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FOOTFALLS

In the cell over mine at night
A step goes to and fro
From barred door to iron wall—
From wall to door I hear it go,
Four paces, heavy and slow,
In the heart of the sleeping jail:
And the goad that drives, I know!

I never saw his face or heard him speak;
He may be Dutchman, Dago, Yankee, Greek;
But the language of that prisoned step
Too well I know!

Unknown brother of the remorseless bars,
Pent in your cage from earth and sky and stars,
The hunger for lost life that goads you so,
I also know!

Hour by hour, in the cell overhead,
Four footfalls, to and fro
'Twixt iron wall and barred door—
Back and forth I hear them go—
Four footfalls come and go!
I wake and listen in the night:
Brother, I know!

(Written in Atlanta Penitentiary,
May, 1913.)

THE SUBTERRANEAN BROTHERHOOD

By JULIAN HAWTHORNE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I INTRODUCTORY II THE DEVIL'S ANTECHAMBER III THE ROAD TO OBLIVION IV INITIATION V ROUTINE VI SOME PRISON FRIENDS OF MINE VII THE MEN ABOVE VIII FOR LIFE IX THE TOIL OF SLAVERY X OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER XI THE GRASP OF THE TENTACLES XII THE PRISON SILENCE XIII THE BANQUETS OF THE DAMNED XIV THE POLICY OF FALSEHOOD XV THE FRUIT OF PRISONS XVI IF NOT PRISONS—WHAT? APPENDIX

PREFACE

These chapters were begun the day after I got back to New York from the Atlanta penitentiary, and went on from day to day to the end. I did not know, at the start, what the thing would be like at the finish, and I made small effort to make it look shapely and smooth; but the inward impulse in me to write it, somehow, was irresistible, in spite of the other impulse to go off somewhere and rest and forget it all. But I felt that if it were not done then it might never be done at all; and done it must be at any cost. I had promised my mates in prison that I would do it, and I was under no less an obligation, though an unspoken one, to give the public an opportunity to learn at first hand what prison life is, and means. I had myself had no conception of the facts and their significance until I became myself a prisoner, though I had read as much in "prison literature" as most people, perhaps, and had for many years thought on the subject of penal imprisonment. Twenty odd years before, too, I had been struck by William Stead's saying, "Until a man has been in jail, he doesn't know what human life means." But one does not pay that price for knowledge voluntarily, and I had not expected to have the payment forced upon me. I imagined I could understand the feelings of a prisoner without being one. I was to live to acknowledge myself mistaken. And I conceive that other people are in the same deceived condition. So, with all the energy and goodwill of which I am capable, I set myself to do what I could to make them know the truth, and to ask themselves what should or could be done to end a situation so degrading to every one concerned in it, from one end of the line to the other. The situation, indeed, seems all but incredible. Your first thought on being told of it is, It must be an exaggeration or a fabrication. On the contrary, words cannot convey the whole horror and shamefulness of it.

I am conscious of having left out a great deal of it. I found as I went on with this writing that the things to be said were restricted to a few categories. First, the physical prison itself and the routine of life in it must be stated. That is the objective part. Then must be indicated the subjective conditions, those of the prisoner, and of his keepers—what the effect of prison was upon them. Next was to come a presentation of the consequences, deductions and inferences suggested by these conditions. Finally, we would be confronted with the question, What is to be done about it? Such are the main heads of the theme.

But I was tempted to run into detail. Here I will make a pertinent disclosure. During my imprisonment I was made the confidant of the life stories of many of my brethren in the cells. I am receiving through the mails, from day to day, up to the present time, other such tales from released convicts. The aim of them is not to get their tellers before the public and win personal sympathy, but to hold up my hands by supplying data—chapter and verse—in support of the assertions I have made. They do it abundantly; the stories bleed and groan before your eyes and ears, and smell to heaven; the bluntest, simplest, most formless stuff imaginable, but terrible in every fiber. Before I left prison I had accumulated a considerable number of these narratives, and had made many notes of things heard and seen—data and memoranda which I designed to use in the already projected book which is now in your hands. Such material, however, would have been confiscated by the Warden had its existence been known, and none of it would have been permitted to get outside the walls openly. The only thing to do, then, was to get it out secretly—by the "underground railroad."

There is an underground railroad in every penal institution. There is one at Atlanta. I attempted to use it, but my freight got in the wrong car. A prisoner whom I knew well and trusted came to me, and said he had found a man who would undertake to pass the packet through the barriers; he had already served such a need, and was anxious to do it in my case. This man was also a prisoner of several years' standing, and with several years yet to serve; he had recently applied for parole, but had been refused. I met and talked with him, found him intelligent and circumspect, and professedly eager to do his share toward helping me get my facts before the world. He intimated that he was on favorable terms with one of the guards or overseers who was inclined to help the prisoners, and would take the packet out in his pocket and mail it to its address. I addressed it to a friend of mine living near New York and on a certain prearranged day I handed it to my confederate. He hid it inside his shirt, and that was the last I saw of it.

The packet never turned up at its address, and it was only long after that I was told what had occurred. My confederate wanted his parole badly, and made a bargain with the Warden, by the terms of which his parole should be granted in return for his delivering to the Warden my bundle of memoranda. The terms were fulfilled on both sides, and my data are at this moment in the Warden's safe, I suppose, along with the letter that I wrote during my confinement to the Editor of the New York Journal (mentioned in the text of this book).

The Warden thought, perhaps, that the lack of my accumulated data would prevent or embarrass me in writing my book. I thought so myself at first, but had not long been at work before I found that the essential book needed no data other than those existing in my memory and supplied by the general theme; my material was not scant, but excessive. My knowledge of prison and my opinions and arguments based upon that knowledge were not subject to the Warden's confiscation, and they were quite enough to make a book of themselves, without need of dates, places, names and illustrations. Indeed, even of such supplementary and confirmatory matter I also found an adequate amount in my own unaided recollection—more than I cared to give space to; for it was my belief that such things were not required to secure confidence in the truth of what I had to say in the minds of persons whose confidence was worth my winning. They would believe me because they couldn't help it—because truth has a quality which compels belief. Moreover, of illustrations of my statements the public had of late had more than enough from other sources; what was now wanted was not so much instances of the facts, as a general presentation of the subject into which special and apposite cases could be fitted by the reader according to his previously acquired information. Finally, I reflected that the introduction of names, places and dates might injure the men thus pointed out; secret service men, post-office inspectors and other spies, and the prison authorities themselves, would be prompted and helped to give them trouble. Accordingly, I was sparing even of such data as I had; and I noticed, as the chapters appeared serially in the newspaper syndicate which published them, that they were criticised in certain quarters as of the "glittering generality" class of writings; I made assertions, but adduced no specific proof of them. The source of such criticisms was obvious enough, but they did no harm, and were not accompanied by denials of my facts. The only other form of attack brought against the book is comprised in the claim that I am a writer of fiction and as such incapable of telling the truth, about anything; that I was the dupe of designing persons who made me the mouthpiece for their factitious grievances or spites; and that I was myself animated by a spirit of revenge for the injury of my imprisonment, which must render anything I might allege against prisons and their conduct worthless.

I have touched upon the two latter counts of the indictment in the text of the book; of the assertion that fiction writers cannot stick to facts or convey truth, I will say that it is unreasonable upon its face. Fiction writers, in order to attain any measure of success in their calling, must above all things base their structures upon facts, and to seek and promulgate undeniable truth in their descriptions and analyses. The "fiction" part of their stories is the merest outside part; all within must be true, or it is nothing. A novelist or story writer, therefore, is more likely to give a true version of any event or condition he may be required to present, than a person trained in any other form of writing, with the exception, perhaps, of journalism. And I have been a journalist, as well as a story writer, for more than thirty years past, and what success I attained was due to the accuracy and veracity of the reports I sent to my papers. In short, I am a trained observer of facts if ever there were one; and no facts in my experience have been so thoroughly hammered into my mind, heart and soul, digested and appreciated, as were the facts of my prison life. Whatever else that I have written might be cavilled at on the plea of inaccuracy, certainly this book cannot be. Whether the statements which it contains be feebly or strongly put may properly be questioned, but none of them can be successfully denied.

But this aspect of the matter gives me small uneasiness. The important consideration is, will the book, assuming that it is accepted as the truth, do the work, or any large part of the work, which it was designed to do? Will readers be influenced by it to practical action; will it be an effective element in the forces that are now rising up to make wickedness and corruption less than they are? The proposal toward which the book points and in which it ultimates is so radical and astounding—nothing less than that Penal Imprisonment for Crime be Abolished—that the author can hardly escape the apprehension that the mass of the public will dismiss it as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certain in my opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if it be not abolished by statute, it will be by force. It must be abolished because, alarming or socially destructive though alternatives to it may appear, it is worse than any alternative, being not only dangerous, but wicked, and it breeds and multiplies the evils it pretends to heal or diminish. It is far more wicked and dangerous than it was a thousand or a hundred years ago, because society is more enlightened than it was then, and the multitude now exercise power which was then confined to the few. Whatever person or society knowingly and wilfully permits the existence of a wickedness which it might extirpate, makes itself a party thereto, and also inflames the wickedness itself. And the ignorance or the impotence which we could plead heretofore in history, we cannot plead to-day. We know, we have power, and we must act; if we shrink from acting, action will be taken against us by powers which cannot be estimated or controlled. This book is meant to confirm our knowledge and to stimulate and direct, in a measure, our action; and to avert, if possible, the consequences of not acting. Its individual power may be slight; but it should be the resolve of every honest and courageous man and woman to add to it the weight of their own power. Wonderful things have been accomplished before now by means which seemed, in their beginning, as inadequate and weak as this.

In the sixth chapter of the Book of Joshua you may read the great type and example of such achievements, the symbol of every victory of good over evil, the thing that could not be done by man's best power, skill and foresight, accomplished, with God to aid, by a breath. The defensive strength of Jericho was greater, compared with the means of attack then known, than that of Sebastopol in the fifties of the last century, or of Plevna in the seventies, or of Port Arthur a few years since. Those walls were too high to be scaled, too massive to be beaten down, and they were defended by a great king and his mighty men of valor. From any moral point of view, the enterprise of destroying the city was hopeless. Nor did the Lord add anything to such weapons of offense as Joshua already possessed. Seven trumpets of rams' horns were the sole agents of the destruction provided; and not the trumpets themselves, but the breath of the mouths of the seven priests who should blow through them, should overthrow those topless ramparts, and give the king and his army and his people into the hand of the men of Israel. Were such a proposition presented to our consideration to-day, we can imagine what would be the comments of the Army and Navy departments, of Congress, of the editors of newspapers, of witty paragraphers, and of the man on the street. Possibly the churches themselves might hesitate before giving their support to such a plan of war: "We must take the biblical stories in a figurative sense!" But stout Joshua had seen the angel of the Lord, with his sword drawn, the night before; and he knew nothing of figures of speech. He got the seven trumpets of rams' horns, and put them in the hands of the seven priests, and led the hosts of the Israelites round and round the walls of Jericho day after day for six days, the trumpets blowing amain, and the hosts silent. And on the seventh day, the hosts compassed the walls of the city seven times; "And at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city…. So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets; and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpets, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down flat, so that every man went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was within the city."

Yes, the biblical stories are to be taken in a figurative sense; they stand as symbols for spiritual actions in the nature of man; though that is not to say that the events narrated did not actually take place as recorded. But Joshua had faith; and faith in the hearts of the champions of right begets fear in the hearts of supporters of wrong, and the defenses they have so laboriously built up tumble distractedly about their ears when the trumpets of the Lord blow and the people who believe in Him utter a mighty shout. Our jails are our Jericho; the evils which they encompass and protect are greater than the sins of that strong city; but a breath may shatter them into irretrievable ruin. Not compromises; not gradual and circumspect approaches; not prudent considerations of political economy, nor sound sociological principles; but simple faith in God and a blast on the ram's horn.

My business in this book was to show that penal imprisonment is an evil, and its perpetuation a crime; that it does not reform the criminal but destroys him body and soul; that it does not protect the community but exposes it to incalculable perils; and that the assumption that a criminal class exists among us separate and distinct from any and the best of the rest of us is Pharisaical, false and wicked. The "Subterranean Brotherhood" are our brothers—they are ourselves, unjustly and vainly condemned to serve as scapegoats for the rest. What the criminal instinct or propensity in a man needs is not seclusion, misery, pain and despotic control, but free air and sunlight, free and cheerful human companionship, free opportunity to play his part in human service, and the stimulus, on all sides of him, of the example of such service. Men enfeebled by crime are not cured by punishment, or by homilies and precepts, but by taking off our coats and showing them personally how honest and useful things are done. And let every lapse and failure on their part to follow the example, be counted not against them, but against ourselves who failed to convince them of the truth, and hold them up to the doing of good. Had we been sincere and hearty enough, we would have prevailed.

I do not underrate the difficulties; they are immeasurable; the hope seems as forlorn as that of the Israelites against the walls of Jericho. But they are forlorn and immeasurable only because, and so long as, we let our selfish personal interests govern and mold our public and social action. Altruism will not heal the inward sore, but at best only put on its surface a plausible plaster which leaves the inward still corrupt; for altruism is a policy and not an impulse, proceeding not from the heart but from the intelligence—the policy of enlightened selfishness. It has already been tried thoroughly, and proved thoroughly inefficient; it is the motive power behind charitable organization; it breeds a cold, impersonal, economic spirit in charity workers, and coldness, ingratitude and resentment in those who are worked upon. It will not do to speak of Tom, Dick and Harry as cases Nos. 1, 2 and 3. You must call them by name and think of them as flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood, to whom you owe more than they owe you, or than you can repay. Put a heart into them by giving them your own heart; do not look down on them and advise them, but at and into them and take counsel with them; or even up to them, and learn from them. They know and feel much that you have never felt or known.

The book is full of shortcomings, imperfections, omissions, and repetitions. But there is meaning and purpose in it, and I hope it may do its work.

JULIAN HAWTHORNE

I

INTRODUCTORY

Conspiracies of silence—it is a common phrase; but it has never been better illustrated than in regard to what goes on in prisons, here and in other parts of the world. The conspiracy has been attacked sometimes, and more of late than usual, and once in a while we have caught a glimpse of what is occurring behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they have been mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guesswork based on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yet conclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and Charles Reade have personally visited prisons, talked with prisoners, written stories that have stirred the world, and forced improvements. Great prisoners like Kropotkin have related their experiences in Russia, and our own George Kennan prompted us to congratulate ourselves, in our complacent ignorance, that our methods of generating virtue out of crime were not like those of the Russians. It was annoying, after this, to be assured by writers in some of our magazines—called muckrakers by some, pioneers by others—that after a sagacious, eager, well-equipped investigation into our own prison conditions, peering into depths, interrogating convicts, searching records, they had found little difference in principle between our way of handling offenses against law, and that of our Cossack neighbors. The latter are more sensational and red-blooded about it, that is all. These revelations compelled some removals and a few reforms; but they too failed to bring home livingly to public knowledge and imagination the whole ugly, sluggish, vicious truth.

Then, only yesterday, an amiable, naive and impressionable young gentleman underwent a week of amateur convictship in one of our jails, and came forth tremulous with indignation and astonishment; though, obviously and inevitably, he did not have to endure the one thing which, more than hardship or torture, is the main evil of penal imprisonment—the feeling of helplessness and outrage in the presence of a despotic and unrighteous power, from which there is no appeal or escape. The convict has no rights, no friends, and no future; the amateur may walk out whenever he pleases, and will be received by an admiring family and friends, and extolled by public opinion as a reformer who suffered martyrdom in the cause. Yet what he has experienced and learned falls as far short of what convicts endure, as the emotions of a theater-goer at a problem play (with a tango supper awaiting him in a neighboring restaurant) fall short of the long-drawn misery and humiliation of those who undergo in actuality what the play pretended.

Meanwhile, scores of animated humanitarians, penologists, criminologists, theorists and idealists have consulted, resolved, recommended, and agitated, striking hard but in the dark, and most of their blows going wide. Commissioners and inspectors have appeared menacingly at prison gates, loudly heralded, equipped with plenipotentiary powers; and the gates have been thrown wide by smiling wardens and sympathetic guards—tender hearted, big brained, gentle mannered people, their mouths overflowing with honeyed words and bland assurances, their clubs and steel bracelets snugly stowed away in unobtrusive pockets—who have personally and assiduously conducted their honored visitors through marble corridors, clean swept cells, spacious dining saloons, sanctimonious chapels, studious libraries and sunny yards; and have stood helpfully by while happy felons told their tales of cheerful hours of industry alternating with long periods of refreshing exercise and peaceful repose; nay, these officials will sometimes quite turn their backs upon the confidences between prisoner and investigator, lest there should seem to be even a shadow of restraint in the outpourings. "Is all well?"—"All is well!"—"No complaints?"—"No complaints!" What, then, could inspectors and commissioners do except bid a friendly and apologetic adieu to their ingenuous entertainers, and go forth bearing in each hand a pail of freshest whitewash? And if, during the colloquies, any malignant prisoner had happened, in a burst of reckless despair, to venture on an indiscreet disclosure, the visitors were allowed to get well out of earshot before the thud of clubs on heads was heard, and the groans of victims chained to bars in dark cells of airless stench, underneath the self same polished floors which had but an hour before resounded to paeans of eulogy and contentment.

