Men and women, is it not true?
From fear of ghosts and devils, and for the glory of the gods of India, of Babylon, of Egypt, of Greece, of Rome, of France, of Spain, of England, were not millions tortured, and burnt, and whipped, and hanged, and crucified?
Witchcraft, and heresy, idolatry, sacrifice, propitiation, divine vengeance; what seas of blood, what holocausts of crime, what long-drawn tragedies of agony and Moody sweat do these names not recall? And they were all mistakes! They were all nightmares, born of ignorance and superstition! We have awakened from those nightmares. Our gods no longer lust after human blood. We know that heresy is merely difference of education, that there never was a witch; we know that all those millions wept and bled and died for nothing: that they were tortured, enslaved, degraded and murdered, by the holy, through ignorance, and fear, and superstition.
If we turn from the crimes and blunders of prophets and of priests to the laws of Kings and Parliaments, we find the same ignorance, the same ferocity, the same futility. I could fill a bigger book than mine with the mere catalogue of the punishments and the instruments of torture invented by tyrants, and land-grabbers, and superior persons for the protection of their privileges, and their plunder, and their luxury and ease. For thousands of years the whip, the chain, the rack, the gibbet, and the sword, have been used to uphold the laws made by robbers, and by idlers, and by ambitious lunatics., to punish the "crimes" of the ignorant and the weak.
Men and women, is it not true?
And all the agony and blood and shame were ineffectual. And always blame and punishment bred hate, and savagery, and more crime.
"But it is different to-day."
It is the same to-day. The laws to-day are defences of the foolish rich against the ignorant and hungry poor. The laws to-day, like the laws of the past, make more criminals than they punish. The laws keep the people ignorant and poor, and the rich idle and vicious. The laws to-day, as in the day of Isaiah, enable the rich to "add field to field, until the people have no room." The laws to-day sacrifice a thousand innocent children to preserve one useful, lazy, unhappy, superior person. The laws to-day punish as a criminal the child who steals a loaf, or a pair of boots, and honour as a grandee the man whose greed and folly keep the workers off the land, and treble the rents in the filthy and indecent slums where age has no reverence, and toil no ease, and where shame has laid its hand upon the girl child's breast.
What was the old denunciation of those who cried "peace, peace, when there is no peace," and what shall we say of those priests and holy men who cry "morality, morality," where there is no morality, where usury and exploitation are honoured arts: where crime and vice are taught to the children as in a school?
If you sow tares, can you reap wheat? If you sow hate can you reap love? If you sow wrong can you reap right? If you teach and practise knavery, can you ask for purity and virtue?