A very good (or bad) example of this was provided by the conduct of the Bishops in the House of Lords a few years ago, when, to provide the Government with a short cut out of its difficulties in dealing with political prisoners (mainly caused by its refusal to treat them as political prisoners) they allowed the rules of the House to be suspended for the passing through all its stages in twenty-four hours of the “Cat and Mouse Act.” Before long its operations horrified them, and they signed (or some of them did) letters and memorials of protest to the Government, asking for those operations to be stopped. But not one of them would make a motion in the House of Lords for the suspension or repeal of that Act for which, in so special a way, they had made themselves responsible. By allowing it to become law they had passed on the responsibility to others; and being thus quit of it, the last thing probably that occurred to any of them was that they themselves needed “a change of heart” in order to recover moral integrity, or even political honesty. And so, in these pages, law and authority are just as much questioned as any other of our social features, on the direct assumption that like produces like, and that a form of society which establishes, encourages, or condones as “necessary” such defilements of human nature as militarism, prostitution, sweated labour, slum-dwellings, vengeful and unreformative punishment--having its heart so hardened as to tolerate these--is not likely in its institutions and government departments to have escaped from a reproduction of that attitude of mind which makes them possible or regards them as a defensible solution of the social problem. The war has revealed much to us. It has shown how much society is willing to afford for things which it considers worth while; and has thus shown by implication those things which formerly society did not think worth while--because its heart was not in them. It has had the heart to spend colossal sums, to conscript millions of young lives to death in defence of its organisation upon the lines of power against a rival organisation willing to pay a similar price. It had not the heart, in the days of peace and prosperity, to spend one-hundredth part of that sum in organising even those institutions which it entirely controlled, on the lines of love.