This is not a fancy picture—no, not even of what is known to judges and attorneys (but not to prisoners) as "The model penitentiary of America," down in sunny Georgia. Fancy is not needed to round out the tale to be told of conditions existing and of things done and suffered in this age and country, behind walls which shut in fellow creatures of ours whom facile jurors and autocratic courts have sent to living death and to worse than death in accordance with laws passed by legislatures for the benefit of—What, or Whom?—Of the community?—Of social order and security?—Of outraged morality?—Of the reform of convicts themselves?—These questions may be considered as we go along. Meanwhile we may take notice that a number of persons, more or less deserving, gain their livelihood by the detection, indictment, arrest, conviction and imprisonment of other persons more or less undeserving; and whether or not these proceedings or any of them are rash or prudent, straight or crooked, just or tyrannous, lenient or cruel, honest or corrupt—is of secondary importance. What is of first importance is to supply fuel for the furnace of this unwieldy machine which operates our criminal system. Our costly courts must have occupation, our expensive jails must be kept full. We have succumbed to the disease which has been called legalism—the persuasion that the craving for individual initiative born of the unsettling of old faiths and the opening of new horizons, as well as the consequences of poverty, misery, ignorance, and hereditary incompetence—that this vast turning of the human tide, manifesting itself in many forms, some benign, many evil—that this broad and profound phenomenon can be met and controlled only by force, suppression, punishment, the infliction of physical pain and moral humiliation.

This disease perverts that beautiful and ideal impulse toward mutual order and self-restraint, which is Law, into lust for arbitrary and impudent power to control the acts and even the thoughts of men down to petty personal details; so that human life, at this very moment when it most needs and aspires to enlightened liberty, is crushed back into mechanical conformity with statutory regulations to which no common assent has been or can be obtained, and the logical consequences of which are as yet but obscurely recognized, even by the limited portion of the community which has been active in establishing them. To give it its most favorable interpretation, it is a sort of crazy counsel of perfection, incompatible with the healthy tenor and contents of human nature, and sure in the end to involve in its errant tentacles not only those who are the avowed objects of its pursuit, but likewise the lawmakers and enforcers themselves. Like all abuses, in its own entrails are the seeds of its destruction. Laws now on our books, if radically applied, would land almost every mother's son of us behind prison bars. And no doubt, when the murderer, forger, swindler, or white slaver, in his cell, begins to recognize in his new cell mate the judge who sentenced him, the attorney who prosecuted him, the juryman who convicted him, or the plaintiff who accused him, we shall find it expedient to subject our legal nostrums to a system of purgation, and our fever of legalism will abate. But if we will take thought betimes we may meet the trouble half way, and thus avert, perhaps, the danger that the fever will be checked only by the overturning of all law, sane or insane. The following chapters are designed to help in defeating a catastrophe so unlovely.

Be it observed, first, that the only persons competent to reveal prison life as it is are persons who have been sentenced to prisons and lived in them as prisoners. Such showings might have been made long ago and often but that those who knew the facts were afraid to speak, or could not win belief, or had not education and capacity for expression requisite to get their facts printed. Others, exhausted or unmanned by their sufferings, wished only to hide themselves and forget and be forgotten; others have indictments still hanging over them, to be pressed should they betray a disposition to loquacity. Seldom, at any rate, has a man trained as a writer lived out a prison sentence and emerged with the ability and determination to throw the prison doors ajar and expose what has hitherto been invisible, unknown, and unsuspected.

Such a story has importance, because there is no group of persons anywhere but has some relation near or remote to what goes on in prisons. And the constant output of new laws, creating new crimes (so that one might say a man goes to bed innocent and wakes guilty)—this delirious industry must goad us all into feeling a personal interest in the administration of our penal machinery. You saw your friend tried and sentenced yesterday; you may yourself stand in the dock to-morrow, knowing yourself morally innocent, astounded at finding yourself technically guilty. Yet you yourself by your civic neglect or ignorance contributed to the enactment of the statute which now catches you tripping. You had better search into these matters, and find out what the authorities whom you helped to office are doing with their authority.

I have served my term in prison. The strain of that experience has not sharpened my appetite to bear testimony; my desire, as evening falls, is for rest and tranquillity. But I owe it to my American birth, parentage and posterity, which connect me with what is honorable in my country, and to my individual manhood, to do what I hold to be a duty. Especially am I sensible of the claim upon me of those voiceless fellow men of mine still behind the bars, who cannot help themselves, who have honored me with their tragic confidences, who have believed that I would do my utmost to let the truth be known and show the world what penal imprisonment really means. I will keep faith with them.

I do not know that my attempt will succeed. Not every reader has imagination or sympathy enough to step into another's shoes—especially into the sorry shoes of a convict—and to realize facts which, even if we credit them, are disquieting and unpleasant. They make us uncomfortable and keep us awake at night. It is pleasanter to ignore or forget them, to say that they must be exaggerated, or that their purveyor has some ax of his own to grind; besides, do not abuses cure themselves in time?—and there is always time enough!

Three or four men, while I was spending my months in jail, had time to die of broken health and broken hearts, due to physical assaults or neglect, combined with a system of mental torture yet more effective and barbarous. Hundreds more are in similar plight, in Atlanta jail alone, who might be saved by timely attention and common humanity. Of this, more anon. I wish now to say that I undertake this work with a purpose as serious as I am capable of; and that among the inducements that move me, personal grudge and grievance are not included. Individual enmities are foolish and sterile for the individuals, and a bore for everybody else. Individuals are never so much to be hated as are the conditions which prompt them to act hatefully. Improve the environment which produced the murderer, robber, corrupt judge, rascally attorney, cruel warden, brutal guard, and you are likely to get a creature quite humane and tolerable. On the other hand, however, in the process of opposing evil conditions, one cannot avoid contact with the human products of them—sometimes in a stern and conclusive manner. Without going the length of the Spanish Inquisition, which tortured the body on earth in order to save the soul for heaven, it is not to be denied that punishment for evil deeds is latent in the bowels of the evil doer and will make him suffer in one way or another. We cannot strike a bad condition without hitting somebody who is carrying it out; and I am in the position of the Quaker who went to war: "Friend," he admonished his foe-man, "thee is standing just where I am going to shoot!"

I am not disposed to present here, in the way of credentials, any account of the circumstances that landed me in prison; still less to plead anything in the way of extenuation. The District Attorney, in his address, described me as a member of one of the most dangerous band of crooks and swindlers that ever infested New York. The government of this country authorized his statement; the news was bruited afar, wherever men read and write and invest money on the planet, and it appealed to every city editor and scandal-monger. Julian Hawthorne, son of the author of "The Scarlet Letter," a pickpocket. Well, what next!

If ever I cherished the notion that the charge was too preposterous to be believed, I was abundantly undeceived. To jail I went, and there served out my time to the uttermost limit allowed by the law. But in this connection I must touch on a matter which caused me some annoyance at the time.

In June of 1913 an editorial appeared in a New York newspaper endorsing some petitions which had been circulated asking the President of the United States to pardon me, mainly on the ground that in my ignorance of business I had been more of an innocent dupe than a deliberate malefactor. I had known nothing of these petitions; had I known of them, I would have omitted no effort to prevent them.

But I did get hold of the editorial; and found myself placed in the position of admitting myself guilty of the crime charged against me, but cowering under the pitiful excuse of having been bamboozled by others. What was even less tolerable, it presented me as entreating pardon of a government from which I would in fact have accepted nothing short of an unconditional apology. The Government had done me an injury under forms of law; I am only one man, and the Government stands for a hundred millions; but justice has no concern with numbers. My mining company and I were ruined; the iron and silver which we tried to put on the market will enrich others after we are gone; but I knew that what I and my partners had said of them was true. What had I to do with "pardons"? Pardon for what?

I lost no time in writing a letter to the editor of the paper, defining my attitude in the matter; but it never reached him. It is in the private safe of Warden Moyer, of Atlanta—or so I was informed by the Deputy Warden, when I was released in October—and for aught I know or care it may remain there forevermore.

Whether my respect for Law is higher or lower than is that of those persons who are responsible for my being sent to prison and kept there, may appear hereafter. But if crime be the result of anti-social impulses, then I hold that our present statutes fail to include under their categories, numerous and inquisitive though they be, a class of criminals who do, or intend, quite as much harm as was ever perpetrated by any man now under lock and key. Many of these persons occupy high places; most of them are respectable. We meet them and greet them in society. I know them, and also the murderers, highwaymen and yeggs of the penitentiary; and when I want sincere, charitable, generous human companionship, my choice is for the latter.

II

THE DEVIL'S ANTECHAMBER

The judge pronounced our several prison sentences; that they were not also sentences of death was due to circumstances which developed later. The jury had previously dispersed, clothed in the sanctity of duties discreetly performed, knowing why they did them, and enjoying whatever consolation or advantage appertained thereto. Marshal Henkel cast upon us the look of the turkey buzzard as he swoops upon his prey, and we found ourselves being hustled down the familiar corridors, and into a room which we had not visited before; a few assistant marshals were there, and ere long a knot of newspaper men entered, observant and sympathetic, ready to receive and record the last words of the condemned.

It was about six o'clock of a dark and rainy March evening. "Any statement you would like to make?" One stands upon the brink of the living world, facing the darkness and silence, and hears that question.

Here is an end of things, a nothing, a sort of death. The support and countenance of one's fellow creatures are withdrawn; you are no longer a part of organized social existence. The rights, privileges and courtesies of manhood are stripped from you. You are adjudged unfit to touch the hand of an honest man in greeting; you are made impotent, disgraced, consigned to the refuse heap. The helpless shame put upon you is borne tenfold by those who bear your name, those you love and who love you. All that touches you henceforth shall be sordid, base and foul.

The prison officials who stand near you meet your eye with a leer of familiarity; they have handled thousands of men in your situation; they will have a grin or a growl for any remonstrance or protest you may make; power over you has been given to them; in you there is no power. You cannot blame them; their authority was deputed to them by men above them, who in turn received it from others; they are parts of the great machine, working irresistibly and automatically.

The judge is blameless; he had said, "The verdict of the jury makes it my painful duty to sentence you!" The jury is not to blame; they had decided upon the evidence, in accordance with their oath. The witnesses who bore testimony against you—did they not testify upon a solemn adjuration to utter nothing but the truth, at the peril of their immortal souls? The indictments to whose truth they bore witness—were they not made and brought by officers appointed by law to seek only impartial justice, and sworn to seek it without fear or favor?

Go back yet another step if you will, and consider the inspectors and detectives who gathered the complaints against you—is the beginning with them? No: they did but act for the protection of the community against a crime of which you were suspected, which was resolved to be a crime by the representatives of the nation in Congress assembled—that is, by the nation itself. You yourself, therefore, as part of the nation, share with the rest the responsibility for your present predicament. Then, whether the verdict against you were right or wrong—whether you be innocent or guilty—the blame at last comes home to you.

Such is the reductio ad absurdum—the lawyers' argument, technically flawless, though proceeding upon a transparent fallacy. That fallacy I shall consider hereafter; the question of the moment is the reporters'—"Have you any statement to make?"

Of what avail to answer? Has not enough been said during the trial of the past four months, and in vain? The young fellow stands there, courteously inquisitive, not unsympathetic perhaps, his pencil suspended. Have I any last words for the world which I am leaving? Shall I declaim of injustice, outrage, perjury? Shall I threaten revenge, or entreat mercy? Shall I "break down," or shall I "maintain an appearance of bravado"—he is ready to record either.

No, I will do none of these futile things. In such extremities, a man's manhood and dignity come to his support. I am helpless, to be sure, but only physically so. All this portentous paraphernalia of court and prison can touch nothing more than my body—my spirit is unscathed. It is the ancient consolation, coming down through poetry and history even to me. The Government—the Nation—can destroy my life, separate me from my people, throw mud on my name; but they cannot take away one atom of my consciousness of the truth. And it is better to have that consciousness than to retain all the rest without it. Blessed ethical truisms, which come to our succor when all else falls away!

Accordingly, the reporters were supplied with a few grave, not sensational words, suggested by the spur of the moment; they receded into the background, and Marshal Henkel, zealous to do his whole duty, and prevent the escape of an elderly gentleman through locked doors, echoing corridors, and the resistance of half a dozen lusty guards, advanced to the front of the stage and gave the order, "Handcuffs!" Knowing my marshal as I did, I was prepared for him, and extended my arm, till I felt the steel close round it with a solid snap. I was a manacled convict, and the community was saved.

But no time was to be lost; it was already after hours for the city prison; and the stout party of the other part of the handcuff and I passed out through the opening door promptly. As we turned the corner of the corridor, I suddenly saw the face of one of my sons-in-law, pale in the electric light; he forced a smile to his lips, and threw up one hand in greeting and farewell. Ah, those who are left behind! who can compensate them, and how can the injury done them be forgiven? I smiled a moment to myself as I thought of the ready answer of the august purveyor of the law—"You should have thought of that when you committed your crime!" That answer is also a part of the automatic machinery, and comes out, when the button is pressed, as inevitably as the package of chewing-gum from its receptacle—even more so!

I felt the rain on my face as we emerged from the old postoffice building, and saw the slanting drops as we passed through the rays of the street lamp on the corner. It was a memorable journey for me, short in its material aspect, long otherwise; and I noticed the particulars. Newspaper Row loomed on the right, strange in its familiarity, my work-place of many years. Here was the Third Avenue terminal, whence, a few hours before, I had confidently expected to take the train homeward, a free and vindicated man. There were glimpses, in the wet glare, of black headlines of newspapers, and the shrill professional cries of the gamins, "Hawthorne convicted!" It was like living in a detective story—but this was real!

But then came the thought that had often visited me in the past months, as I sat in the dingy courtroom, and listened perfunctorily to the legal wrangle, the abuse and defense, the long-drawn testimony of witnesses, the comment of the precise and genial judge, and contemplated idly the jaded, uncomfortable jury, the covert whispering of Assistant District Attorneys and postoffice inspectors, the dangling maps and the piles of documents—when I had asked myself, "Is all this real, or are they transient symbols importing a concealed significance?" Then, to my imagination, the empty walls would seem to melt away, and I saw a great, benign face and figure above the bench of the judge, holding a trial of those who labored so busily—a trial not entered in the books, and alien from that which occupied us; and recording judgments, unheard here, but eternal.

Was that the reality? Then let come what might on this plane of foolish contention, where we strive to cover the Immutable with the petty mask of our mutabilities. We sweat and toil for ends which we know not, and our paltry and blind decisions, our triumphs and failures, determine nothing but the degree of our own ignorance and impotence. The Lord's aims and issues are not ours, and ours do but measure our spiritual stature, and direct our immortal destiny, in His sight.

Yes, but this palpable world has its place and function nevertheless, to be accepted and used while time lasts. If those who tried me were on trial, I had no personal concern in the matter. My business, now, was to keep pace with my companion, who obligingly allowed his arm to swing with mine, so that passers-by, even if they could afford to divert their attention from their own footing on the muddy pavements, and from the management of their umbrellas, would not have noticed the bond uniting him and me. For this courtesy—the only possible one in the circumstances—I took occasion to express my recognition, to which he responded with easy friendliness. "We don't never make no trouble for them as don't go to hunt none," was his remark.

We were now in Centre Street, and the Tombs was close at hand; and I drew into my lungs full draughts of the open air, murky though it was, reflecting that my opportunities of doing so in future would be limited.

Here were the steps supporting the tall steel gate, through which, in former days, I had seen many a poor devil pass; it was now others' turn to commiserate, or to jeer, the poor devil that was myself. There was no delay—we seemed to be awaited; and in the next minute I had felt what it is to be locked into a prison. I was behind bars, and could not get out at my own will—nor at any one else's, for that matter; only at the impersonal fiat of the machine.

My marshal chatted and laughed a moment with the keeper, then gave me his buxom paw in farewell. I was led through stone passages, past rows of barred cells from which peered visages of fellow prisoners, incurious and preoccupied, or truculent and reckless—men under indictment and without bail, convicts making appeal, and culprits jailed for minor offenses. Such men were to be my comrades for the future. Some were out in the corridors, pacing up and down or chatting with friends; for the laws of the Tombs are unsearchable.

It is a unique place, a Devil's Antechamber, where almost anything except what is decent and orderly may happen. It is not so much a prison or penitentiary as a human pound, where every variety of waif and stray turns up and sojourns for a while; murderers, pickpockets, political scapegoats, confidence men, old professionals, first-time offenders, even suspects afterwards to be proved innocent. There is nothing that I know of to prevent thorough-going convicts from getting in here permanently; the Tombs is of catholic hospitality. But they do not properly belong here; it is but their halfway house—the antechamber.

