Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/12

viii vice enthroned; and the callousness of the individual is enlarged and becomes a national callousness, all the more difficult to get rid of, because it has become identified with law and authority.

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