| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and
a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual
employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime.
It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more
crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly
recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as
far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the
results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the
less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either
cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as
a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: "Bring me a million such as that," said Danglars, "I shall
be well pleased," putting the draft in his pocket. "Fix your
own hour for to-morrow, and my cashier shall call on you
with a check for eighty thousand francs."
"At ten o'clock then, if you please; I should like it early,
as I am going into the country to-morrow."
"Very well, at ten o'clock;, you are still at the Hotel des
Princes?"
"Yes."
The following morning, with the banker's usual punctuality,
the eighty thousand francs were placed in the young man's
The Count of Monte Cristo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: to be so increased that, in short, they shut up no houses at all. It
seemed enough that all the remedies of that kind had been used till
they were found fruitless, and that the plague spread itself with an
irresistible fury; so that as the fire the succeeding year spread itself,
and burned with such violence that the citizens, in despair, gave over
their endeavours to extinguish it, so in the plague it came at last to
such violence that the people sat still looking at one another, and
seemed quite abandoned to despair; whole streets seemed to be
desolated, and not to be shut up only, but to be emptied of their
inhabitants; doors were left open, windows stood shattering with the
wind in empty houses for want of people to shut them. In a word,
A Journal of the Plague Year |
