In other words, we must ask what modern institution has a future before it?  What modern institution may have swollen to six times its present size in the social heat and growth of the future?  I do not think the Garden City will grow:  but of that I may speak in my next and last article of this series.  I do not think even the ordinary Elementary School, with its compulsory education, will grow.  Too many unlettered people hate the teacher for teaching; and too many lettered people hate the teacher for not teaching.  The Garden City will not bear much blossom; the young idea will not shoot, unless it shoots the teacher.  But the one flowering tree on the estate, the one natural expansion which I think will expand, is the institution we call the Prison.

Prisons for All

If the capitalists are allowed to erect their constructive capitalist community, I speak quite seriously when I say that I think Prison will become an almost universal experience.  It will not necessarily be a cruel or shameful experience:  on these points (I concede certainly for the present purpose of debate) it may be a vastly improved experience.  The conditions in the prison, very possibly, will be made more humane.  But the prison will be made more humane only in order to contain more of humanity.  I think little of the judgment and sense of humour of any man who can have watched recent police trials without realising that it is no longer a question of whether the law has been broken by a crime; but, now, solely a question of whether the situation could be mended by an imprisonment.  It was so with Tom Mann; it was so with Larkin; it was so with the poor atheist who was kept in gaol for saying something he had been acquitted of saying:  it is so in such cases day by day.  We no longer lock a man up for doing something; we lock him up in the hope of his doing nothing.  Given this principle, it is evidently possible to make the mere conditions of punishment more moderate, or—­(more probably) more secret.  There may really be more mercy in the Prison, on condition that there is less justice in the Court.  I should not be surprised if, before we are done with all this, a man was allowed to smoke in prison, on condition, of course, that he had been put in prison for smoking.

Now that is the process which, in the absence of democratic protest, will certainly proceed, will increase and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it.  Prison may even lose its disgrace for a little time:  it will be difficult to make it disgraceful when men like Larkin can be imprisoned for no reason at all, just as his celebrated ancestor was hanged for no reason at all.  But capitalist society, which naturally does not know the meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of disgrace:  and it will still go on imprisoning for no reason at all.  Or rather for that rather simple reason that makes a cat spring or a rat run away.