And discrimination must be observed in classifying the inmates; no one here likes to be regarded as beyond hope of bettering or escaping from his restricted condition. He wears his own clothes, for one thing—and no small thing; he is not known by a number; it is not, I believe, en regle to club him into insensibility at will and with impunity, or to starve him to death, or so much as to hang him up by the wrists in a dark cell. The guards or keepers do not go about visibly armed with revolvers or rifles; talking and smoking are not prohibited; the grotesque assemblage is let out into the corridors occasionally, where they shamble up and down and exchange observations and confidences; and they have an hour outdoors in the stone paved, high-walled yard.

Moreover, extraordinary liberties can be obtained, if you know how to go about it, and possess the means of bandaging inconvenient eyes. Not only are we permitted to stampede our quotas of bedbugs, but leave may be had to decorate our cells with souvenirs of art and domesticity, to soften our sitting-down appliances with cushions, to drape the curtain of modesty before the grating of restriction, to carpet our stone flooring, to supply our leisure hours with literary nourishment, to secrete stealthy cakes and apples for bodily solace, to enjoy surreptitious and not over-hazardous corridor outings when others are locked up, to write and receive any sort of letters at any times, without having them first read and stamped by licensed letter-ghouls.

More, there was at least one man among my companions there who contrived, by devices which I never sought to fathom, to pass the immitigable outer gates themselves every day, attend to his business in the outer world for as many hours as might serve, returning quietly in time for last roll-call. He took a keeper with him, of course, but only in order to assuage possible anxiety on the part of those responsible for his security; and one cannot help suspecting that as soon as the two found themselves under the free sky, the keeper betook himself to some friendly saloon, moving-picture palace, or other inviting retreat, and only saw the other again when they met by appointment in their trysting place.

It was safe enough no doubt; the prisoner would hardly think it worth his while to attempt actual disimprisonment; he was content to sleep at night in his cosy and comfortable cell. But the Moral Powers who live in white waistcoats and saintly collars might have been restless in their innocent sleep, had they known what things are practicable under the austere name of incarceration in the City Prison.

Revolving these matters, I could only come to the conclusion that they pointed in one direction, namely, toward the anachronism and absurdity of our whole theory of punishment by imprisonment. As I shall have plenty of cause to give full discussion to this subject later on, I will only touch it here; but the fact is that we imprison malefactors or law-breakers (not always synonymous by any means, since there are a score of artificial crimes for one real one) not because we believe that to be the right thing for them, but simply by reason of our inability to imagine anything more suitable and sane. Moreover, there are the steel and stone jail buildings themselves, which cost much in money and more in graft; what shall be done with them? The wardens and guards, too—all the fantastic appanages of these institutions—are they to be cast incontinently upon a frigid world?

The law, in short, lags leagues and ages behind the moral sense of the community, so encumbered with its baggage train that it can never fetch up lost ground. We know perfectly well that the only punishments that can improve men are punishments of conscience from within, and of love from without—which is practically the same thing; and that punishment by imprisonment is punishment by hate in fact, whatever it may be in theory, and therefore diabolical and destructive. It can only inflame and multiply the evils it pretends to heal; and this is no theory, but a certified and established truth. Everybody who has been through it, knows it, everybody who dares to think may know it.

The whole thing is ridiculous, a huge and clumsy absurdity, stepping on its own feet and smelling to heaven. And here in our America it is to-day worse than in Italy or Russia, in some respects, because we know better that it is wrong, and therefore try to hide its enormities from open daylight. We lie and dissimulate about it, investigators whitewash it, conservative citizens deprecate exaggeration about it, wardens and guards—some of them, not all—are more wicked in their secret practises with convicts than they would be if they did not know that they would be stopped if the community knew of them. And it was inevitable that only a low type of men would accept positions as guards and wardens, because no honest man worth his salt could afford to work for the pay that these officials get; and the latter themselves would not work for it, did they not depend upon stealing twice as much, or more, by the graft.

But the system, inwardly rotten, crumbles; and in the interval remaining before it falls, the devil is getting in some of his most strenuous work. I know, and rejoice, that enlightened and magnanimous methods are obtaining in some places; hearty and brave men, here and there, are making themselves wardens of the good in men instead of exploiters of the evil. But in most prisons—among them, in that one down in Atlanta, whence I come—the devil is laboring overtime, conscious that his time is short.

The worst criminals there—as God sees criminals—are not the men in branded attire who sit in their cells and slouch about their sterile tasks, but men who walk the ranges in uniform, and who sit in the rooms of managers; for the crimes of the former are crimes of poverty or of passion, but those of the latter are voluntary, unforced, spontaneous crimes against human nature itself. They are upheld in high places; they are fortified by difficulty of "technical proof"; they are guarded by the menace of the spy system, and of criminal libel; but there is some reason to think that their term is near.

But let us return to that queer Antechamber of the Devil at the corner of
Centre and Franklin Streets.

There is a picture by that strange and unmatchable English artist of the Eighteenth Century, William Hogarth, of the mad house in London know as Bedlam. If he were here, he might draw a companion picture of the Tombs. The one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, irrational, futile place, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civic attitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. There is nothing intelligent, purposeful, trenchant or radical about it; it is planted in ignorance and grows by neglect.

The keepers of it are good natured people enough, with a sense of humor, and free from trammels of principle, official or ethical. Their greatest severity is exercised toward those who stand outside the gates and crave permission to visit their friends within; these find the way arduous and beset with pitfalls of "orders," hours, and other mystic rites, except where they blow in miraculously, enforced by some breath from on high.

The inmates themselves, meantime, get on quite prosperously, so long at least as their money or money's worth holds out. There is no license or aptitude on their guardians' part to club them for relaxation's sake, or to kick them into underground dungeons for "observation" (you will understand that term by and by), or in any manner to hold a carnival of wanton brutality with them. The general idea is merely to keep them somewhere inside the building for the appointed or convenient time; beyond that, a liberal view is adopted of the conditions of their sojourn. They can buy eats to suit themselves, and have them served to them in their cells; they can hold communication with one another and with the outer world; I suppose they might wear evening dress after six o'clock if they wanted to. They are not victims of despotic and irresponsible power, and this is not only good for them, but also for the keepers, who are not led into the degradation and monstrous inhumanities which the possession of such power breeds in regular prisons.

Most of these prisoners expect to get out before long, either to go on to more permanent quarters, or to be liberated altogether; many of them emerge with comparatively small loss of social standing; for, indeed, highly respectable persons occasionally stray in here. The Tombs is not regarded as a final or fatal misfortune in a man's career. Yet it has its drawbacks.

Dirt is one of the more obvious of these; I might call it filth, but it depends on how one has been brought up. The impurity, at any rate, is not confined to the surfaces of the cells, floors and walls, but it creeps into the current language, and permeates the atmosphere. I am convinced that there never has been or could be a houseful of people who hear or use fouler and more unremitting obscenities than are those which flow sewer-wise and unhindered from the lips of many of this population.

It dribbles and exgurgitates, black and noisome, at the slightest provocation—nay, at none whatever, but with the delight of the past master and artist in verbal nastiness, anxious to display his erudition. It is a corruption of thought and expression so foul and concentrated, and withal so limited in its vocabulary and scope, that it fastens itself in the ear by a damnable iteration which no diverting of the attention can overcome; and it announces a depth of moral and mental debasement which seems as far from human as from merely animal possibilities; it is of the uttermost soundings of Tophet, and would probably be modified by fresh-heated gridirons even there.

This speech, or verbosity rather—for it has none of the logic or continuity of mortal utterances—does not continue uninterruptedly during the day, but observes special hours, when the guards are paying even less than their usual attention to the vagaries of their charges. Of these periods, the hours of early dawn are the most fertile.

When I dwelt in the environs of the city, it was my fortunate habit, in summer, to awake at dawn, just before sunrise, when the wide pasture outside my window was still obscure with the shadows of night, but the sky had begun to kindle with the splendors of day. In a group of darksome trees beside a little stream two hundred paces distant a song thrush was wont to trill forth the holy soul of awakening nature in such a paean of deathless Pan as inspired John Keats to utter the melodies of his magic ode. It consecrated the footsteps of the approaching sun, and the hearer was borne back on its swelling current to those pure early aeons of the human race, when love was the lord of life and innocence went forth crowned with rapture.

For this hymn of the primal gods was now substituted the hideous strophes and antistrophes of the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one performer after another took up the strain, to and fro and from upper to lower tiers of cells, one awaited some seismic cataclysm to put an end to it and them; and the pauses of it were punctuated by bursts of dreary laughter, applausive of the incredible gushings of blighting depravity. They were the heralds of the prison day—the tune to which its steps were set. After it was over—when the yawning keeper had rattled the bars and threatened a twelve-hour close confinement to the perpetrators—one was amazed to identify with the latter persons outwardly in human shape, instead of malformed and sooty fiends from the bottomless abyss. I doubt whether anything to range with this occurs in any other criminal cauldron in the world; and therefore, with stopped nostrils, have I tried to give some faint adumbration of its character.

The head keeper of the menagerie I saw but once or twice; he was of Falstaffian proportions, with a clear and steady masculine eye and a demeanor of genial and complacent authority. He knew what and when to see and not to see, and had his own measure of the legalities and the proprieties. Little gusts of investigations and reforms passed by him as the eddying dust of the street sweeps by granite skyscrapers. "J'y suis—J'y reste!" was his motto. The subordinates had a general Irish complexion to my feeling; they were there to gather tips under the humorous guise of marshals of order. They were affable and easy, going as far as they could with only so much show of resistance as might lend more value to their yielding.

The prisoners were as heterogeneous as the contents of a rag-picker's auction. Yet they associated with little friction, herding uniformly kind with kind, only rarely lending themselves to transient ructions. They played little jokes on each other; a fat and serious captive was sitting of an evening at his cell door, absorbed in the perusal of a wide-spread newspaper; a gnome-like passerby in the corridor lit an unsuspected match, and suddenly the newspaper was a sheet of flame.

There were uglier spectacles; we had among us a fresh murderer, who after killing his wife had retained grudge enough against her to hack off her head. He kept darkly to his cell, sitting hour after hour with his head leaning on his hand, and eyes unswervingly downcast. His crime was not popular in that company, and none sought his companionship. At the other end of the scale were dazed, foreign creatures, guilty of they knew not what, gropingly and vainly striving to understand and to make themselves understood. There was the scum of the gutters; and there were men of intellect and high breeding, arming their hearts to resist shame and despair, and bending to soften the plight of children of misery below them.

The soul of the new comer blenches and shivers occasionally as he contemplates the grisly, crazy scene, and thinks of all that menaces the women at home. And when, in the visiting hours, the women come and stare palely at the faces of those they love between the bars, wishing to cheer them, but appalled and made giddy by the abject and sordid horror of the solid fact, those who stare back at them and try to smile feel the grating of the wheels of life on the harsh bottom of things. But a man's manhood must not give way; there must be no triumph over him of these assaults and underminings of the enemy. Soul gazes at soul; but the talk is superficial and trivial. He is drowning in the gulf, and she stands yearning on the brink, but there shall be no vain outcries or outstretched arms. It is a condition wrought by men, not countenanced by God, and the spirit must command the flesh to endure.

Punch the button and listen once more to the refrain—"You should have thought of that before!" But can our posterity ever be induced to believe that such inhumanities could have been committed in the divine name of Law!

I am not qualified to write the epic of the Devil's Antechamber; I abode there but ten days, as we reckon time. On a cool and clear Easter Sunday morning the summons came to go forth to further adventures. Accompanied by three deputies, but free of the Henkel handcuffs, we passed the gates and trod the sunny pavements. Not a cloud in the blue sky, nor a taint upon the pure wings of the free air. None that saw us pass suspected our invisible fetters. Yet to me at least the thought that had ministered to me in the actual courtroom and prison, that the fetters were a dream and freedom the reality, was not accessible then. The absence of physical bonds seemed to render the imprisonment more, not less undeniable.

But we stepped out briskly, and breathed while we might.

III

THE ROAD TO OBLIVION

Five of us stood on the platform of the Pennsylvania station; one stayed behind as the train moved out. He was the answer to the question, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"—"Who shall watch the watchman?" Our two marshals were to see that we did not escape; he was to see that they saw. But his function ended when the departing whistle blew. He was a lean, pale, taciturn personage in black; Marshal Henkel had perhaps substituted him for the handcuffs. There was nothing between us and freedom now but our brace of tipstaves, the train crew, the public in and out of the train, the train itself moving at a fifty mile an hour pace, the law, and our own common sense. Moreover, we had decided to see the adventure through. Something more than nine hundred miles, and twenty-six hours, lay between us and Atlanta.

The elder of our two guardians was a short but wide gentleman of forty-five, of respectable attire and aspect, as of one who had seen the world and had formed no flattering opinion of its quality, yet had not permitted its imperfections to overcome his native amiable tolerance. He was prepared to take things and men easy while they came that way, but could harden and insist upon due occasion. Human nature—those varieties of it, at least, which are not incompatible with criminal tendencies—was his "middle name" (as he might have phrased it), so that in his proper social environment he was not apt to make social mistakes. This environment, however, could not but be constituted, in the main, of convicts either actual or potential; and there was probably no citizen, however high his standing or spotless his ostensible record, who in this official's estimate might not have prison gates either before him or behind him, or both. To be able to maintain, under the shadow of convictions so harsh, a disposition so sunny, was surely an admirable trait of character.

His assistant in the present job was still in the morning stage of his career; a big, red-headed, rosy-cheeked, and obtrusively brawny youth of five and twenty. He might be regarded as the hand of steel in the glove of velvet of the combination. He may have carried bracelets of steel in his rear pockets; but his associate earnestly assured me that such was far from being the case. "I don't mind telling you the truth, Mr. Hawthorne," he confided to me with a companionable twist of the near corner of his mouth, "I'd as soon think of cuffs, for gentlemen like you two, as nothin' in the world! Why, it's like this—as far as I'm concerned, I'd just put a postage-stamp on you and ship you off by yourselves—I'd know you'd turn up all right of yourselves at the other end! That's me; but of course, we has to foller the regulations; so there you are!" And the ruddy youngster stretched his herculean limbs and grinned, as who should say, "Cuffs! Hell! What d'yer know about that? Ain't I good for ten of yer?"

As the comely Pennsylvania landscape slid by, my friend of a lifetime and I looked out on it with eyes that felt good-by. For us, the broad earth, bright sunshine and fresh air were a phantasmagoria—we had no further part in them. From college days onward, through just fifty years of life, we had traveled almost side by side, giving the world the best that was in us, not without honor; and now our country had stamped us as felons and was sending us to jail. It had suddenly discovered in us a social and moral menace to its own integrity and order, and had put upon us the stigma of rats who would gnaw the timbers of the ship of state and corrupt its cargo. The end of it all was to be a penitentiary cell, and disgrace forever, to us and to ours.

But was the disgrace ours and theirs? When you kick a mongrel cur it lies down on its back and holds up its paws, whining. But the thoroughbred acts quite otherwise; you may kill it, but you cannot conquer it. We would not lie supine under the assault of the blundering bully. Disgrace cannot be inflicted from without,—it can only come to a man from within. And the disgrace which is attempted unjustly must sooner or later be turned back on those who attempted it; the men whom our country had deputed to handle the machinery of law had blundered, and had convicted and condemned those who had done no wrong. I had never felt or expressed anything stronger than contempt for any particular persons actively concerned in our indictment and trial—the pack that had snapped and snarled so busily at our heels. Till the last I had believed that their purpose could not be accomplished,—that the nation would awake to what was being done in the nation's court, under sanction of the nation's laws. The public must at last realize the moral impossibility that men who had all that is dearest to men to lose, should throw it away for such motives as were ascribed to us—ascribed, but, as we felt, not established. And when the public realized that, thought I, they would perceive that the shame which the incompetent handling of the legal machinery aimed to fix on us must finally root itself not in us but in the public; since the world and posterity, which, more for our names' sake than for our own, would note what was being done, would not distinguish between the employee and the master—the country and the country's attorneys, and would hold the former and not the latter accountant.

I was mistaken; the public took the thing resignedly to say the least. And though I consented to no individual animosities—for individuals in such transactions are but creatures of their trade, subdued to what they work in, like the dyer's hand—I could not so easily absolve the impersonal master. The fault inhered of course not in any grudge of the community against us, but in the prevalent civic neglect (in which, in my time, I had participated with the rest) of duties to the state, theoretically impersonal, but which cannot proceed otherwise than on personal accounts.

Man is frail; but, next to sincere religious conviction, no principle exists so strong to control him as noblesse oblige—the impulse to keep faith and to deal honestly imposed not by his individual conscience alone, but by the pure traditions of his inheritance. The man who has the honor of his forefathers to preserve—an honor which may be a part of the nation's honor—is a hundred-fold better fortified against base action than is the son of thieves, or even of nobodies. The latter may find heroism enough to resist temptation, but the former is not tempted; he dismisses the thing at the start as preposterous. It is no credit to him to put such temptation aside, but it is black infamy and treachery to make terms with it. If he do make terms with it, no punishment can be too severe—though I take leave to say that the external penalties which state or nation can inflict are trivial compared with those deadly ones which torture him from within; but before crediting him with having yielded, the state or nation should not merely assume his innocence—a stipulation which our law indeed makes, but which is notoriously disregarded by prosecuting attorneys—but should weigh and sift with the most anxious and jealous scrutiny anything and everything which might appear inconsistent therewith. A son of a thief who steals does but follow his inborn instinct; but a thief whose ancestors were gentlemen is a monster, and monsters are rare.

