REVOLUTIONARY CHRISTIANITY 45 



was once placed in the position of superintendent of a 

 large school, refused to punish, putting the boys on their 

 honour to do right* The result was perfect discipline, 

 though the boys did not like it* They much preferred 

 the tryanny of the schoolmaster to the far more despotic 

 tyranny of the conscience ! Of a truth the conscience is 

 the only legitimate tyranny, and it is by far the most 

 irresistible* 



But if the punishment of children fails to fulfil any 

 useful purpose, still more so is it with the punishment 

 of adults. In England every man who gets into prison, 

 gets there on an average ten times, proving up to the hilt 

 that our penal system, to put it mildly, is not reforma- 

 tory ! Man is not good because of the magistrate or 

 the policeman ; he is good because God made him good. 

 There is no need for the so-called ** forces of Law and 

 Order. *^ The only force of law and order that ever 

 was, or ever will be, any good, is the force of God^s 

 Law of Love in the heart of man. The so-called forces 

 of law and order always have been instruments of tryanny 

 used by the strong to oppress the weak. 



Criminals can roughly be divided into two classes, 

 and for neither of them is penal treatment in the least 

 appropriate. There is the class of criminals whom we 

 may speak of as ** born criminals,*^ and there is the class 

 whom we may speak of as ** manufactured criminals.** 

 ** Born-criminals ** are suffering from feeble-mindedness, 

 or from moral insanity, and to punish them is as foolish 

 as it would be to punish a child because it had a birth- 

 mark. They are suffering from an hereditary disease. 

 Their lives should be made as useful and happy as 

 possible under the circumstances, and they should be 

 carefully segregated so as to render it impossible for 

 them to propagate their species. 



The ** manufactured criminals ** have been made 

 what they are by their surroundings — surroundings 



