My clerical friend and I would stand before her sick and sorry and ashamed. We should be alike dismayed and shocked: we should be alike touched and repelled. But there in that tragic moment would appear the likeness and the difference between us. He would not _understand_. The unfortunate woman has been rendered physically and morally loathsome to us. So has this murderer. But that should cause us to pity, and not to hate them; it should inspire us not to destroy them; but to destroy the evil conditions that have brought them, and millions as unfortunate as they, to this terrible and shameful pass. The bitterest wrong of all is the fact that these fellow-creatures of ours have been degraded below the reach of our help and our affection. Looking into my own heart, and recalling my experience of men and women, I must own that there is not one in a thousand of us who might not have become a shame and a horror to our fellows had our environment been as cruel and as hard as the environment of these from whom we shrink appalled. And when I read of a murder, when I see some human wreck, so repulsive and unsightly that my soul is sick within me, and my flesh shudders away from the contact, I crush the anger out of my heart, and remember what I am and might have been, and that this man, this woman, now so dreadful or so vile, is a victim of a state of society which most of us believe in and uphold. I cannot hate these miserables, but I cannot love them. I could not sleep in a dirty bed, nor eat a rotten peach, nor listen to a piano out of tune, nor drink after a leper or a slut, nor make a friend of a sweater, nor shake the hand of an assassin, nor sit at table with a filthy sot. But to drive our fellow-creatures into disgrace and crime beyond redemption, and then to hate them or to hang them; is that just? To loathe and punish the victims of society, and never lift a hand against the wrongs that are their ruin, is that reasonable? I ask for a verdict in the prisoner's favour; but I cannot ask that he be set at liberty. We could not liberate a smallpox patient nor a lunatic. Although the prisoner ought not to be punished, it is imperative that he be restrained. Being what he is: being what society has made him, he is not fit to be at large. We must defend ourselves against him. We must protect our children from him, even although we have failed to protect other children against society. I ask the jury for a verdict in the prisoner's favour. I leave the prisoner to their justice and to their reason. That is my case. CHAPTER THIRTEEN--THE FAILURE OF PUNISHMENT DOES it do a man any good to hang him? Does it do us any good to hang him? Is any human being in the wide world edified or bettered when a man is hanged? Is it any _use_ hanging men? That it is unjust to hang a man we have seen. But is it any use?