In England and the other older countries, the principle of noblesse oblige still has weight with the public as well as with the individual; here, the welter of democracy, which has not evolved into distinct human form, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see a scoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate the public mania for success in the form of concrete wealth which multiplies inducements to crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish acceptance of such inducements, with the result that while in its practical life it rushes in one direction, it erects in its courts a fantastic counsel of perfection which points in a direction precisely opposite. Our law tends not merely to the penalizing of real crimes, but to the manufacture of artificial ones; and the simple standard of natural or intuitive morals is bewilderingly complicated with a régimen of patent nostrums, conceived in error and administered in folly.

Sitting in the car window with my friend, I revolved these things, while the sunny landscape wheeled past outside, and our guardians chewed gum in the adjoining section. After all was said and done, amid whatever was strange and improbable, he and I were going to the penitentiary in the guise of common swindlers. A pioneer on the western plains, in the old days, riding homeward after several hours' absence, found his cabin a charred ruin, his property destroyed, his wife lying outraged with her throat cut, his children huddled among the débris with their brains dashed out. Sitting on his bronco, he contemplated the immeasurable horror of the catastrophe, and finally muttered, "This is ridiculous!"

"This is ridiculous!" I remarked to my companion; and he consented with a smile; when language goes bankrupt, the simple phrase is least inadequate. "We may as well have lunch," he said; and we rose and journeyed to the rear of the train, sedulously attended by our deputies. The spontaneous routine of the physical life is often a valuable support to the spiritual, reminding the latter that we exist from one moment to another, and do wisely to be economical of forecasts or retrospects. We journeyed back, through innocent scenes of traveling life, to the smoking compartment, which happened to be vacant; and under the consoling influence of tobacco our elder companion sought to lighten the shadows of destiny.

"You gentlemen," he said, uttering smoke enjoyingly through mouth and nostrils, "don't need to worry none. It's like this: the judge figured to let you off easy. He's bound, of course, to play up to the statute by handin' you your bit, but, to start with, he cuts it down all he can, and then what does he do but date you back four months to the openin' of the trial! All right! After four months you're eligible for parole on a year and a day's sentence, ain't yer? Your trial began on November 25th, and to-day is the 24th of March. That means, don't it, that you make your application the very next thing after they gets you on the penitentiary register to-morrer! Why, look-a-here," he continued, warming to his theme, and becoming, like Gladstone as depicted by Beaconsfield, intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, "it wouldn't surprise me, not a bit, sir, if you and your mate was to slip back with us on the train to-morrer evenin', and the whole bunch of us be back in little old New York along about Wednesday! That's right! An' what I says is, that ain't no punishment—that's no more'n takin' a pleasure trip down South, at the suitable time o' year! An' I guess I been on the job long enough to know what I'm talkin' about!"

We guessed he knew that he was talking benevolent fictions; and yet there was plausibility in his argument. The law did not allow parole on sentences of a year or under, but on anything over one year, a convict was eligible, and our sentence of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonth therefore brought us within this provision. In imposing that extra day, the judge could hardly have been motived by anything except the intention to open this door to us; and although the regular meeting of the parole board at the prison was not due just then, we were informed that an extra meeting might be summoned at any time. The board consisted of the warden of the prison, the doctor, and the official who presided at all parole board meetings at the various federal penitentiaries throughout the country,—Robert LaDow. The law declares that a majority of the board decides the applications that come before it; and as two members of the board make a quorum, it seemed obvious that the warden and the doctor of Atlanta Penitentiary would serve our turn—if they wanted to. Mr. LaDow, of course, might be appealed to by telegraph if expedient.

Turning the thing over, therefore, with the cozening rogue in front of us drawing our attention to the buttered side as often as it appeared, we could hardly avoid the conclusion that there was a possibility of his being right. We might be required to remain in Atlanta barely long enough to don a suit of prison clothing and to have our bertillons made, and forthwith make a triumphal return home, with our scarlet sins washed white as snow. Of such an imprisonment it might be said, as wrote the poet of the baby that died at birth,

"If it so soon was to be done for,
One wonders what it was begun for,"

but it would not be the first thing that we had noticed in Federal administration of justice which might have been similarly criticized.

My allusion to this subject here is only by way of leit-motif for a thorough discussion hereafter. The juggling with the parole law, by the Department of Justice and the parole boards, is one of the most indefensible and cruel practical jokes that "the authorities" play upon prisoners. It caused two deaths by slow torture while I was at Atlanta, as shall be shown in the proper place; and there is no reason to suppose that the percentage at other prisons was not as large or larger. The sufferings short of death that are due to it cannot be calculated. A practical joke?—yes; but there is a practical purpose back of it. The miserable men who are practised upon by this means, helpless but hoping, are led to believe that they may buy freedom at the price of treachery to their fellows. Can it be credited that a convict in his cell, with perhaps years of living death before him,—you do not yet know what that means, but if I live to tell this story, you will be able to guess at its significance before we part—will refuse the opportunity offered to end it at once in return for merely speaking one or two names?—a convict—a creature outlawed, crushed, damned, dehumanized, despised,—can we look from him for a heroism, a martyrdom, which might shed fresh honor on the highest name in the community? I confess that I would not have looked for it a year ago, and I doubt whether you look for it now. But, I have to report, with joy in the goodness and selflessness in men whom you and I have presumed to look down upon, that in very few instances that I have heard of, and in almost none that I know, has a convict thus terribly tempted even hesitated to answer—NO! But many an old and cherished prejudice will begin painfully to gnaw its way out of your complacent mind before we are done.

The City of Brotherly Love flickered by and was left behind, like the sentiment which it once stood for. We were headed for Washington, where the will and conscience of the nation take form and pass into effect. Government of the people by lawyers, for lawyers; did they know what they were doing? The Constitution, bulwark of our liberties; the letter of the law, technicalities, precedents, procedure, the right of the individual merged in the public right, and lost there! The House—five hundred turbulent broncos, each neighing for his own bin; the Senate—four score portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the license of privilege and "the interests"; the Executive—dillydallying between nonentity and the Big Stick; the Supreme Court—a handful of citizens and participators in our common human nature, magically transmuted into omniscient and omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! And the rest of our hundred millions, in this era of new discoveries and profound upheavals, on this battlefield of Armageddon between Hell and Heaven, in this crumbling of the old deities and the looming of the Unknown,—are we to lie down content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster of Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat on our necks, bind our Titan limbs, bandage our awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize our civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine liberty into the underpinning of an oligarchy?

My friend and I—while our licensed proprietors napped with one eye open—smiled to each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick of personal injury and injustice will arouse far-reaching rebellion against human wrongs and imperfections in general. But our famous American sense of humor may be worked overtime, and, from a perception of the incongruity and relative importance of things, be insensibly degraded into pusillanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. The soberest observer may concede that there is a spiritual energy and movement behind visible phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the province of the wise to understand. The peril of Armageddon lies in the fact that evil never fights fair, but ever masks itself in the armor of good. Not only so, but good may be changed into evil by hasty and misdirected application, and do more harm—because unsuspected—than premeditated evil itself. Public endowment of chosen persons with power is good and necessary in our form of civilization, and the chosen ones may accept it in good faith. But in a community where everybody has business of his own to mind, and is put to it so to conduct it as to keep off the poor rates, deputed powers, designed to be limited, always tend to become absolute. It is heady wine, too, and intoxicates those who partake of it. And it is only a seeming paradox that absolute and irresponsible power is more apt to develop in a democracy than under any other form of human association. Holders of it, moreover, instead of fighting for supremacy among themselves, and thus annulling their own mischievousness, as would at a first glance seem likely, soon learn the expediency of agreeing together; each keeps to his own area of despotism, cooperating, not interfering with the rest. But the system inevitably takes the form of rings within rings, each interior one possessing progressively superior dominion. At last we come to a central and small group of men who are truly absolute, and are supported and defended in their stronghold by the self-interested loyalty of the rest. But they do not proclaim their supremacy; on the contrary, they hide it under clever interpretations of law, and, at need, by securing the enactment of other laws fitted to the exigency of the occasion. If there is remonstrance or revolt among their subjects, they subdue it partly by pointing out that it is the law, and not themselves, that is responsible; and partly by employing other legal forms to put down the resistance. You cannot catch them; they vanish under your grasp as principles, not men. Their voice is never heard saying, "I will!" but always, "The law requires." And these autocrats—this oligarchy—are only men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations and sinful inheritance. They were not born to the purple—they just happened to get to it. But being possessed of it—and apart of course from any crude and obvious malfeasance in office—they cannot be "legally" dislodged; and if they step aside, it is only to let alter egos take their place. The King of England—the Emperor of Germany—can be deposed by the people, and his head cut off; but the free and independent—but law-abiding—citizens of the United States cannot throw off this subtle tyranny, because it is identified with legal provisions which we have insensibly allowed to creep into the inmost and most personal fibers of our lives. As for modifying or abolishing the law itself—that would be anarchy!

It would be foolish to contend that our rulers are actuated by any personal malevolence or even, at first, by unlawful personal ambition; they are, as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law is their fetish—their magical cure-all and philosopher's stone. They almost persuade themselves, perhaps, that we the people make the laws; whereas not more than one man in ten thousand—even of lawyers—knows what the law in any given case is, nor would the majority of us approve any particular law, if we were afforded the chance. Any one of us will support the law against his enemy, but not, in behalf of his enemy, against himself. But our legalized sultans and satraps, Councils of Ten and Grand Inquisitors, keep an easy conscience; the Law is King and can do no wrong. A few centuries ago it was law in England to kill a man for taking any personal liberties; there was not much harm in that, for most of the persons that counted were above the law, being nobles or gentlemen. But our way is far more injurious; if a man takes a personal liberty, the cry is, Put him in jail! Death is a penalty which only disposes of a man forever; but jail is poisonous; the man survives, but he becomes criminal, and an enemy of society. And this cry for jail does not appear to emanate from legal tribunals merely, but we the people ourselves have caught it up, and invoke cells and chains for the lightest infraction of public or personal convenience; nay, we clamor for more laws to supplement our already overburdened statute-books. Thus do we thoughtlessly strengthen the hands of our masters. The nostrum which they manufactured to govern us withal, and which at first had to be administered to us willy-nilly, has now become like that notorious patent medicine for which the children cry. We kiss the rod—as long as it is laid across our fellows' backs and not our own. And the rule of Law, by lawyers, for lawyers, shows no signs of vanishing from our earth. Only convicts and ex-convicts dissent; for they know what they dissent from. As an unidentified friend wrote to me of late, "No thief ere felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law"; but the thief had reason on his side. And it may yet come to pass that his reasons may be listened to.

Darkness set in as we entered the sacred soil of Virginia; night lay before us—our next night would be spent inside penitentiary walls. Was it a dream, or would some cosmic cataclysm occur in season to prevent it? No: the ancient routine of one fact after another, of cause and effect, would keep on with no regard for our sensibilities; however important we might appear to ourselves, we were but specks infinitesimal in the vast scheme of things. Miracles and special providences are for story books; if you are the victim of abuses, be sure that the remedy will come not through averting them, but by carrying them out to the finish. On the morning of his execution, it seemed incredible that Charles I should be beheaded; but he mounted the scaffold, laid his head upon the block, and the masked man lifted his sword and cut it off. All that is left for you is not to falter—to keep down that tremor and sickening of the heart; when Danton of the French Revolution reached the guillotine, he was heard to mutter, "Danton, no weakness!" And many an unrecorded Danton, on the night before his appointed death, has lain down and slept soundly. It recurred to my memory that my father, shortly before his death, had said to an old friend of his, "I trust in Julian." On the day following his death, that friend had journeyed to Concord to tell me those words—returning to Boston immediately. My father's son had lived to be proclaimed a felon; but I slept sound that night.

All next day we were passing through the raw red soil of the South, with its cotton plantations, forlorn at this season, its omnipresent idle negroes, and its white folks, lean and solemn, standing guard over what fate had left to them. At stopping places we would step out for a few minutes on the platform of the observation-car, to breathe the air and feel the sunshine,—the affectionate deputies close at our elbows. Some of our fellow passengers were bound for Florida or Cuba, to escape the crudity of the northern March; "May be we'll meet up again there!" some of them said, innocently unsuspicious of what sort of characters they were addressing. Paradise and the Pit travel side by side on this earth, and find each other very tolerable company.

Into Atlanta station the train at last rolled; the journey to oblivion was all but finished. The restless little city, turmoiling in its boom, swarmed around us; we had to wait half an hour, our gripsacks in our hands, for the surface-car to the prison, three miles or more beyond the town. We awaited it with some impatience—such is the unreasonableness of our mortal nature. At last we were rumbling off on our trip of twenty minutes, sitting unnoticed in the midway seats, our considerate but careful guardians on the watch at the front and rear platforms. The car took its time; it stopped, started again, stopped, started, after the manner of ordinary cars; oh, for a magic carpet or pneumatic tube, to make an end of this! or for a thousand years! It was as if the headsman were making preliminary flourishes with his sword, ere delivering his blow. These were difficult minutes.

They ended; "Here we are!" We alighted, and advanced to the entrance of an expanse of ornamental grounds, with a cement pathway leading up to an extensive fortified structure—a wall thirty feet high sweeping to right and left from the tall steel gateway, with the summits of stone towers emerging beyond. I stepped out briskly, in advance of the others; I noticed some bright-hued flowers in a bed on the right. In a few moments I was ascending a wide flight of steps; as I did so, the gateway yawned, and two men in uniform stepped out. There was a transient halt, a few words were exchanged; we went forward, and the gate closed behind us.

IV

INITIATION

"Put the fear of God in his heart!"

This phrase, impious and ironic, is used by officials in prisons, and repeated by prisoners. It has no religious import. The naming of God in that connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner—as the distillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the South are called—who had lately arrived at the penitentiary. He said, "I allus thought this here Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say he was some religious guy!" His enlightenment was doubtless due to the first aid to the unregenerate administered by our chaplain.

To "put the fear of God in a man's heart" means to break his spirit, to cow him, to make him, from a man, a servile sneak; and this is effected not by encouraging him to remember his Creator, but by instilling into him dread of the club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must learn to fear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to be hustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for not comprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for not understanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements to obedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which were formulated in Washington and disseminated for the information of the investigation committees and of the public, but which are disregarded nevertheless by the prison authorities from the highest to the lowest. For they risk nothing by disregarding them; there is no one except prisoners to complain of illegal treatment, and there is no one for them to complain to except the very persons who are guilty of the illegalities; and the warden at Atlanta, at any rate, has repeatedly stated that he would not accept the oaths of any number of prisoners against the unsupported denial of a single guard. To do otherwise would be to "destroy discipline." Moreover, these unverified complaints—such is their inevitable category in the circumstances—are themselves fresh causes of offense, and productive of the severest punishments—not only clubbing and close confinement, often in the dark hole, but loss of good time, which of course is more dreaded than anything else.

But may not the prisoners complain to the committees or inspectors, appointed precisely to enquire into and relieve abuses of this sort?

I shall have a good deal to say about these agents of humanity presently. I will only say here that no prisoner who cares whether he lives or dies, or who possesses common sense or the smallest smattering of experience of prison affairs, ever is so reckless as to impart any facts to the persons in question. If he accuses any guard or other official of cruelty, the entire force of prison keepers can and will be at need marshaled to deny point-blank that any such thing occurred, or, if any did, it was because the accused official was at the time quelling a dangerous revolt, and deemed his own life in peril. If this evidence be insufficient, it is a pathetic truth that some prisoners can always be found so debased by terror and abject as to perjure themselves against their comrades. It is among negro prisoners that such traitors are commonly sought and found. White men uniformly have a sense of honor—thieves' honor, if you please—which keeps them loyal. There are exceptions to this rule, and there are also exceptions to the rule that negroes betray. I have the pleasure and the honor of the acquaintance of some negro prisoners at Atlanta who would sooner die than ingratiate themselves with the officials by a falsehood.

Accordingly, complaints of brutal treatment at Atlanta are not frequent, either to the officials or to investigators; otherwise, I need not tax your imagination to picture what happens to the complainants after the investigators have departed.

Order and discipline—as appertaining to prisoners, not to officials—must be preserved; of course they must, if we are to have any prisons at all. And since there is no way for the prisoners to compel the guards to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compel the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are desperate revolts at times—desperate in the literal sense, since they have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny which will sometimes blaze up in victims—and on the other hand there are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at abuses. But every means is taken to avert this last; for guards know things, and the System could be shaken by men who not only know, but, unlike prisoners, have a chance to make what they know believed.

