But comical as their foreign policy is, their social system is still more so, for under the guise of “charity” and “philanthropy” there exists, in fact, a civil war, in which each individual, or group of individuals, plays a remorseless game of “Beggar my neighbour” and “Devil take the hindmost” in mad scramble for wealth; whence results, of course, a state of gross and glaring inequality, under which certain favoured persons wallow in the good things of life, while others pass their years in the pinch of extremest poverty. Thus, in due course, and by an unerring process, is manufactured what they call “the criminal class”--that is, the host of those who are driven by social injustice to outlawry and violence. And herein, perhaps, more than in any other of their customs, is shown the inherent savagery of their natures, for, instead of attempting to eradicate the _cause_ of these evils by the institution of fairer and juster modes of living, my fellow-islanders are almost to a man in favour of “punishing” (that is the expression) these victims of their own foolish laws by the infliction of barbarous sentences of imprisonment, or the lash, or, in extreme cases, the gallows. To inculcate habits of honesty they shut a man in prison, and render him more than ever incapable of earning an honest livelihood. As a warning against robbery with violence, they give a lesson in official violence by flogging the criminal; and, by way of teaching the sanctity of human life, they judicially murder the murderer. Many a grotesque absurdity is solemnly and deliberately enacted in their so-called “courts of law”; and any one who ventures to suggest that this is the case is regarded as a fool and reprobate for his pains.