! Commonplacing

What would you do with the pretended suicides?’

‘Whip them, for trifling with and trading upon the feelings of their kind.’

‘Then you would drive them to suicide in earnest.’

‘Then they might be worth something, which they were not before.’

'We are a great deal too humane for that now-a-days, I fear. We don’t like hurting people.’

'No. We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon-worship. But surely our tender mercies are cruel. We don’t like to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst their fellows. A weakling pity will petition for the life of the worst murderer—but for what? To keep him alive in a confinement as like their notion of hell as they dare to make it—namely, a place whence all the sweet visitings of the grace of God are withdrawn, and the man has not a chance, so to speak, of growing better. In this hell of theirs they will even pamper his beastly body.’