Nor must we forget two other effects of attempted enforcement, both of which are, I think, entirely evil. A government which is continually flouted in its attempt at administration is bound to attempt even greater severity. There will be an extension not only of the area of offence, but also of the methods of coping with offence, and the punishment to be inflicted where it occurs. The classic instance of this result is the government of Geneva from the period of Calvin’s dispensation. It does not result in the satisfactory enforcement of the law, but in its wider evasion. Severity on one side is met by brutality upon another; one might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. And the disproportion between crime and punishment which emerges draws the sympathy of the general population away from the government to the offender. This is, I suggest, wholly bad for any society. It makes the habits of government generally suspect to the multitude. It creates martyrs unduly and unwisely. And this has, of course, the consequence that it becomes ever more impossible to enforce the law. Its irrationalism is advertised to the multitude. It becomes inacceptable to an ever-increasing circle who, while they may sympathize with its principle, are not prepared to acquiesce in the price that has to be paid for its application. Not only, sooner or later, does such legislation perish, but the habits to which it gives rise persist, and are frequently carried over into realms where they are still more undesirable. And the severity which a government is tempted to practise makes it blind to wrong through becoming inured to its consequences. When the British Government first met the weapon of the hunger-strike it was baffled; later, it turned that weapon against those who employed it by what was called the Cat and Mouse Act. Much of this proceeding, where the suffragettes were concerned, had a comic, as well as a tragic side. But the whole procedure had the serious result of making the public expect that any hunger-strike would be a dramatic battle between the government and its prisoner, in which the cause of the imprisonment was lost sight of in the gamble of the procedure. The public, accordingly, was not greatly moved by the hunger-striking which took place during the Irish Revolution; and when Mr Lloyd George left the Lord Mayor of Cork to die, people were more interested in the circumstance of his death than in the vital question of whether he should have been allowed to die. In all this realm, the denial of liberty seems to result in the slow maximization of unhappiness.