Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/49

Rh sense, we have fallen to the confused notion that punishment is the same. But as a matter of fact the two are entirely different. The law of cause and effect stands for natural consequences; the law of punishment substitutes artificial consequences; and we fly to punishment largely as an escape from the results of our age-long indifference to natural consequences. Having produced the criminal we set to work to destroy his self-respect, as a short cut to the preservation of our own.

That may sound a puzzling statement; but the more we accentuate the difference between the criminal and ourselves—the more, superficially, are we able to get rid of our sense of brotherhood and responsibility. And so, when bishops go on to the platform to advocate the flogging of men who live on the earnings of prostitutes, it helps them to forget that they also are living on the earnings of prostitutes, and are by their support of a capitalist system involving sweated labour and degraded housing conditions—neatly and efficaciously driving the prostitute into the hands of the male "bully"—whom they then flog for extracting his profit from a damaged article which, in the public market of supply and demand, they have already wrung dry. The very monstrousness of the proposed penalty helps us to forget that we are all links in the same chain of circumstances. In the "bully" the degrading brutality of the system finally emerges and becomes patent; just as in war