the more obvious the miracle of his conversion. When you
advertize a converted burglar or reclaimed drunkard as one of the
attractions at an experience meeting, your burglar can hardly have been
too burglarious or your drunkard too drunken. As long as such
attractions are relied on, you will have your Snobbies claiming to have
beaten their mothers when they were as a matter of prosaic fact
habitually beaten by them, and your Rummies of the tamest
respectability pretending to a past of reckless and dazzling vice. Even
when confessions are sincerely autobiographic there is no reason to
assume at once that the impulse to make them is pious or the interest
of the hearers wholesome. It might as well be assumed that the poor
people who insist on showing appalling ulcers to district visitors are
convinced hygienists, or that the curiosity which sometimes welcomes
such exhibitions is a pleasant and creditable one. One is often tempted
to suggest that those who pester our police superintendents with
confessions of murder might very wisely be taken at their word and
executed, except in the few cases in which a real murderer is seeking
to be relieved of his guilt by confession and expiation. For though I
am not, I hope, an unmerciful person, I do not think that the
inexorability of the deed once done should be disguised by any ritual,
whether in the confessional or on the scaffold.

And here my disagreement with the Salvation Army, and with all
propagandists of the Cross (to which I object as I object to all
gibbets) becomes deep indeed. Forgiveness, absolution, atonement, are
figments: punishment is only a pretence of cancelling one crime by
another; and you can no more have forgiveness without vindictiveness
than you can have a cure without a disease. You will never get a high
morality from people who conceive that their misdeeds are revocable and
pardonable, or in a society where absolution and expiation are
officially provided for us all. The demand may be very real; but the
supply is spurious. Thus Bill Walker, in my play, having assaulted the
Salvation Lass, presently finds himself overwhelmed with an intolerable
conviction of sin under the skilled treatment of Barbara. Straightway
he begins to try to unassault the lass and deruffianize his deed, first
by getting punished for it in kind, and, when that relief is denied
him, by fining himself a pound to compensate the girl. He is foiled
both ways. He finds the Salvation Army