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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: cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as
a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and
kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals
at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.
That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so
absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.
They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are
merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if
they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished
there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will
cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against
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