author can hardly escape the apprehension that the mass of the public will
dismiss it as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certain
in my opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if it
be not abolished by statute, it will be by force. It must be abolished
because, alarming or socially destructive though alternatives to it may
appear, it is worse than any alternative, being not only dangerous, but
wicked, and it breeds and multiplies the evils it pretends to heal or
diminish. It is far more wicked and dangerous than it was a thousand or a
hundred years ago, because society is more enlightened than it was then,
and the multitude now exercise power which was then confined to the few.
Whatever person or society knowingly and wilfully permits the existence
of a wickedness which it might extirpate, makes itself a party thereto,
and also inflames the wickedness itself. And the ignorance or the
impotence which we could plead heretofore in history, we cannot plead
to-day. We know, we have power, and we must act; if we shrink from
acting, action will be taken against us by powers which cannot be
estimated or controlled. This book is meant to confirm our knowledge and
to stimulate and direct, in a measure, our action; and to avert, if
possible, the consequences of not acting. Its individual power may be
slight; but it should be the resolve of every honest and courageous man
and woman to add to it the weight of their own power. Wonderful things
have been accomplished before now by means which seemed, in their
beginning, as inadequate and weak as this.

In the sixth chapter of the Book of Joshua you may read the great type and
example of such achievements, the symbol of every victory of good over
evil, the thing that could not be done by man's best power, skill and
foresight, accomplished, with God to aid, by a breath. The defensive
strength of Jericho was greater, compared with the means of attack then
known, than that of Sebastopol in the fifties of the last century, or of