All this time we have been waiting just inside the prison gates. The difference between just inside and just outside is important; for nine convicted men out of ten, it would be punishment for their misdeeds more than sufficient to be taken no further on the way to retribution than that. Whatever humiliation and disgrace they are capable of feeling or have cause to feel is at that first moment at its height; it strikes upon them unaccustomed and defenseless—never so acutely sensitive as then. Afterward, familiarity with misery and shame renders them progressively more and more callous, without adding one jot to the public odium of their position. They can never forget that first clang of the closing gates in their ears; the whole significance of penal imprisonment is in that. Many a man, the moment after that experience, might turn round and go forth a free man, yet with a soul charged with all the mortal burden that man-devised penalties can inflict upon him. Moreover, not having been unmanned and his nature violated by physical insults and outrages, he might find strength and spirit to begin and pursue a better life thereafter. The "lesson" (word which our shallow and officious moralists roll so sweetly under their tongues) would have been taught him to the last tittle, and withal enough of the man remain to profit by it. Whereas, under the existing conditions, no more than four or five years in jail destroy any possibility of future usefulness in most men; they have been hammered into something helpless, dazed, or monstrous; and even if they have courage to attempt to take hold of life again, they are defeated by the unremitting pursuit of our spy system, which depends for the main part of its livelihood upon getting ex-convicts back to jail—whether on sound or on perjured evidence is all one to the spies. So, as I said some time ago, most prison sentences are life sentences, to all practical intents. To the manhood of the man, prison means death.

Do some of the above statements appear extreme? Read on, and decide. Meanwhile I will observe that so long as prisons endure, such abuses as have been hinted at must persist. Whatever reforms have in special instances ameliorated them, have in so far only gone to show that the whole system is vicious and irrational.

My friend and I looked at our new masters with curiosity; they looked at us with what might be termed arch amusement. With such a look do small boys regard the beetles, kittens, or other animals, power to torment whom has been given them. It was after prison hours—the men had been already locked in their cells, and the warden and deputy had gone home. It was left to the subordinates to put the fear of God in our hearts; we could only surmise how far they would go in that instruction. We did not then know that their power was limited only by their good pleasure. But it is an accepted and reasonable principle with them that the sooner one begins to take the nonsense out a prisoner, the better. The strangeness of his surroundings intimidates him at the start, and he more readily realizes that he has no friends and that he is in prison—not (as one of the guards afterward took occasion to remark) in a "sanitarium for decayed crooks." A good scare thrown into him now will bring forth more fruit than greater pains taken—and inflicted—hereafter.

Our anticipations, however, were the less formidable, because we had been exhaustively assured during the past ten days that Atlanta Penitentiary was not so much a penitentiary as a sort of gentlemen's summer resort and club, where conditions were ideal and treatment almost foolishly humane and tender. This information came not only from all court officials with whom we had held communion on the subject, but from our own counsel at the trial; the judge himself seemed to believe it, and if you ask the prison authorities at Atlanta, they will earnestly assure you that prisoners there are treated like gentlemen, are given every material comfort consistent with their being prisoners at all, are sumptuously fed and housed, and are helped in all ways to build up their manhood, maintain their self-respect, and prepare themselves for a career, after liberation, as valuable and industrious citizens. We were naturally disposed to credit assertions so emphatically and variously made,—some basis for them there must be. And it was obvious, at a glance, that the corridor in which we stood was spacious and airy, with a clean limestone pavement; that the disorder and shiftlessness of the Tombs was absent here. The guards who attended us wore neat dark uniforms of military cut; and if their caps were tilted back on their heads, or cocked on the northeast corner, that was a pardonable expression of their authority and importance. I saw no firearms and no blood, nor were the groans of tortured convicts audible. I remembered the flowers in the garden outside, and was prone to think that things might have been very much worse; they were certainly better, at a first glance, than at Sing Sing, which I had visited on a newspaper assignment about fifteen years before. I had resolved beforehand to make the best of everything, and it seemed already possible that I might not have to make believe very much to do so.

No resolve, however, could overcome the influence of that locked and barred gate, nor the realization that I was a convict, and that nobody inside the penitentiary had any doubt that I was justly convicted. Friends were remote and helpless; the support of former good repute was annulled; I stood there impotent, one man against the Federal Government, with nothing to aid me but the weight of my personal equation (whatever that might be worth) and my private attitude on the question of my guilt, which the trial had not modified, but which could be of no practical benefit to me here. The sensation of confronting everywhere a settled and hostile skepticism as to one's integrity was novel, and hard to meet with a firm countenance. And I felt how easily this sensation might crush the courage of one who was conscious of being justly condemned. How many men must be sitting yonder in those cells who lacked the moral consolations that I had! The thought sharpened my perception of the horror of all imprisonment, but at the same time stiffened my fortitude; for if these men could live through their ordeal, how much more could I!

Meanwhile we were being hurried through the handsome corridor, and down a flight of iron steps to a less presentable region. There was no aggressive brutality, only a peremptory curtness, entirely proper in the circumstances. Our only defense against physical severity was a bearing of cheerful but not overdone courtesy, and we gave that what play we might. I could not foretell how I might behave under a clubbing, and would not bring the thing to a test, if I could decently avoid it. In a long, low, shabby, ill-lighted room we were lined up against a counter, on the other side of which were two or three of our fellow prisoners—the first we had seen—whose function it was to fit us with prison suits. They consisted of a sack coat and trousers of gray-blue cloth—rather heavy goods, for the warm season had not yet begun—and this was obviously far from being their first appearance on a convict; suits are handed down from one generation of prisoners to another until they are entirely worn out; my own was of an ancient vintage and a good deal defaced, but I had no ambition to be a glass of fashion in jail. Of course I could only conjecture what diseases previous wearers of it might have suffered from; but I hoped for the best. Every new arrival at the penitentiary is presumed to be dirty until he is proved clean, and the only way for him to prove his bodily purity is to submit to a bath. The regulation is commendable, and was welcome to us after our day and night in the train; but a comrade of mine from the mountain wildernesses of South Carolina, where bathing is still regarded as a degrading innovation, described to me long afterward what a sturdy battle he had put up against the disgrace, and being a lusty youth, it had taken the best efforts of several guards to hold him under the spout long enough to wet him—and themselves into the bargain. Though this was the first time since infancy that I had bathed under compulsion, I complied very readily, and even said to my friend, "This isn't so bad!" It is not permitted, under the law, to give out any news about prisoners to the world without, after they have once passed the portals; nevertheless, this memorable remark of mine was printed next day in the New York newspapers, together with the scarlet hue of my necktie, and some other details,—my registered prison number among them, my own first knowledge of which was derived from the published paragraph. It was my first intimation of a fact which afterward exercised no small influence on my destiny in the prison—that I was a "distinguished," or at least a notorious prisoner. This influence had its good as well as its bad aspect, in the long run, but the latter was in the beginning the more conspicuous. The unidentified press-agent who disseminated to an eager world the news about the bath and the necktie, continued to be active during our stay in Atlanta, but his other communications were not even approximately so accurate as the first one, and nearly all of them were children of his imagination exclusively, and were more likely to be gratifying to the officials than to my fellow prisoner and myself.

From the bath to the bedchamber. Up the darksome stairs again into the stately corridor; through an inner gateway, and into a wide hall which communicated to right and left, through small steel doors, with the west and east ranges (dormitories). The west door was unlocked, and we were pushed into a huge room, about two hundred feet by a hundred and twenty, with tall barred windows along each side. Inside this space had been constructed a sort of inner house of steel, seven or eight stories in height, with zig-zag stairways at either end, leading to narrow platforms that opened on the individual cell doors. These doors were barred, and were locked by throwing a switch at the near end of the ranges; but any particular door could also be opened by a key. The cell doors of the inner structure were at a distance of some twenty feet from the walls and windows of the outer shell, and got what light and air they had from these—none too much of course. Also, the guard on duty in the range, if the weather be chilly, will close the windows, against the protests of the prisoners, and against the regulations too; but most of the guards are thin-blooded Southerners, and diseased into the bargain, and do not like cold air. The consequence is that the four hundred pairs of lungs in each range soon vitiate the atmosphere; the prisoners turn and toss in their cots, have bad dreams, and rise in the morning with a headache.

We mounted three or four flights of iron steps, and were introduced into a cell near the corner. It was, like all the others, a steel box about eight feet long by five wide, and seven or eight high. On one side, two cots two feet wide were hinged against the wall, one above another; they reduced the living space to a breadth of three feet. The wall opposite was made of plain plates of steel, and so was the inner end of the cell, but in this, at a man's height from the floor, was a round hole an inch in diameter. That was a part of the spy system; for between the two rows of cells is a narrow passage, in which the guard can walk, and, himself unseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners and listen to their conversation. All prisoners are at all times of the day and night under observation. This seems a slight thing; but the cumulative effect of it upon men's minds is disintegrating. At no moment of their lives can they command the slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you ask, has a prisoner? Would he not use it to cut his way through the chilled steel walls with his teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with his cellmate?—Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy at certain junctures; and to deny all privacy tends to bestialize human beings. It is a part of the "put-the-fear-of-God-in-his-heart" principle—to break, humiliate, degrade the man, and render him unfit for human association. There are a washbasin and a toilet seat at the foot of the cot, facing the barred door. What difference can it make to a convict if the guard, or any other passer-by, watches him while he uses them?

There had been issued to us sheets, a pillowcase, and a gray blanket of the army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probably straw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress was hillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of countless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we might share. We had, each, a prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling of the cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was an electric bulb which would be darkened at nine o'clock. But all this was welcome; I had often roughed it in conditions quite as severe; my spirits could not be dashed by mere hardships or inconveniences. We put our domestic menage in order cheerfully, glad that we had been celled together, instead of doubling up with strangers. Nor would it have discouraged us to know that the west range was the one occupied by negroes and dangerous characters. The place was silent; none of the demoniac chantings and hyena laughter of the Tombs. We had our little jests and chucklings as we made our arrangements; Courage, Comrade! the period of suspense and anticipation is passed; we are at grips with the reality now!

Moreover—"Every prisoner, on installation in his cell, is supplied with rolls and hot coffee, and with pipe and tobacco!" Thus would the statement run in the report to the Department. What if the bread be uneatable, the coffee undrinkable, and the tobacco unsmokable? The mere idea of such things is something; besides, prisoners do contrive, being hard put to it, to consume them. We ourselves at least tried all three; if it proved easier to be abstinent than self-indulgent, that was our own affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites were appeased by a little gray pamphlet, containing the rules governing the conduct of convicts in the penitentiary. There were a great many of them, and not a few required thought to penetrate their significance. Why, for instance, should special emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest one's shoes against the bars of the door upon retiring? We were never informed; but I presume it must have been to prevent a man being tempted to reach out an arm a hundred feet long through his bars, throw the switch, steal along the platform, open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates, climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape—all the while avoiding the notice of the range guard, of the guards in the corridors, and of the watchman on the tower outside, all of whom were armed with magazine rifles and were yearning for an opportunity to use them. Of course, he would want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so that if the shoes were visible inside his door, it was prima facie evidence that he himself was also within. Another rule was italicized—"Do not try to escape—you might get hurt!" I refrained from testing the validity of either prohibition.

In the midst of our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of a visitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison garb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness and suffering—he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestion with which all prisoners who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted. Not that Ned (as I will call him, since it was not his name) mentioned his condition; it was determined long afterward by the diagnosis of my friend; Ned's object in visiting us was not to air his own troubles, but to assuage, so far as he might, the gloom and uneasiness of the new arrivals. In his haggard face shone a pair of very intelligent and kindly gray eyes, and above them rose a compact, well-filled forehead. I was fortunate enough to keep in touch with this young man during my stay, and I found no more lovable nature in the penitentiary. He made no secret of the fact that he had been guilty of a Federal offense, and he never expressed contrition for it; "I made a mistake in taking another man in with me," he remarked; "you are never safe unless you go it alone." He had not been systematically educated, but he had read widely and judiciously, talked correctly, though with occasional colloquial idioms thrown in, and he was a concentrated and original thinker. His opinions were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was very penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant in his sympathy with the misfortunes of others. No more welcome and valuable counselor than he could have come to us in those first hours of our durance.

That he was able to visit us was due to his being a "runner," as those prisoners are termed who are assigned to carrying messages and doing odd jobs in the ranges. He leaned against the bars and spoke manfully and pungently, with touches of gay humor now and then; advised us to our conduct—what to do and what to avoid; and when he noticed the little gray pamphlet, said scornfully, "Don't muss up your ideas with that! There's a hundred rules there, and every one of 'em is broken every day. Those rules are for show; what happens to you depends on who the guard is, and how he happens to be feeling. You can go as far as you like sometimes, and other times you'll get hauled up if you turn your head sideways. The screw" (guard) "on this range is decent; he won't crowd you too much. Keep quiet, and do what they tell you, and the odds are you'll get by all right. Of course, if some fellow gets a grudge against you, he's liable to hammer you like hell; there are some prisoners here that get on the wrong side of a screw, and—well, it goes hard with 'em! But if you're a little careful, I guess you'll get through all right.

"I've read all about your case in the papers, and I know you oughtn't to be here; and Bill" (the Warden) "likely knows it too, and as folks on the outside are on the watch for what happens to you, he'll think twice how he treats you. Bill is a cunning one; he keeps his ear to the ground; when he sees that the reform people are going to put something across, he backs it up, and gives out that he suggested it himself; but up to a year or two ago, he did the worst sort of things to the men; even in his early reports and addresses he advocated treatment that he'd never dare stand for now—except on the quiet! He gets himself written up in the local papers here as the model warden—warm-hearted and broad-minded, and all that flap-doodle! But if he had his way, you'd think you were back in the dark ages in this penitentiary. Wickersham threw a bit of a scare into him a couple of years back; and there have been others; but most of the inspectors that are sent here stand in with him; he gives them good feeds in his house, and takes them out in his auto, and fills 'em up with soft talk—about 'his boys,' and his fatherly interest in 'em, and all that—but he keeps the dark cells and the rest of the dirty work out of their sight, and of course none of the men dares say anything to 'em—it would be all day with them if they did—as soon as the inspector turned his back. That's what gets the men's goat—that he puts up such a humane front, and all the while hammers them on the sly. They'd prefer being told at the start they were going to get hell, and then getting it; but it goes against their grain to get it, and meantime have folks outside believe they're in a gentlemen's country club!"

Ned imparted his information by fits and starts; ever and anon he would break off abruptly and walk off down the range, to give the guard the idea that he was about his ordinary business; then he would return, squat down on his hams beside the door, and murmur along in his rapid, distinct tones. All that he said was abundantly confirmed later.

Finally—"Good night—sleep well—they'll put you on some job in a few days; it's the first days that go hardest with most men, but you'll get used to it; you might get out on parole, too—but don't count on it; of all the frauds in this prison, parole is the worst! And if they ever pass that 'Indeterminate Sentence' law—good-by! Imagine Bill with that thing to use as a club over us! He'd make every other man here a lifer!"

He laughed in the prison way—silently, in his throat—and went away, after warning us that it was near nine o'clock. Our watches had been taken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide by sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it to bring him cigarette papers, or "dope." Besides, what has a man in jail to do with time? Our warm-hearted and fatherly masters desire their charges to exist so far as practical in a dead, unmeasured monotony, where a minute may seem to prolong itself to the dimensions of an hour; to feel themselves utterly severed from the world they have annoyed or injured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has of late become impossible fully to realize it. A prison will always be a prison; but at any rate, light shall be let in on it.

Meanwhile, our cell light went out; and we waited for the dawn.

V

ROUTINE

I lay in the upper bunk. It was a six-foot drop to the cement floor below. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon the whole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion, six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice would have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of the sort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in the nightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising degree, and do not fall victims to this trap as often as one would expect; but occasionally one of them forgets, and down he comes, sometimes getting bruised only, but generally with a broken bone or so. I do not have nightmares, and I lay prone, gripping the sides of the mattress with my knees, as if it were a bucking broncho. So I journeyed, Mazeppa-wise, through the abysses of that first night, and was not unhorsed.

Light glimmered obscurely through the bars of the cell from the night-burner below. Odd sounds broke out at intervals. Half suppressed coughs, sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gurglings, due to defective plumbing, occasionally a few muttered words; then a man in an upper tier began to moan and groan dismally—a negro with a colic, perhaps. Long, dead silences would be interrupted by inexplicable noises. In the dead vast and middle of the night the prisoner in the cell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, eighteen inches above my head. Four paces one way, four back, over and over interminably. Who was he? What was he thinking about? Something seemed to goad him intolerably; that forging to and fro, like a tormented pendulum with a soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of one tortured for air and space. How many years must he endure—how many centuries? Was his wife dying, his children abandoned? Up and down he padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to atone—but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly, for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at night is a strange place—eight hundred men packed in together, each terrifyingly alone!

Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock or earlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It screeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardian angels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members of the Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one day more; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring—but all with a sense of repression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but long since become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundred criminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes by indifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsible discipline-mongers, and by association with one another—a régimen of hell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of the problem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!

Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but always with this death-house on its back. And the death-house gets bigger and more populous every year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers, humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists, scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard—all toiling and tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay wages—and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the accommodations for them less adequate. What can be the matter? Are we to end by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? or shall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea of imprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes—and try something else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leave criminals to their liberty among the community?

