a08 ESSAYS AND LETTERS
from men the consequences of their actions. However cruel the Attilas and Genghis-Khans and their followers may have been^ the process of personally killing people face to face must have been unpleasant to them, and the consequences of the slaughter must have been still more unpleasant : the lamentations of the kindred of the slain, and the presence of the corpses. So that the conse- quences of their cruelty tended to diminish it. But to-day we kill people by so complex a transmission, and the con- sequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and hidden from us, that there are no eflfects tending to restrain cruelty ; and the cruelty of one set of men towards another is ever increasing and increasing, till it has reached dimensions it never attained before.
I think that nowadays if — I do not say some promi- nent villain such as Nero, but — some most ordinary man of business wished to make a pond of human blood for diseased rich people to bathe in when ordered to do so by their learned medical advisers, he would not be prevented from arranging it, if only he observed the accepted and respectable forms : that is, did not use violence to make people shed their blood, but got them into such a position that they could not live without shedding it; and if, also, he engaged priests and scientists : the former to consecrate the new pond as they consecrate cannons, ironclads, prisons and gallows ; and the latter to find proofs of the necessity and justifiability of such an institution, as they have found proofs of the necessity for wars and brothels. *
The fundamental principle of all religion — the equality of men — is so forgotten, neglected, and buried under all sorts of absurd dogmas, in the religion now professed ; and in science this same inequality (in the theory of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest) is so acknowledged to be a necessary condition of life — that the destruction oi millions of human lives for the convenience of a ruling
- Laws similar to our •Contagious Diseases Prevention
Act' of 1864 (supported by the Royal CoDege of Physicians and Surgeons in 1866) still exist in Russia, as well as a regular system of licensing houses of ill-fame.
