“Be ye the children of Creation!” is the real human solution--not by harking back (as opponents would pretend) to the savagery of a lower species, but by accepting the spiritualising impulse of evolutionary forces--which have brought us to this great development from the mentality of the lower animal world--the knowledge that we are all part of one whole. And it is on that recognition of an underlying unity (from which we are inseparable) that the great natural revolution of our ideas about crime and punishment must be brought about. If we cling to the violent and the arbitrary, and the separative solution (of which miraculous retribution is the corollary) we are in the Dark Ages still. It must have been the experience of many whose work has taken them not only into slums but into prisons and police-courts, that the oppressive sense of Evil triumphant, strong and proud of itself, has weighed more heavily upon them in the prison and in the police-court than in the slum; for the slum only represents the neglect of Society, but the administration of our penal code represents its stereotyped preoccupation (with sympathy and understanding almost entirely eliminated) on a problem which nothing but sympathy and understanding will ever solve. There Society is in its trenches fighting against the human nature which it first violates and then fears. We, law-makers and law-abiders, are in league with--and are dependent for our material prosperity and protection upon--a system which is very nearly as bad as the crimes we denounce. And until we have made our system very much more beautiful, very much better, and more convincing to the criminal and the revolutionarist--it is only by fear and a punitive code that we can keep it going. It is not possible to maintain such adjuncts to our social system as profiteering, exploitation, class privilege, wage-slavery, race-subjection, international jealousy, without a penal code and its logical outcome, war. If we want to get rid of the one we must have a whole mind to get rid of the others too. Do not let us pretend to separate them, for we cannot. Not only does the attempt produce weak practical results--it produces also a false mind. The attempt to separate one thing from another, one human being from another, is at the root of our belief in punishment. Punishment helps to separate, helps to make us feel separate; it does not unite. An English judge declared quite recently that the main object of punishment was not to reform the criminal but to protect society. And so long as that is true, the criminal is just as conscious as we are that the discipline laid on him is the expression of a divided standard of morality, knowing perfectly well that we in like circumstances should not think such punishment good for ourselves or our children.