There will be time enough to discuss these riddles. It is time now to get into your prison suit, with its "U.S.P." on the back of the coat, and your number; its "U.S.P." on the back of the shirt, with your number; its "U.S.P." on the front of your trousers-legs, and your number; your canvas shoes and your vizored cap. But beware of putting on the cap within prison walls, lest the guard report you to the captain, the captain to the deputy, the deputy, if necessary, to the warden, and ye be cast into the inner darkness. There shall there be thin slices of bread, and water, and gnashing of teeth.

With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, we shuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across the hall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sown with tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standing at coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in one window, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensed to shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this model jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quick and skilful in their use. They are the sauce for meals and the encouragement to labor. But casualties seldom happen; when they do, they are hushed up, and the body of the man is buried next day in the prison graveyard.

I will postpone to a future chapter the subject of the dining room and what is done there. As we filed out, I noticed "MERRY CHRISTMAS," and "HAPPY NEW YEAR" emblazoned in green above the door. It was to remind us, perhaps, of what we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading to the warden's office, and to freedom, by a steel-barred gate, we saw a guard seated in a chair with a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might have mutinied with as much hope of success as we at that juncture; but the guard had to be used for something, and convicts must not be allowed to forget that they are in prison. At all events we forbore to mutiny, and were rounded into our cells and locked up for half an hour, during which we might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, dirt, and the rest the refuse of the weed, supplied to the prison by contract; or we might read, or comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the Divine blessing upon the labors of the coming day.

The interval is really provided as a measure of security; many of the prisoners do their work outside the main buildings; but it is deemed unsafe to unlock the outer gates while the whole body of prisoners is on the move. They might make a concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to be shot down in detail by the guards in the towers.

Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on the Atlanta Constitution, makes the following statement in an issue of the paper shortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "Warden Moyer was unfit."—"It is safe to assume," Mr. Ormund affirms, "that if all the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termers and each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a like term, William Moyer, the present incumbent—a man who has done more to make prison life bearable than any man in this country—would be selected without a murmur of opposition."

That is a fine, explicit statement of Mr. Ormund's, such as any warden in dire trouble and perplexity might be glad and proud to have a faithful friend make concerning him. It has no strings to it, and is followed up by similar sentiments throughout the article. But why, in that case, are the gates into the yard locked, and the man with the rifle provided? If Warden Moyer renders life at Atlanta prison more bearable than at any other in the country, what conceivable grounds are there that his affectionate inmates should wish to run away from him? That warmhearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly put the Government to the expense of supplying safeguards against a contingency which his own tender and lovable nature renders unthinkable, even if the thirty-four foot wall outside does not. There seems to be a non-sequitur here, which Mr. Ormund, perhaps, may feel inspired to clear up. When he has done that, it will be time to call his attention to a score or more other incongruities which a residence of only six or seven months in this humane institution has been sufficient to disclose.

At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside our pipes, or our prayer-books, and were ready for the activities of the day. The others were detailed to their regular work; but my friend and I had our final rites of initiation still to undergo. A young official, whose countenance readily if not habitually assumed a sullen and menacing expression, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed him downstairs to an elevator, in which he ascended to the upper floor, while we pursued him upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. Ivy—such was his poetic given name—was worn on the extreme rear projection of his head, and he used his club in place of speech; not that he actually pummeled us with it, but by wavings and pointings he made it indicate his will, and kept us mindful how easily we might afford him a pretext for putting it to its more normal use. Mr. Ivy, as I afterward learned, was a Southerner by birth, as are the majority of the guards in the penitentiary, and may have been, like most of them, a graduate from the Army. In reporting the case of Private George, of the U.S. Army, now a prisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Penitentiary, it was stated by Mr. Gilson Gardner that "The common soldier in the U.S. Army has no rights. When he enlists, he gives up the guarantees of the Constitution, the protection of jury trial, and even his right to petition for a redress of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, secretly tried and cruelly punished, and he has no remedy."

As regards unjust, cruel and despotic treatment, the status of the U.S. soldier and of a penitentiary convict are on all fours, though of course the former has the advantage of belonging to a service traditionally honorable, of open air service and exercise in all parts of the country or abroad, of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of whatever glory and advancement campaigning against an enemy may bring him. But we may readily perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge of discipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, by indiscretions incident to Army life, might say to himself, on receiving his discharge, "I am bred to no trade, I am good for nothing, but I should like to get back at somebody for the humiliations and hardships I have endured. Why not take a job as a prison guard; the pay is only $70 a month, but instead of being the under dog, I shall be on top, licensed to bully and belabor to my heart's content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and to get away with it unscathed!"

For my part, I can imagine no reason more plausible to explain the large number of ex-soldiers among prison guards, and their conduct in that position. With some shining exceptions, they are petty tyrants of the worst type, sulky, sneering, malignant, brutal, and liars and treacherous into the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, immersed in that sinister and unnatural atmosphere, hating and hated, with no sane or absorbing occupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play the part of spies and false witnesses, ignorant and demoralized,—tends to create evil tendencies and to confirm such as exist. No worse originally than the average of men, they are made baser and more savage by their circumstances. And no man able to hold his own in the free life and competition of the outside world, would stoop to accept a position as guard in a jail.

I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quite possible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had no opportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish and futile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment on individuals, save as they may illustrate the point under discussion. But I am the less reluctant to animadvert upon this or that employee of the penitentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from compromising him with the higher prison authorities, abuse from me would only recommend him to their favor.—Mr. Ivy, such as he was, conducted us to a bench outside a closed door, already partly occupied by three or four half naked convicts, white and black. We gathered from his gestures of head and club that we were to remove our upper garments and our shoes and stockings, and place them on the floor in front of us. It was a cold morning, and the floor was of limestone. We obeyed instructions, and for the next twenty minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity or amusement to our fellow benchers and to passers-by in the hall, and with nothing to keep us warm but the genial influences of the occasion. Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through the door into a sort of office, with clerks and Dr. Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 a year,—a tall, wooden faced young medical school graduate, who cultivated a skeptical expression and a jeering intonation of speech. He and an assistant put us through a physical examination, and took a series of measurements, all of which were entered by the clerks in ledgers. Our photographs were then taken, and afterward (it was the next day, but may as well be told here) we were further identified by taking the impressions of our finger prints, and by a second photograph without our mustaches—these having been removed in the meantime. We were now convicts full-fledged and published, and our pictures were disseminated to every prison and penitentiary in the country, to be enshrined in the rogues' gallery and studied by all police officials.

This may sound silly, in the case of two men much nearer three score and ten than three score, and untrained to gain a livelihood by crime. Bertillon measurements were not needed to identify us, nor photographs without mustaches. But, in the first place, prison rules apply to the mass, not to individuals; and secondly, it has been resolved by the wisdom of our rulers that a man who reverts to crime after one or more convictions shall be more severely punished than a first offender. Nobody stops to question the logic of this ostensibly prudent provision. But the convict knows that his chances of making an honest livelihood after a conviction are many times less than before. Spies are on his trail at every turn, and if ever he succeed in securing legitimate employment, an officer of the secret service presently informs his employer that he has a jail-bird on his pay-roll. Naturally he is promptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the same experience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he be inactive, he is not safe—far from it. He is known to the police and liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means of support. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archives as a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culprits escape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest be made, if not of the person or persons actually guilty of this particular crime, then of some one who may be plausibly represented as guilty of it. Accordingly, our friend is apprehended and charged with the crime; there is his record, and it is easy to secure "evidence" that he was on the spot at the time, though he may have been, in fact, a hundred or two miles away from it. Detectives are experts at providing this sort of evidence; and it frequently happens that they get the corroboration of the victim himself by assuring him that, if he will confess, the judge will let him off with a light sentence, whereas if he prove "stubborn," it will go hard with him—a matter of ten years or so. Ten years in jail for something you did not do! Six months or a year if you confess! Perjury is wrong no doubt; but, were you who read this placed in that predicament, which horn of the dilemma would you select? If you have never served an actual jail term, you might virtuously hesitate; but it is the world against a mustard seed that you wouldn't hesitate if you had. The crisp of the joke is, however,—and of course it serves you right,—that the judge, after all, gives you the ten years, and that means life, for you will never be long out of jail afterward. As I write this, I have in mind several instances of it among my personal acquaintances at Atlanta.

If then our convict, upon his release, cannot keep himself in any honest employment, and cannot avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing at all, good or bad, it seems plain that he must either hunt out a quiet place where he may starve to death before the officer can arrest him for starving, or commit suicide in some more sudden and active manner, or he must accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to a career of crime," as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still human enough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms of self-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like the idiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away with it, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out an unobserved and blameless existence.

Thereupon there is rejoicing in the ranks of the secret service; armed with their bertillons, they swoop upon their quarry and bear him away. "May it please the Court, this man is an incorrigible; not deterred by previous punishment, immediately upon release he plunges again into crime; he should receive the limit!" The Court thinks so too; the limit is imposed, and the malefactor is led out to the living death which will end with death in reality. And now will some righteous and competent person arise and proclaim that this man's yielding to his first temptation to crime did NOT involve greater moral turpitude than did his yielding to the second temptation or to the third—greater or at least as great—and that therefore the severer sentence is justified? His first misdeed was prompted by hunger, ignorance, drunkenness, or cupidity; the others were the fruit of desperation itself—and how many of you have known what desperation means?

You perceive that this story proceeds by digressions; such value as it may have it will owe mainly to such digressions, so I will not apologize for them. My friend and I, our ordeal completed, were returned to our cells to think it over. The walls and ceiling of the cells are painted a light gray color; it is against the rules, except by special indulgence, to affix pictures or other objects to them. The "coddling of criminals," so widely advertised, does not include permission to give a homelike look to their perennial quarters; it is more conducive to moral reform that they should contemplate painted steel. There was one camp-stool in our cell; later, cells were supplied with two wooden chairs, the seats sloping at such an angle with the backs as rendered sitting a penance; cushions were not provided. I remember seeing similar contrivances in old English cathedrals, relics of a day when monks had to be kept from falling asleep during the religious rites. We might also sit upon the lower bunk, bent forward in such an attitude as would avert bumping our heads against the upper one. Each convict, early in his sojourn, has a religious interview with the Chaplain, who presents him with a copy of the New Testament—not also of the Old; you may remember that the latter records certain regrettable incidents of a sinister and immoral sort, calculated, I presume, to shock the tender budding impulses toward regeneration of prison readers. One may get other books of a secular kind from the library, upon written application; and prisoners of the first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous good-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higher officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity of the daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow, echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench of the dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims, whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personal communication with the outer world, except such as commends itself to the whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings still alive—the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of it all—slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature. Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against the coddling of criminals, and the too indulgent officials smile sadly and protest that they have not the heart to be stern. "Coddling criminals"—the alliteration makes it roll pleasantly off the tongue!

But do I forget the many indulgences given to prisoners—and so profusely celebrated in every mention publicly made of Atlanta Penitentiary? Let me name them once more. Saturday being a non-working day, it used to be the custom to lock the prisoners in their cells from Saturday morning till Monday morning—a custom still followed at many penitentiaries; for how could they be controlled if not split up into working gangs, and thus prevented from conspiring to mutiny? It is one of the obsessions of prison authorities that the prisoners are severally and collectively a sort of wild beast, always straining at the leash, and ready at the least opportunity to break forth in wild and deadly disorder. It is obviously expedient, too, to impress the public with this conviction, and therefore, in part, we have the clubs, rifles, and general parade of watchfulness. As a matter of fact, meanwhile, nothing is more easy to handle than a prisonful of convicts, if the most elementary tact be used; and they are eagerly grateful for the smallest unforced and spontaneous act of kindness.

Until about eighteen months ago, however, severe restrictions were in vogue, and the warden declared that it was his belief and policy that men in prison should be taught by precept and illustration to regard themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no conversation between prisoners—silence, solitude, suffocation in this terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a régimen is still in force at many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in the age-long history of penal imprisonment shows a blacker record. It is advocated as the best way to induce men to reform, and become, after release, useful and industrious members of the community.

A couple of years or so ago, Atlanta was visited by an Attorney-General, who was not prepared for what he saw, nor had the things he should not have seen been removed from sight before he saw them. He demanded some improvements on the spot, and soon after a new deputy warden was appointed—a young man, of kindly disposition, though weak, not inured as yet to the conventional brutalities, and with a backing in Washington which gave him unusual powers. Among good things which he instituted and insisted on were—two and a half hours outdoors on Saturday afternoons, for baseball and general relaxation; conversation at meals; music at dinner by a band made up from convicts; regular bi-weekly letters, with extra letters allowed between times by special request to orderly convicts; concerts or vaudeville performances every month or so in the chapel, by professionals.

Insanity became less frequent after this, and the general health of the men improved. They had something to look forward to, and to look back to, and the freedom of the baseball concession led to no disorders; something like hope and cheerfulness began to appear, like green blades of grass in spring. The warden cleverly seized the opportunity to take credit to himself for all the improvements, and to circulate industriously in the local papers the praise of the model penitentiary. But neither did he fail to take advantage of the new situation to tighten his grasp upon the reins of control. The majority of jails, in addition to the ordinary spy system operated by officials, organize a supplementary one composed of convicts themselves—stool pigeons—certain carefully selected prisoners, who are rewarded for treachery to their fellows by various indulgences and secret liberties. The principle is detestable, and has evil effects. The stool pigeons themselves are of course the basest members of the community, and the other prisoners, soon learning to suspect them, come at last to a miserable distrust of one another—for the comrade apparently most sincere may be at heart only a more artful traitor. In this, they play into the officials' hands, whose theory of government is fear, and who find aid to themselves in the mutual misgivings and hatreds of their charges.

Evidently, the relaxations of the baseball afternoons afforded a capital opportunity to the stool pigeons, and the results were soon apparent. The spies, in order to curry favor with their employers, reported not actual infringements of discipline only, but guessed at what might be, and even invented what was not, often by way of retaliation against personal enemies. I shall return to this subject hereafter; enough, for the present, that it counterbalanced in a degree the physical benefits of the new concessions by engendering mental disquiets and animosities among the entire population, and especially inflaming them against the officials. I am not myself sure, for example, whether or not one or another of my most intimate acquaintances among the prisoners may not all the while have been on the watch to betray me behind my back. For aught I know, it may have been to some such sordid treachery that I owe the refusal of my parole, when it became due. And any respect for constituted prison authorities, upheld by such means, was impossible.

When the coddling of prisoners involves feeding them on poison, they would prefer Spartan severity and fair warning.

VI

SOME PRISON FRIENDS OF MINE

Vague noises are at all times audible in jail—stirrings, foot-falls, a subdued voice now and then, the sharp orders of an official—"bawlings out" as they are termed; the clanging of steel gates, the murmur of machinery, the cacophany of musical instruments during practise hours in the chapel; as well as the periodical screeches and ringings of whistles and gongs. The general impression on ear and eye alike is of stealthy repression, a checked unrest—a multifarious creature, uneasy but kept down. The place is perhaps hardly less silent than a cloister; but the peace of the cloister is utterly absent. An atmosphere of animosity and contention pervades all—a constant apprehension of sinister things liable to happen, a breathless struggle, the sullenness of hate, the whispering of treachery. The eyes of officials peer, watch and threaten; those of the convicts are downcast but privily rebellious, or deprecatingly servile.

It is the everlasting pregnancy of war between slave and master, quite different from submission to rightful authority. Whatever the law may say, the rightfulness of prison authority is never admitted by prisoners. Honest authority is tranquil and secure; prison authority goes armed, conscious of its unrighteousness, and there is unremitting nervous stress on both sides. Both sides seem secretly to await a signal to sudden conflict.

At dinner, soon after my arrival, amid the omnipresent murmurous palaver of conversation, there fell an unusual noise. The unusual is always formidable in jail. The noise was nothing in itself, and would have passed unheeded in a hotel dining-room. But over us, crowded together there, spread an instant hush. All knew that men had been stabbed, frenzied affrays had broken out in that room. What was it now? The guard in the window stiffened and poised his rifle. The guards on the floor caught their breath, but assumed a confident air. The men sat staring in the direction of the noise, tense and waiting.

Nothing happened; somebody had dropped a plate and broken it, perhaps. But had some natural leader of the enslaved leaped up and shouted at that juncture, murder would have followed the next moment. Among every hundred convicts there are eight or ten whom misery and wrong have made reckless, whose morbid rebelliousness needs, to break forth, only the shadow of opportunity to kill before being killed, and they accept it. But it was not to be that day, and we relaxed, and grinned, nervously or grimly, and resumed our meal.

Eight hundred men, clad in a shapeless monotony of dingy blue, labeled on the back with their disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily to and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices, menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness and ostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest—these were men born under the great flag, Americans, my countrymen, and now my companions! What a change, what a degradation from the free American citizen of the streets and boundless expanses! Not men, now, but slaves, condemned to penal servitude; not citizens, but a class apart and alien; felons, criminals, no longer entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but existing in shame and on suffrance, ruined, nameless, parted from friends and families, with present physical pain and mental misery, and with a future of hounding and helplessness, of fear and hiding, of uselessness and aimlessness, of insanity and base death!

