We all agree that war is a very horrible thing. But at one point it has a moral value which is not shared so obviously by other penal codes; a value which people are coming more and more to recognise to-day, and which will--more than anything else perhaps--help to put an end to war. For when you seek to punish wrong by going to war, then you yourself have to share the punishment. Innocent and guilty alike must agonise and suffer and die. To inflict that punishment you must choose out your bravest and your best, and send them to share equally with those you would punish the sentence of suffering and death. All punishment, inflicted by penal codes, really comes back to the community; but only in war do we see it shared: actively and voluntarily by some, passively and unavoidably by others. And perhaps it is that more than anything else which will eventually persuade civilised man that war is intolerable--that he cannot punish without sharing the punishment. It may sound fantastic to suggest that a like condition should be definitely attached to our civil and penal system, in order to bring home to us that all punishment is shared, that what we manufacture in our prisons becomes a staple commodity. But I can think of no device that would so quickly and effectively get rid of that separation of interest which punishment seems to establish. Imagine that for every prisoner sentenced, a lot fell on someone else, calling upon him or her to go and share in that demonstration of society’s failure to produce only good citizens. Imagine the Prime Minister, about to make an important statement in the House of Commons, called suddenly by lot to share the incarceration of a defender of the liberty of the press or of a robber of hen-roosts! Should we have to wait a month--a week--to have our prisons transformed into places where human nature was no longer thrown to waste, with its energies cut off from sane employment and development? Would it not bring home to us--as perhaps nothing else would--the mill-stone weight on the life of the nation of all punishment that is not purely reformative and curative? Would it not very soon put an end to punishment in the old sense altogether? You may look upon this suggestion as a fantastic parable; but spiritually it is what we shall have to do. “There is only one sin,” said the unknown writer of one of the most beautiful and famous books of devotion produced during the middle-ages--the Theologia Germanica. “The only sin is separation.” We shall never get rid of the criminal till we cease to separate ourselves from him, till we make his interest our interest, till we share, willingly and consciously, the responsibility of the society which has produced him. CHRISTIANITY A DANGER TO THE STATE (1916) The State, which accepts the proposition that force is a remedy, has logical ground for employing force to secure its ends, until worsted by the forces opposed to it, or by some other power.