There is a certain school of moralists who are angered and alarmed by the mere suggestion that men should cease to blame and punish each other. They protest that virtue would die out and morality become a mockery if we ceased to scold, and whip, and execute each other. They seem to believe that injustice and ferocity are the best exemplars of justice and human kindness. Dr. Aked, minister of Pembroke Chapel, Liverpool, declaiming against what he called "this preposterous notion of moral irresponsibility," declared that "it is the doctrine of every coward, of every cur, of every thief who ever pilfered from his master's till, of every seducer and traitor the world has seen." I whisper the name of Torquemada, and pass on. Dr. Aked, supposing, for the sake of illustration, that he who has been a bad man, said: If, in the mercy of God, the day comes when I see myself as I am, when there is no more shuffling, when to myself Myself is compelled, even to the teeth and forehead of my faults, to give in evidence--if such a day comes, no juggling with words, _no nonsense about not knowing any better_ or being driven by education upon organisation, by environment acting on heredity, will serve to conceal from my soul the hideous view of its own guilt. And yet Dr. Aked is a minister of the Christian religion, and a professed follower of Christ, who said of his murderers, "_Father forgive them, for they know not what they do_." I might imitate Dr. Aked, and denounce the idea that punishment makes men virtuous and docile as the idea of every tyrant, of every religious persecutor, of every wife-beater, of every martinet, of every bully and brute the world has ever seen. But I prefer to look calmly and sensibly at the evidence. That mighty moral ruler, King Henry VIII., during his reign did, according to the author of _Elizabethan England_, hang up seventy-two thousand thieves, rogues, and vagabonds. Now, Sir Thomas More, who was one of the finest men England ever bred, and was Lord High Chancellor under Henry VIII., has put it upon record, in his great and noble work, _Utopia_, that these severe punishments were not only unjust, but ineffectual. I will quote from Sir Thomas: One day when I was dining with him (Cardinal Archbishop Morton) there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said: were then hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places.