mothers when they were as a matter of prosaic fact habitually
beaten by them, and your Rummies of the tamest respectability
pretending to a past of reckless and dazzling vice. Even when
confessions are sincerely autobiographic there is no reason to
assume at once that the impulse to make them is pious or the
interest of the hearers wholesome. It might as well be assumed
that the poor people who insist on showing appalling ulcers to
district visitors are convinced hygienists, or that the curiosity
which sometimes welcomes such exhibitions is a pleasant and
creditable one. One is often tempted to suggest that those who
pester our police superintendents with confessions of murder
might very wisely be taken at their word and executed, except in
the few cases in which a real murderer is seeking to be relieved
of his guilt by confession and expiation. For though I am not, I
hope, an unmerciful person, I do not think that the inexorability
of the deed once done should be disguised by any ritual, whether
in the confessional or on the scaffold.

And here my disagreement with the Salvation Army, and with all
propagandists of the Cross (to which I object as I object to all
gibbets) becomes deep indeed. Forgiveness, absolution, atonement,
are figments: punishment is only a pretence of cancelling one
crime by another; and you can no more have forgiveness without
vindictiveness than you can have a cure without a disease. You
will never get a high morality from people who conceive that
their misdeeds are revocable and pardonable, or in a society
where absolution and expiation are officially provided for us
all. The demand may be very real; but the supply is spurious.
Thus Bill Walker, in my play, having assaulted the Salvation
Lass, presently finds himself overwhelmed with an intolerable