That is what the prison chaplain had taught him. It is what the clergy do teach. They talk of the folly and the immorality of abolishing prison and gallows; and then they offer the perpetrators of the most inhuman and terrible crimes a certainty of everlasting bliss in a sinless heaven. If it is immoral and absurd to say that all criminals are sinned against as well as sinning; if it is immoral and absurd to say that we ought not to hang a man, nor to flog, nor to imprison him, what kind of morality and wisdom lie in offering all criminals an eternity of happiness and glory? The clergy are that which their environment has made them. What kind of reasoning can we expect from men who have been taught that it is wicked to think? Before you are angry with me for defending the prisoner be sure that you are not confounding the ideas of the criminal and the crime. I hate the crime as much as any man here; but I do not hate the criminal. I am not defending evil; I am defending the evil-doer. Before you plume yourselves too much upon your superior morality and greater love of justice, allow me to remind you that I am asking that the world shall be moral, and not only this man: I am demanding justice for _all_ men, and not for a few. But you--you think you have acted righteously and honourably when you have hanged a murderer; but you have not a thought for the inhuman social conditions that make men criminals. This prisoner is but a type: a type of the legion victims of a selfish and cowardly society. Every day, in every city, in every country, innocent children are being poisoned and perverted by millions. Which of you has spoken a word or lifted a hand to prevent this wholesale wrong? What man of you all, who are so fierce against crime, so loud in praise of morality, has ever tried in act or speech to combat the crime and the immorality which society perpetuates: with your knowledge and consent? You who are so anxious to punish crime, what are you doing to prevent it? When I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour you assume that I would set him free, assuring him that he is an injured man and that fate compelled him to the act of murder. Do you think, then, that I would release a tiger amongst the crowd in a circus, or that I would allow a homicidal maniac to go at large in the streets of a city? It would be folly to give to this brutalised and ignorant tramp a message which hardly a man in this court is sufficiently educated and refined to understand; it would be folly to set at liberty a besotted savage: it would be unsafe. But I say to _you_ that the prisoner is a victim of heredity and environment, that he has been debased and wronged by society, and that to punish him is unjust. (A woman's voice: "The monster! Kill him.") Madam, there is not a woman here can be sure that any child she bears may not be driven by society to stand some day in the dock.