For
This Inhuman Law Still Holds Good, And Is Not Obsolete Or A Mere Relic Of
Barbarism.
The whipping, indeed, is abrogated for very shame's sake; so
is the reward to the informer; but the magistrate and the imprisonment
and the offence remain.
You must not sleep in the open, either in a barn
or a cart-house or in a shed, in the country, or on a door-step in a
town, or in a boat on the beach; and if you have no coin in your pocket
you are still more diabolically wicked - you are a vagrom man, and the
cold cell is your proper place. This is the Jubilee year, too, of the
mildest and best reign of the Christian era. Something in this
weather-beaten board to be very proud of, is it not? Something human and
comforting and assuring to the mind that we have made so much progress.
The pagan Roman Empire reached from the wall of Severus in the north of
England to Athens of the philosophers; it included our islands, France,
Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey in Europe and Asia,
Egypt - the whole world of those days. No one could escape from it,
because it enclosed all; you could not take refuge in Spain on account of
the absence of an extradition treaty; no forger, no thief, no political
offender could get out of it. A crushing power this, quite unknown in our
modern world, with all our engines, steamers, and telegraphs.
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