Harold J. Laski

They rush to the legislature to compel action every time they discover some exceptional incident of dubious conduct.

They are terrified by what they call immorality, by which they mean behaviour of which they do not happen to approve.

They are anxious to control the publication of books, the production of plays, women’s dress, the laws governing sexual life, the use of leisure.

They are interested in prohibition and uniformity for their own sake, and every success that they win only spurs them to greater efforts.

Every state contains fussy and pedantic moralists who seek to use its machinery to insist that these habits shall become the official standard of conduct in the population.

An enforcement which induces cowardice at the critical moment in those who are participes criminis does not seem to me anything of which to be proud.

I think it still worse to make the central figures in the drama of illegality powerful in the lives of those to whom they purvey their service; men and women whose methods of obtaining a living it does not occur to their clients to condemn.

I think it bad for society to make illegal conduct heroic.

There is hardly a bribe too high for them to pay.

The degree to which the police are corrupted by these influences is very difficult to exaggerate.

Men and women attain power through its means who normally would be shunned by most decent-minded persons.

Condemnation by the law seems to have little or no effect in dispelling its influence.

The history of these adventures in England and America is one of organized immorality and corruption.

That has been the case with bootleggers in America and with night-clubs in London.

It will form an army of lawbreakers whose habits are only too often condoned by a large section of public opinion.

Whenever government interferes to suppress some service which a considerable body of persons think they require, when, also, the suppression is disapproved by a large number of citizens, an industry to supply that service will come into…

In all this realm, the denial of liberty seems to result in the slow maximization of unhappiness.

The public, accordingly, was not greatly moved by the hunger-striking which took place during the Irish Revolution; and when Mr Lloyd George left the Lord Mayor of Cork to die, people were more interested in the circumstance of his death…

But the whole procedure had the serious result of making the public expect that any hunger-strike would be a dramatic battle between the government and its prisoner, in which the cause of the imprisonment was lost sight of in the gamble of…

And the severity which a government is tempted to practise makes it blind to wrong through becoming inured to its consequences.

Not only, sooner or later, does such legislation perish, but the habits to which it gives rise persist, and are frequently carried over into realms where they are still more undesirable.

It becomes inacceptable to an ever-increasing circle who, while they may sympathize with its principle, are not prepared to acquiesce in the price that has to be paid for its application.

This is, I suggest, wholly bad for any society.

And the disproportion between crime and punishment which emerges draws the sympathy of the general population away from the government to the offender.

Severity on one side is met by brutality upon another; one might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.