Upon what plea are these conditions established? Because the slaves had broken the law—been guilty of crimes. But what crimes? Some had done murder, others committed rape, some had held up a train, another had blown a safe, another was a pickpocket, another a white-slaver, this one had stolen food to avert starvation, that was a confidence man or bank embezzler, here was one snared in some technicality of new finance laws, yonder an ignorant moonshiner from the hills, who had grown corn in his back yard and thought he had a right to make whiskey out of it—he had no other means of livelihood. Breakers of God's laws; of man's; victims of tricks and legal technicalities, of torturing want and of headlong passion, and of sheer court errors or of perjured testimony—here they were, all on the same footing, no discriminations made! To what end? So that they might be punished and repent and go forth better men and useful workers, and so that society might be protected and its integrity vindicated. That is the ostensible reason; no other is alleged.

It sounds like a jest; but the men are here, the thing is done. In some moods I would say to myself, "It's too preposterous—it can't be—it's an hallucination—a bad dream!" But there it was, visible and palpable. Was it protection for society to shut up a man from ability to support those dependent on him, who were thus themselves driven to want and perhaps crime, multiplying the original criminality by three or four or half a dozen? Could any injury which the culprit could do to the community equal the injury thus done by the community to him and his, and indirectly to itself, by such treatment? Or could the technical and perhaps unconscious violator of an obscure and whimsical law be reformed by putting him on an equality with a cold-blooded murderer, or with a man who had grown rich by selling the shame of women? Was the punishment equable which handled with equal severity a brutish negro from the cotton fields, and a man brought up in refinement and gentleness?

But I would go further, and challenge the right of the community to inflict penal imprisonment as we know it at all. Some criminals belong in hospitals, others in insane asylums, for others the thoughtless neglect and selfishness of society is responsible, and they should be succored, not punished; and the remainder should be constrained, under surveillance but not in confinement, to compensate for the harm they did by labor or self-denial aimed directly at that result. But of this hereafter.

Meanwhile, I paid attention to my companions themselves.

In their intercourse with one another there was a singular amenity or pleasantness, and with some who had been prisoners for a long time, a sort of childlikeness. But it was like the childlikeness of a person partly dazed, or recovering from a severe illness or shock. They greeted one another with a covert smile, an unobtrusive movement of head or hand; only when under direct observation of an official would they pass without a sign. The usual words were, "How're you feeling?" or, "How're they comin'?" not in the perfunctory tone of greetings in the outer world, but with an accent of real interest and solicitude. The answer would be, "Good!" "Fine!" with as much heartiness as could be thrown into it—though it might be obvious enough that the truth was far from being that.

There was one dear old fellow who had a variation on these forms; he was an alleged moonshiner, though, as he said, "Yes, I did make some whiskey, but I never sold none!" "How're you feeling, Joe?" I would say; and he would reply, with his pathetic smile, and his high, soft voice, "Pretty well—pretty well, for 'n old man!" with a drawling emphasis on the "old." He was about seventy, with the soft brown hair of youth, but bent and stiff and wrinkled with hard years and rheumatics; and if I questioned him more closely, he would confess that he suffered from "lots o' misery here!"—passing his gnarled old hands over his digestive tract. Indeed, four-fifths of the men had that trouble in more or less acute form, owing to the atrocious food supplied as our regular diet.

Joe's face, though lined with the hardships and privations of a long life, was beautifully formed, aristocratic in its delicate contours; and he possessed, and constantly used, one of the most delectable, contagious and genuine laughs that ever made music in my ears. The men would ransack their humorous resources in conversation with Joe, merely for the sake of making him laugh. He would fix his old eyes squarely on yours, and laugh and laugh with infinite mirth and good nature. Such a sound in such a place was rare and wonderful, and helped one like fresh water in a desert.

The general friendliness among the men—so contrasted with their demeanor toward the officials—was due to the identity of their common interests; they were in the same boat, facing the same perils and disasters, united in the same aims and hopes, and leagued against the same oppressors. They lived in the constant dread of some calamity; and if I met the same man three or four times in the same day, he would never fail to make the same enquiry—"How're you feeling?" recognizing that I might have received some ugly blow in the interval. There was a spontaneous courtesy and a charitableness in it that touched the heart.

The same sentiment was manifested at meals; if anybody got hold of anything that seemed to him a little better than usual, he could not rest till he had offered some of it, or all of it, to his neighbors at table. "Here, take this—take it—I got more'n I want!" Or, watching his opportunity, Ned the runner, who had comforted us on our first night in prison, would come to the door of my cell, with his Irish humor and cordiality shining in his eyes. "Say, Mr. Hawthorne, there's a dividend been declared!" and out of some surreptitious receptacle he would produce three or four crumpled cigarette papers—of all contraband articles in the prison the most prized. "No—take 'em—I got no end of 'em!"

A peculiar consideration was manifested by the men toward "the old man"; my hair was white enough, to be sure, but it had been so for nearly twenty years, and I was in much better physical condition than most of them. I accepted their kind offices with gratitude and emotion, and, when I saw that to do otherwise would hurt their feelings, their concrete gifts, too.

But there were many instances of self-sacrifice greater than these; men would go to the hole sooner than betray a comrade; and you are fortunate in being unable to comprehend what that means. If a comrade in his range was sick and unable to come to meals, I have constantly seen a man secrete half of his miserable breakfast or dinner in his pocket, to be carried up to the invalid and smuggled into his cell. It was a matter of course, nobody remarked it. Any mistake or indiscretion committed by a prisoner would be instantly and almost mechanically covered by the man nearest him, though at the risk of punishment—and the punishment for betraying human sympathy in this way is—of course it is!—especially severe; it is conspiracy to cheat the Government.

The traditional tale of a prisoner's devotion to animals is also true; a man next me at table—a yegg—for two weeks poured half his allowance of milk (he was on milk diet for acute indigestion) into a surreptitious bottle, and bore it off for the sustenance of a couple of little forlorn kittens that he was acting as special providence for. The meditative smile with which he perpetrated this theft upon the prison authorities was a wonderful sight. Another convict, a hardened old timer, for several weeks lavished cargoes of tenderness upon a rat which he had laboriously conciliated and tamed. "What makes you so fond of that animal?" enquired one day a sentimental and statistical old lady visitor to the prison. After struggling with his emotions for a minute, he burst out, "Yah! he bit the guard!" This dialogue was overheard, and enchanted the whole penitentiary for months.

But one reflects that, whatever humane or lovable traits prisoners may exhibit, they are after all criminals! The existence in a lost soul of good qualities or impulses side by side with evil ones has long been recognized. Victor Hugo illustrated the discovery in his Jean Valjean, it was a staple with Dickens, Bret Harte's heroes are all of that type, it was the inspiration of much of Charles Reade's eloquence, Kipling has more than a touch of it, our contemporary fiction-mongers sentimentalize over it, and the train-robber in the movies usually has a full line of sterling virtues up his sleeve. The lost soul, in short, brims over, upon occasion, with the wine of regeneration. Therefore (so runs the moral) let us of the elect furbish up our charity, and be as tolerant toward this non-human class of people as may be consistent with our own safety and respectability. Scraps of our own lustrous impeccability have somehow found their way into them, and we cannot afford wholly to disavow them, in spite of their wretched lodgings.

This phariseeism is so inveterate with us, that I may fairly say that one has to be sentenced to jail as a criminal in order to correct it. From that vantage ground or Mount of Vision it presently dawns upon us that these men are no more lost souls than we are—are, in fact, woven out of the same yarn and cut from the same cloth. And from this same vantage ground it also gradually dawns upon us that, in one respect at least, the aggregate in a jail is better than the same number of men taken haphazard from the city streets. For the former have now laid aside self-righteousness and dissimulation, which are of the essence of our unrestrained civil life: "I killed a man, yes; I robbed a bank, I picked a pocket, I lived off a woman, I swindled my stockholders, I counterfeited a banknote." No disguise here—no evasion.

But when you go into the details of the transaction, weigh the causes which led up to it, consider the conditions surrounding it, realize the temptations or provocations that precipitated it, you step into your confessional: "Lord, my nature and heart are not different from this sinner's, and but for accidents and good fortune which were none of my providing, I should stand accountant to-day as he does!" You bring the whited sepulcher home to you, and find that you have been living in it yourself. And if you have a little intelligence you will acknowledge in your convict the scapegoat who—not more and perhaps less blameworthy than you—is bearing your iniquities as well as his own.

So, instead of condescending, with supercilious eyebrows and spotless broadcloth, to concede that these unfortunate members of a non-human class sometimes betray traces of saving grace after all, it might better become you to wish that some of their saving graces appertained to yourself. At your best showing, you are a pharisee and a hypocrite, and he is not; he stands confessed; your sin is still secret in your soul. By what right do you look down upon him?

These things which I now say to you, I said first to myself, sitting in my cell, or watching the endless gray-blue files shuffle past me on their way to and from meals. It was of small help or significance that I claimed innocence of the particular offense that happened to be charged against me; I was as indistinguishable from these men in heart as I was in outward garb and rating. And I had manhood enough to feel glad that, since they had to be here, I was here with them. The burden of the scapegoat has its compensations.

On my first Sunday in the chapel, there came an exhorter or revivalist, accustomed to dealing with prisoners from the platform, and dubbed "The Old War-horse of Salvation," or some such title. He had his white waistcoat, his raucous, shouting voice, his phrases, his anecdotes, his "my men," "my friends," "fellows"; his "I'm saved, I hope, and you can be!" Oh, the phariseeism of that "I hope!" At the end of his uproar, he called upon those of his hearers (we had all sat quite silent and impassive during the performance) who were willing to be saved, to stand up in their places. All the stool pigeons arose (poor devils), and a few other bewildered persons who fancied it expedient to be on the side of the angels, "Thank you—thank you—thank you!" hoarsely cried the exhorter, naively accepting their response as a personal compliment to himself.

But that great audience sat dark, silent and impassive, and it could only have been the tough hide of the Old War-horse that made him immune to their cold contempt. I said to myself, "What a terrible audience it is! Who is fit to stand before it?" These men had seen, known and suffered the terrible, nameless things; the Unknown God, perhaps, had spoken to many of them in their solitude; and now this being of white waistcoat and phrases must get up and urge them to wash their sins in the blood of the Lamb! In their silence they were preaching to him a sermon such as no mortal pulpiteer ever uttered; but his ears were deaf to it. "One—three—six—nine souls saved to-night! Thank you—thank you—thank you!" And he turns to receive the polite congratulations of the distinguished guests who sat behind him on the stage.

In prison, and only in prison, the veil is lifted or rent in twain, and men are revealed as they are. As they stand before their Creator, they stand now before their fellows. They are helpless—so warden and guards think—but they have gained a power beyond any physical might of man. They are voiceless, but they challenge mankind. They endure every indignity and outrage; but an account will be required of those responsible for it.

I wish to emphasize this dropping of the mask—this stop put to posturing and pretending—this going forth in rude nakedness before one's fellows. The man in the church pew chants out with the rest of the congregation, "We are sinners, desperately wicked, and there is no health in us;" but he says it with his tongue in his cheek, and fitting his mask on only the more tightly. Or the man "convinced of sin" on the anxious seat at the revivalist meeting frenziedly accuses himself of all the sins in the decalogue, but finds protection in the very generality and promiscuity of his confession, which includes and at the same time conceals the particular fact that he robbed the till and got away with it. We seldom hear of a penitent of this kind being indicted by a Grand Jury, tried, convicted and jailed on the basis of his salvation outcries. He talks figuratively.

There is nothing dramatic or hysterical in the attitude of the felon in his cell. He robbed the till, he admits to you; but he does not drag in the rest of the decalogue to divert your attention. And his penitence, when he feels any, is not, in nine cases out of ten, prompted by the expectation of getting a clean bill of health on his entire life-account (the empty till included) from a good natured Savior not too keen about details. He tells you, as a rule, "I was foolish and took too many chances!" or, "If I'd handled the thing by myself, instead of admitting a partner, it would have been all right;" or, "Oh, of course, I was a damned fool; what's the use of bucking up against the fly cops!" In the case of a murder, it might be, "I'm sorry I killed him, but I guess any fellow would have done the same in my case."

Duration of confinement does not modify this attitude; the man of ten years says the same as the man of ten months, except—and the exception is worth noting—that the former's moral sense, whatever he originally had of it, has been blunted or discouraged, and he has conceived a settled animosity against human authority, and disbelief in the justice and sincerity of its administrators. He has been the subject, during his incarceration, of such numberless acts of gratuitous tyranny, outrage and cruelty, and has seen so much of "the way things go," in general, that though he may concede that honesty is the best policy, he can find no other recommendation for it, and is prone to the secret conviction that honesty itself is somehow only a cleverer way of cheating.

Such a state of mind is bred by prison experience—not otherwise. Prison obstructs or altogether closes every door to genuine moral reform in prisoners.

A few larger souls overcome the obstructions; for example, our John Ross, who more than thirty-three years ago, in the blindness of a drunken spree in Yokahoma, killed a shipmate who angered him. He died in jail last June (1913). He was sentenced to death, but got commutation to life imprisonment. He was a fine type of man, physically and mentally. His spirit was never broken by what he endured, and some years before being transferred to Atlanta, he became, in a simple, non-sensational, but profound way, religious. At Atlanta, in his cell, he was a center of good influence on his fellow convicts; truthful, hearty, faithful, manly, cheerful; his preaching was by personal example, and by support and help given at need to the weak and despairing. He was promised freedom on parole; the promise was not kept; but even this last betrayal failed to break his staunch heart. He died like a man, with composure and dignity.

With a few such exceptions, prisoners are unrepentant except for business reasons—that is, either because they recognize that crime does not pay, or in order to influence in their favor the pardoning power. Many of them, of course, employ their prison opportunities to devise new crimes and to train fresh recruits from the younger convicts. Men who have been imprisoned more than once lose hope of anything better than transient freedom; they know they will be prevented by the police from earning an honest livelihood, and that they must either starve or steal. They become in the end mere prison creatures, destitute of evil or of good, active or passive.

I repeat that the experience of associating with men without disguises is novel and refreshing. A tedious burden is lifted from the shoulders; the bones in the sepulcher are less revolting than the whitewash outside; it is pleasanter to know what a man is than to suspect him. It is certainly much wholesomer, on the other hand, to uncover your own deformity than to hide it, especially when you know, or fear, that the hiding is unsuccessful.

There is a sense of brotherhood, long since unfamiliar to human intercourse under usual conditions, but welcome even at the cost of conditions such as these. The truth gradually emerges to our consciousness—it is not the evil in us that kills brotherhood, but the vain, unending effort to make the evil seem good. Now our eyes meet one another's frankly; the skilfullest counterfeit was worse than the worst reality. There is nothing in us to be proud of, but something to be thankful for. Society has done its worst to us; but it could not take away from us our mutual kindliness, or the qualities that justify it. We are condemned as wicked, but we are comforted by one another's good.

Prison, in short, more convincingly than any abstract argument, demonstrates its own futility as a means of either taking revenge upon the prisoner, or of inducing him to hate crime and to turn to good. Revenge, of course, is officially discredited nowadays, though it is practised as actively as ever under guises more or less civilized; but the pretense of moral reform by penal imprisonment is becoming too preposterous to be tolerated much longer. On the contrary, prison renders the great aggregate of prisoners collectively self-conscious; the goats find themselves, and are forced into antagonism with the sheep not only as individuals but as a body. They make common cause together, and in obscure ways achieve a degree of organization. They learn to regard the community not as better than themselves, but as more successful pensioners of fortune; they fear them because the advantage of numbers is on their side, but they hate them because they feel, either justly or unjustly, that they have suffered injustice at their hands, and they will prey upon them when opportunity serves not only from the original motive of physical need, but from the additional and more sinister one, bred in prison, of retaliation for the wrong done them.

When you sap a man's faith in plain justice, and terrify him with the threat of irresistible power, and torture him in mind and body through the exercise of that power, you drive him to the support and society of men similarly circumstanced, and thus create the precise analogue in the body politic of a cancer in the individual body. Prison attempts to segregate this cancer, but only promotes its increase. Its poison is in the blood and circulates everywhere.

As I passed out of the dining-room after meals each day, I came to notice a young man who sat at a table near the door. He sat with folded arms, and with a set and gloomy countenance; his eyes were fixed on vacancy, and he did not speak with his companions. A crutch leaned against his shoulder; he had lost one leg.

I learned his story. In the settlement of a small estate of which he was an heir, a sister of his had obtained money that belonged to him, and when asked to restore it to him, had refused to do so. After some fruitless negotiation, he got angry, and sent her through the mails a message containing violent expressions of reproach and animosity. The young woman took this paper to a United States marshal, who brought it to the attention of the district attorney, with the result that the brother was indicted under some law of libel or of obscene matter, was arrested, tried, and convicted, and sentenced to Atlanta penitentiary for five years. After he had been lodged in his cell, his sister repented of her action, and sought to have him freed; but the law does not recognize such changes of heart, and the brother must serve out his time.

