With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great
gain--a gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads
history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and
passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is
absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have
committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and
a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual
employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime.
It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more
crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly
recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as
far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the
results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the
less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either
cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as
a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and
kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals
at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.
That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so
absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.
They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are
merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if
they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished
there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will
cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against
property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing
what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest
and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and
regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our
criminals, I believe, disagree. But though a crime may not be