Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/66

46 It may sound fantastic to suggest that a like condition should be definitely attached to our civil and penal system, in order to bring home to us that all punishment is shared, that what we manufacture in our prisons becomes a staple commodity.

But I can think of no device that would so quickly and effectively get rid of that separation of interest which punishment seems to establish. Imagine that for every prisoner sentenced, a lot fell on someone else, calling upon him or her to go and share in that demonstration of society's failure to produce only good citizens. Imagine the Prime Minister, about to make an important statement in the House of Commons, called suddenly by lot to share the incarceration of a defender of the liberty of the press or of a robber of hen-roosts! Should we have to wait a month—a week—to have our prisons transformed into places where human nature was no longer thrown to waste, with its energies cut off from sane employment and development? Would it not bring home to us—as perhaps nothing else would—the mill-stone weight on the life of the nation of all punishment that is not purely reformative and curative? Would it not very soon put an end to punishment in the old sense altogether?

You may look upon this suggestion as a fantastic parable; but spiritually it is what we shall have to do.

"There is only one sin," said the unknown writer of one of the most beautiful and famous