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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and
passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is
absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have
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
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