d
profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of Equality,
and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance, often politely
called punishment or justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is
tolerated. The other is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well
aware of the fact that the only editor in England who denounces
punishment as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his
paper The Freethinker; and has been imprisoned for two years for
blasphemy.

SANE CONCLUSIONS

And now I must ask the excited reader not to lose his head on one side
or the other, but to draw a sane moral from these grim absurdities. It
is not good sense to propose that laws against crime should apply to
principals only and not to accessories whose consent, counsel, or
silence may secure impunity to the principal. If you institute
punishment as part of the law, you must punish people for refusing to
punish. If you have a police, part of its duty must be to compel
everybody to assist the police. No doubt if your laws are unjust, and
your policemen agents of oppression, the result will be an unbearable
violation of the private consciences of citizens. But that cannot be
helped: the remedy is, not to license everybody to thwart the law if
they please, but to make laws that will command the public assent, and
not to deal cruelly and stupidly with lawbreakers. Everybody
disapproves of burglars; but the modern burglar, when caught and
overpowered by a householder usually appeals, and often, let us hope,
with success, to his captor not to deliver him over to the useless
horrors of penal servitude. In other cases the lawbreaker escapes
because those who could give him up do not consider his breech of the
law a guilty action. Sometimes, even, private tribunals are formed in
opposition to the official tribunals; and these private tribunals
employ assassins as executioners, as was done, for example, by Mahomet
before he had established his power officially, and by the Ribbon
lodges of Ireland in their long struggle with the landlords. Under such
circumstances, the assassin goes free although everybody in the
district knows who he is and what he has done. They do not betray him,
partly because they justify him exactly as the regular Government
justifies its official executioner, and partly because they would
themselves be assassinated if they betrayed him: another method learnt
from the official government. Given a t