Herr Settembrini hid his face in his hands, that were clad in very shabby leather gloves; and Naphta, with statesmanlike calm, asked how else they would expect to reduce refractory criminals⁠—unless by putting in the stocks, which were quite the suitable furnishing for a prison. A humane penitentiary would be neither one thing nor the other, an aesthetic compromise: if Herr Settembrini did not think so, then it was clear that, though an aesthete, he had very little sense of the fitness of things. And in the field of education, a conception of human dignity which would bar corporal punishment from the schools had its roots, according to Naphta, in the liberal-individualism of our bourgeois, humanitarian age, in an enlightened absolutism of the ego, which was, indeed, now dying off, to give place to social conceptions made of sterner stuff: ideas of discipline and conformity, of coercion and compliance, to the realization of which an element of godly severity would be needful, and which, when realized, would make us alter all our ideas on the subject of the chastisement of the human carcass.