That may sound a puzzling statement; but the more we accentuate the difference between the criminal and ourselves--the more, superficially, are we able to get rid of our sense of brotherhood and responsibility. And so, when bishops go on to the platform to advocate the flogging of men who live on the earnings of prostitutes, it helps them to forget that they also are living on the earnings of prostitutes, and are by their support of a capitalist system involving sweated labour and degraded housing conditions--neatly and efficaciously driving the prostitute into the hands of the male “bully”--whom they then flog for extracting his profit from a damaged article which, in the public market of supply and demand, they have already wrung dry. The very monstrousness of the proposed penalty helps us to forget that we are all links in the same chain of circumstances. In the “bully” the degrading brutality of the system finally emerges and becomes patent; just as in war the degrading brutality of our peace system finally emerges. Then we point to it with horror and cry that we are peace-lovers! So we are; we have loved peace at a price which we would not exceed--we ran it on sweated conditions; and we pay for it in war. For there exist, in every nation, sources of wealth, sufficient--if equitably distributed and constructively applied for the good of all--to allay that economic unrest which is the main incentive by which modern nations are led into war. But in every country alike there are interests which refuse to pay that price, and which will, if threatened, precipitate their country into war rather than be held at a ransom which would merely readjust wealth more equitably to the true sources of its production. War has come to us--not as a punishment divinely imposed--(a splendid old lady of ninety told me the other day that the war was God’s visitation upon us for our divorces and for having given votes to women)--war has come upon us, not as a punishment for these offences against Taboo, but as a natural consequence of our social peace conditions. And at present, in the mentality of nations, punishment (not of the system, but of the criminal act which has finally emerged from it to horrify us) is the only remedy. And so punishment still appears to us as the very bed of justice--the foundation stone of morality. If you do not insist on it, social order will go to pieces. And as we have attempted scarcely any criminal reform without punishment--and none till the day before yesterday--the contention is accepted as true for lack of witnesses against it. The standpoint toward human nature of our generally accepted “moral code” is that of a devout believer in corporal punishment--of that kind of parent who says: “I have to flog my boy because he is so untruthful.” And the idea that the untruthfulness is the product of the corporal punishment never enters the parental mind.