suppose that there ever was a human heart so
base that it did not at least know the difference between justice and
injustice, and to some extent respond to it?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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