But, my Christian friends, how do you find your system work? If you tell Bill Sykes he is a bad man, that the angels will not love him, that the fat successful sweater or idler will loathe and despise him, and if you send Bill to prison and hard labour for a term of years, will it always happen that William will repent and reform, and become a building society or a joint-stock bank himself?
Or do you find that poor Bill hardens his heart, and hates you; and that he comes out of your shameful prison, and from your cowardly and savage whips and chains, and burgles and drinks again, and learns to carry a revolver?
If we want to get rid of evil we must remove the cause of evil. It is useless to punish the victim.
It is with moral evils as with physical evils. When an epidemic of fever or smallpox comes upon us we do not punish the sick, nor blame them. But we isolate the sick, and we attack the cause of the sickness, by attending to matters of hygiene and sanitation. That is how we ought to deal with moral sickness.
Men do not live badly because they are "wicked," but because they are ignorant. The remedy lies in the study and adoption of the laws of the science of human life.
If we are to have a moral people we must first of all have a healthy people. If the working classes are to be made sober and pure and wise, the other classes must be made honest, and to be made honest they must be taught what honesty is.
But the Christian cannot teach what honesty is because he does not know. He cannot attack the causes of vice and crime, because he does not understand that vice and crime are caused. He has been taught that men do wrong because they will not do right, and that they can do right if they will.
The Christian blames the criminal, and punishes him, because the Christian believes that the criminal has a "free will."
But we should not blame nor punish the criminal, because we know that he is a victim of heredity and environment. So we should restrain the criminal, and try to reform him; and we should attack the environment which made him a criminal, and is still making more criminals, and we should try to alter that environment, and so prevent the making of more criminals.
For the hardened criminal, restraint may be necessary. It may be impossible to reform him. It may be too late.