But there is a difference between horror and hate. The murderer is horrible to me, far more horrible than the shark, just as a mad man is more horrible than a mad dog; just as a human corpse is more awful than the carcase of a deer.
The criminal makes me shudder, he makes my flesh creep; my whole nature recoils from him. But I do not hate him, and I do not blame him.
Which of us does not admire and honour an innocent, graceful, and charming girl? To all of us, men and women, her presence is more delightful than a garden of sweet flowers.
Think of some such amiable and gentle creature. Then imagine that we meet her ten years hence, and find her a drunken harlot, wallowing in the gutter. Think of her then so hideous, filthy, and obscene; think of her debased, indecent, treacherous; think of her incapable of honesty, of gratitude, of truth; think of her sullied and broken and so vile that she would betray her only friend for a glass of gin: think of her well, and ask yourselves how should we feel towards her.
Some of us would blame her: some of us would pity her: some of us would try to befriend her: but hardly one of us could endure her touch, her speech, her gaze. She has become a horror in the light of the day.
My clerical friend and I would stand before her sick and sorry and ashamed. We should be alike dismayed and shocked: we should be alike touched and repelled. But there in that tragic moment would appear the likeness and the difference between us. He would not understand.
The unfortunate woman has been rendered physically and morally loathsome to us. So has this murderer. But that should cause us to pity, and not to hate them; it should inspire us not to destroy them; but to destroy the evil conditions that have brought them, and millions as unfortunate as they, to this terrible and shameful pass. The bitterest wrong of all is the fact that these fellow-creatures of ours have been degraded below the reach of our help and our affection.
Looking into my own heart, and recalling my experience of men and women, I must own that there is not one in a thousand of us who might not have become a shame and a horror to our fellows had our environment been as cruel and as hard as the environment of these from whom we shrink appalled.
And when I read of a murder, when I see some human wreck, so repulsive and unsightly that my soul is sick within me, and my flesh shudders away from the contact, I crush the anger out of my heart, and remember what I am and might have been, and that this man, this woman, now so dreadful or so vile, is a victim of a state of society which most of us believe in and uphold.
I cannot hate these miserables, but I cannot love them. I could not sleep in a dirty bed, nor eat a rotten peach, nor listen to a piano out of tune, nor drink after a leper or a slut, nor make a friend of a sweater, nor shake the hand of an assassin, nor sit at table with a filthy sot.