omfortable classes ought to be
virtuous--which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and
more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who
says, with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells you
with innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man--always
supposing the man's hands were tied.

This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and
unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian
and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel.
Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet
anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this
man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually
doubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be
"done" to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better it would be if
nothing need be done. But something must be done. "I s'pose we 'ave to
do it." In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there is
only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart
and comedy in his head.

.....

Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem of the
proper treatment of criminals is that both parties discuss the matter
without any direct human feeling. The denouncers of wrong are as cold as
the organisers of wrong. Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity.

Let me take one practical instance. I think the flogging arranged in our
modern prisons is a filthy torture; all its scientific paraphernalia,
the photographing, the medical attendance, prove that it goes to the
last foul limit of the boot and rack. The cat is simply the rack without
any of its intellectual reasons. Holding this view strongly, I open the
ordinary humanitarian books or papers and I find a phrase like this,
"The lash is a relic of barbarism." So is the plough. So is the fishing
net. So is the horn or the staff or the fire lit in winter. What an
inexpressibly feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack--a relic of
barbarism! It is as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow, and
we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion. There is
nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Man is a
relic of barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism.

But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is
simply a relic of sin; but in comparative history