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active. It is a provocation to demand the abolition of the death penalty, but in its place the punishment of being blinded is suggested (the culprit would have before him years of sheer, unrelieved introspection in which to repent and find his true self); it is a provocation to write that prisons harm far more than they cure and that to herd together scores of criminals in one big room, in a state of enforced idleness, can only make the wicked worse and even corrupt the good; but the reader's anxiety is allayed by the proposal of segregation in individual cells as an alternative (analogous to blinding as an alternative to the death penalty).
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18. ''Presentation" to Les Mystères. . . .

 
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