We all know how easily family quarrels arise, how bitter they may be while they last, and how readily, withal, they may be accommodated by tactful handling. The sister had done wrong; the brother had lost his temper; in what family has not such an outbreak occurred? But because the brother had happened to put his bad temper on paper, the law, being rashly invoked, seizes him, takes five years out of his life, and brands him with the shame of the jail bird. Upon what plea can such an act be construed as justice? But the district attorney shows the court that the statute has been violated; the judge charges the jury, the jury finds its verdict in accordance with the legal evidence, and the thing is done. It is a mechanical process—nothing human about it.

Review your own life, and discover whether you have ever stood in the shadow of a similar catastrophe. Were you ever angry with a relative or with any other person, and did you express your anger to him in words? Then you are as guilty as this one-legged boy, sitting there at his table with his life ruined. Only, he happened to write his anger, and the sister happened to show it to a lawyer, and the machine was set in motion which no repentance or forgiveness or remorse can stop. But the machine does not increase the culprit's fault, and for such a fault the legal penalty may be five years in jail. You are not so remote from the subterranean brotherhood as you may have supposed.

Will prison reform him? Is society protected? Is faith in human justice promoted by such things? His case is but one of scores in every jail that are as bad and worse. But—"throw him to the lions—serves him right!" is still the cry.

VII

THE MEN ABOVE

The men below would like to feel respect for the men above, even if it be a respect married to fear. It is more humiliating to be dominated by worthless creatures, of no character or genuine manhood, whose authority is effective only because it happens to be the tool through which works the irresistible power of a government, than to obey men of native energy and force, captains as well of their own souls as of the bodies of their subjects. The despotism of a cur is revolting, and rouses the wild beast in the victims. Those responsible for its infliction insult human nature.

As far as I have had opportunity to observe, or have been informed, the despotism of the cur in our jails, and in those of other countries perhaps (though not to nearly the same extent as in ours) is the rule; and that of self-respecting and respected men is the rare exception. Hate inflamed with contempt is a dangerous and evil passion to stimulate. It awakens a thirst for savage retaliation which hate alone does not produce. Moreover, weak and cowardly tyrants are always more cruel than courageous and masculine ones, and they do not observe any consistent line of conduct; in the intervals of their debauches of brutality they are oily and ingratiating, make favorites, offer pusillanimous apologies, protest humane intentions, and allege absurd excuses for past outrages. A brute is bad enough, and we are all brutes at bottom; but a brute who covers his hyena snarl with the smug mask of a saint is monstrous and detestable.

The wardens of many of our jails are double men. Behind the imposing façade of their physical aspect we detect an uneasy, hurried, shrewdly contriving little creature, quite incommensurate with the material bodily structure built up for his concealment and protection. He will not come out in the open, but seeks some advantage, plans to get behind us and execute some cunning coup-de-theater, while our suspicions are lulled by the hospitable and comfortable glow of the exterior. In his dealings with the convicts as a body, he is apt to imitate Macbeth's witches, and keep the word of promise to the ear, but break it to the hope; he has vanity without self confidence, lacks the truthfulness of the strong, his voice does not resound and compel, he dances and fidgets, grins and is grave in the same instant. If the men's attitude be sullen, he tries to be bluff and hearty, "my-boys" them, claps them heartily on the shoulder, or lapses into whining and gushing. It is all of worse than no avail with these undeceivable readers of character. It is a curious effect of the working of esprit de corps in jails that the prisoners may feel ashamed of such unmanly antics in their warden, especially should strangers be within eyeshot.

Of course, in his encounters with prisoners singly, a man of this type may show more of his real nature, especially if the prisoner be one of the inoffensive sort. He will be bland, insolent, indifferent or cruel, as suits his mood of the moment. "For God's sake, won't you let me write her just one letter?" implored a prisoner who had just got news of the fatal illness of his wife. Picture the situation—two human beings face to face, one helpless and in agony, the other with absolute power! The official faced the man deliberately, with an amused smile. "I can," he said, slowly, "but—I won't!" How would you have felt in such a case? Could you ever forget it? and would you not be ready, for that official's sake, to hate mankind, and to curse God and die? But you perhaps believe that convicts have no human feelings, and that they are cheerful under such treatment.

The value of these remarks lies, of course, in their general character; the conduct of an individual, regarded by itself, would have small importance. And if I do not instance the conduct of those honest and manly officials who are to be found here and there, it is because the public is already informed concerning them; their deeds do not seek darkness, but are visible by their own light. It is the rascals that we do not hear about, or if we do, it is through reports of press agents in newspapers and otherwise, who are mere mouthpieces for the lying self-praise of the rascals themselves.

While I was in jail, I had access, by a fortunate circumstance, to the annual reports to the Department of several wardens of prisons in various states, and was able to compare their stories of themselves with the accounts given me by prisoners who had lived under them and with my own first hand knowledge of prison conditions, which, with a few shining exceptions, are so terribly and remorselessly alike the civilized world over. After making every allowance for the different point of view of master and slave, it was very plain that the author of the report was not merely prevaricating, or coloring his facts to render them acceptable to his superiors, but was lying outright often, both directly and by omissions. He would pose as a broad-minded and compassionate father to his inmates, when all the time he was subjecting them to cruel and needless severities and tortures. There was one man, who has lately resigned, I believe, full of years and honors, whose addresses at the meetings of federal wardens were almost angelic in tone and tenor, who was in fact notorious among persons who had actual knowledge of his official conduct as one of the most remorseless tyrants toward the men in contemporary prison annals. Many men of bad conduct may be excused on the plea that they are ignorant—know no better; but this man was an intelligent student of penology, and knew exactly how wicked and wanton he was. He was an innocent baby once upon a time, and might have grown up to be no worse a man than is the estimable person who now reads these lines; but he took up prison work, and the atmosphere of crime, and preoccupation with it, and the license to use arbitrary powers, made a devil of him. It is a common story.

Another series of reports showed a man who, beginning as a reactionary of an extreme type, advocating the most ruthless measures toward convicts, finally felt the pressure of the wave of prison reform which is gathering force just now, and adjusted his reports and addresses so as to make himself appear as a leading apostle of the new ideas. But though his public professions changed, the chief difference in his practises was that, from having been undisguised, they became secret, and so far as circumstances permitted, he acted, and permitted or encouraged his subordinates to act as cruelly as before. However, a new deputy warden was presently appointed, with more liberal ideas, and endowed with large powers, and for a while the condition of the prisoners improved; the warden, with his ear to the ground, and his eye on the handwriting on the wall, deftly adjusting himself to the situation, and industriously claiming for himself credit for all betterments introduced by the deputy—who, having no press agent, was forced to stand inactively by and see his honest credit filched away from him—in public opinion, at least. Of course, the prisoners knew perfectly well on which leg the boot was. But prisoners cannot make themselves heard outside the jail.

Accordingly, this warden, whose methods I know well, is now quoted as a signal champion of the new and more merciful dispensation, though only two or three years ago, according to his own personally written and signed reports, he was for keeping prisoners practically incommunicado—dead to the world; writing and receiving letters to be nearly or wholly done away with; newspapers withheld; visitors denied. Prisoners, he urged, were sent to prison for punishment, and punished, continually and thoroughly, let them be. Punish the man, kill his health, his hope, his spirit, his soul, his body too at need, and thus, and only thus, reform him. It was a simple plan, and likely to bring results—of a kind. Shall we believe that this man's professions of a change of heart are genuine? or feel surprise to discover that at the very moment he is receiving visitors in his commodious office upstairs, and purring out to them his fatherly affection for his prisoners, and denying that the old, bad methods of repression any longer are tolerated, there are miserable wretches being hung up by the wrists in dark and noisome cells under his feet?

Regarding the personnel of the officials at Atlanta I can for obvious reasons say little. They are a good deal like such officials anywhere. The warden is a Pennsylvania Dutchman; the deputy a young Kentuckian, gigantic and fresh faced; his first assistant is a stalwart man of middle age, a good deal of a martinet, but the men are inclined to like him because they see in him a solid, masculine creature, who stands pat, says what he means, and does what he says. Then there are the prison doctor, the steward of the commissary department, and the parole officer, and under them are the guards and the "snitches"—the latter not being officially recognized, although they wield an important influence, their reports against their fellow prisoners being seriously considered, and often made the basis of action by their superiors, which has no small effect upon the welfare of the jail. Yet these poor wretches—they are mostly negroes—sell their brethren for a mess of pottage of secret favors and immunities; none save the most abject would accept such employment. Could any inspiration or procedure be more insecure? Yet it is an essential factor in the present principle of prison management.

The guards are, with some exceptions, such a body of men as might be expected from their salary—seventy dollars a month, with no raise for length of service or meritorious conduct. They cannot be rated as high as the average police officer, and the conditions amid which they live are so unfavorable to manly development that it is small wonder they grow worse as they grow older in service. They either dislike the men and use them accordingly, or they make secret compacts with them for surreptitious favors, which undermine discipline and corrupt such morals as prisoners may be supposed to possess. Often, however, they will solicit favors from prisoners, and, when the latter seek some accommodation in return, grin in their face, or austerely threaten to report them. Their brutality is sometimes quite whimsical and unexpected,—the outcome of some personal dislike, without bearing on the prisoner's conduct,—though they are voluble in assigning some alleged infraction of the rules, should a superior happen to call them to account. And the superior, I may almost say, never believes the prisoner against a guard, or rather, never acts upon such belief. That is the settled policy of the penitentiary; the warden himself has placed himself on record numerous times to the effect that under no circumstances would he take the word of a prisoner over that of a guard. To be reported means to be punished, be the report baseless or not. It follows naturally that guards never scruple to give full rein to any animosity they may privately feel against a man, knowing that they will be able to "put it across" with the higher official to whom complaint may be made.

I happened to be in the corridor one day when one of the guards, a tall, strapping fellow, was bringing downstairs a convict of stature much less than his own, a poor half demented youth, whose dementia was unfortunately wont to express itself in foul or abusive language, which came from him almost involuntarily, without any particular personal application. The two men were half way down the final flight of steps, when, without any visible pretext, but, I presume, on account of some unlucky epithet or utterance let fall by the convict, the guard suddenly seized the youth violently by the throat, hammered his head against the wall, and dragged him headlong down the rest of the descent. They were now in the corridor; the man, bewildered and giddy, was whirled round and shoved to the head of another short flight of steps leading out to the yard; the door was open. The guard came behind him, caught him by the collar, and exerting his strength, hurled him through the door; he fell prone on the ground, and lay there.

Here, my own view of the incident was cut off; but ten minutes afterward I met a comrade, who, bristling with wrath, described the continuation of the affray, which he had just witnessed. He said that the guard, following the man, grasped him by the coat and jerked him off the ground and shoved him, staggering, toward the isolation building on the other side of the yard. There happened to be two visitors, a man and a woman, under convoy of another guard, passing at the moment; the first guard was by this time too much blinded by his own passion to notice them; the other laughed, and apparently reassured the visitors. Upon nearing the isolation building, a third guard, who was on duty at the gate, ran up, and struck the prisoner several times on the head with his club. The man put up his arms in an effort to ward off the blows, or to beg for mercy, but without effect; he was dragged between his two assailants to the deputy's office, as if he were a dangerous giant struggling to get away, though, in fact, he was quite helpless and partly insensible. From there, as we learned later, he was taken to a dark cell, charged with I know not what misdeeds, and nothing was ever done to either of the licensed ruffians who had mistreated him.

I recall such scenes with reluctance; they are ugly things to think of; but some illustrations are necessary in order to put in your mind some notion of what jails mean. An episode which, as it turned out, had elements of the ridiculous, but which came within a hair's breadth of having very fatal consequences, occurred a short time before I became an inmate; it is still spoken of with emotion by those who participated in it.

A large number of prisoners, some twenty or more, I think, were collected in one of the basement work-rooms, when a fire broke out there. The smoke soon became suffocating, and crept up into the ranges above, alarming the whole prison. But conditions in the room itself were immediately intolerable; the door had been locked, and the men were jammed together there, frantically shrieking for the door to be opened. Death for all of them would be a matter of only a few minutes. The guard in the corridor above, a huge, burly personage, with the brains, it would be flattery to say, of a calf, and exceedingly punctilious in his notions, came down the stairs to see what was the matter. One of the men shouted out to him, forgetting decorum in the desperate hurry of the moment, "Why don't you open the door, you —— —— ——?" Now, it was not only against the rules that the door should be opened between certain hours, but it was altogether irregular and intolerable to miscall an official. The guard stopped short. "Who's that called me a ——?" he demanded indignantly. But there was none to answer him, for the men were by that time strangling and fainting.

Down the stairs at this juncture came one of the higher officials, choking and gasping. "Open that door, why don't you?" he managed to call out, seeing the guard below him. "I'm trying to find out," replied the latter, "who it was called me a ——." The higher official was understood to say something which penetrated the hide of his subordinate, and stirred him at last to action—not a moment too soon. The door was unlocked, and the captives tumbled and crawled out. The burly personage, who rated punctilio and seemly language above the lives of men, still retains his position in the corridor; but the prisoner who had insulted his dignity has never been identified.

But what can be expected of men in the position of guards of a prison? The function is abnormal, and unless it be undertaken from high motives and with an exceptional endowment of intelligence and humane feeling, it will steadily deteriorate a man; from being at the start to all practical purposes a social derelict, incompetent for productive employment, and often suffering from an incurable disease, he will sink lower and lower in the scale of manhood and morality. He has two chief aims in life—to requite himself upon defenseless convicts for the kicking-out bestowed upon himself by the community; and to get an increase of pay.

I had not been three days in the prison, when one of them came to me in my cell and asked me to write for him a letter to the Department urging a raise of salary. So be it by all means, if higher pay will get better men; but men who can command higher pay do not care to do such work.

Since my guard saw no impropriety in asking for it—though, of course, it was against the rules—I wrote his petition for him. The rules governing guards are explicit, but so far at least as they regard treatment of prisoners they are freely disregarded. For example, guards are forbidden by the rules to address prisoners insultingly, to apply names or epithets to them, to lay hands upon them or to strike them "upon whatever provocation" unless they believe their own lives are in danger. A rabbit has as much chance of throttling a bulldog as the ordinary prisoner of endangering the life of a guard; yet hardly a prisoner in the penitentiary has not repeatedly either undergone or witnessed, or both, insults and physical violence offered by guards to the men. As to the impropriety of asking favors of the men, the guards might plead distinguished precedent for it. One of the higher officials of the penitentiary summoned me to his office one morning. He informed me that he intended to devote his life to prison work, but that he was still a young man, and that advancement was slow and difficult. "When you were outside, you lived in society, and knew a lot of big men," he was kind enough to say; "you will be going out of here again before long. If you should find it in your way to speak a good word for me in quarters where it would be likely to do me good, I should appreciate it." I should perhaps have premised, lest he appear in the light of asking something for nothing, that he had opened the conversation by handing back to me the Ingersoll watch of which I had been deprived on entering the institution. I knew that my young friend and benefactor was deep in the darksome intricacies of prison politics, and was just then getting rather the worst of it; but I was unable to give him any positive assurance that my influence with the Department, or elsewhere, would suffice to give him a lift.

Favoritism rules in all parts of the prison administration; it and prison politics are, indeed, twin curses of our whole prison system. In spite of all the specious official promises of reward for good conduct in the form of parole and obedience to the rules, every prisoner knows that they are apples of Sodom; the most correct conduct, maintained for years, will gain a man nothing, while a worthless and heedless fellow, if he has a friend among the men above, will have his way smoothed for him. An official's pet snitch enjoys all manner of indulgences in the way of food and freedoms, and if he be an intelligent fellow, he can ride on his superior's neck and influence his conduct to a surprising degree. Again, certain guards, in the eyes of their superiors, can do no wrong whatever wrong they do; and others, who are apt to be men who retain some conscientious notions as to their duties, find their path difficult. Some guards, too, though they may be obnoxious to their officers, are not dismissed because they know too much, and might reveal uncomfortable facts were they cashiered. I could name an example of this—a young guard who, a few years ago, committed a cold blooded crime upon a convict, for which in the outside world he would have been liable to a hanging. But the prison authorities did not find it expedient to punish him, and he still saunters about the prison, with his cap tilted on his head, and his rifle. He is a good shot, and is employed a good deal on the towers, where quick marksmanship might be useful. He knows too much.

Evil conditions breed evil deeds and dangerous secrets. Conditions have improved somewhat during the last two or three years, but the improvement has been more outward than inward. One day, two or three years ago, suddenly appeared at the gates the Attorney-General from Washington. He had not been looked for so early. He walked straight into the dining-room, where he noticed a number of convicts standing up with their noses against the wall. "What is this for?" he asked one of them. The convict couldn't exactly tell; he was waiting to be had up for examination. "How long are you kept there?" "From seven in the morning till seven at night." "Have you had anything to eat?" The man had not, nor any opportunity to discharge the functions of nature either.

This Attorney-General, in Washington, had never showed himself a friend of convicts; but when he saw—and smelt!—this comparatively slight instance of prison discipline, his gorge rose. He ordered all the culprits to the kitchen for a meal, and issued an edict against this punishment, and against some other things that he discovered. What he would have done had he seen the dark cells, and the condition of the men who had been kept there for a few months, may be conjectured. The public is indeed assured that the use of these cells has long been discontinued; but seven or eight hundred prisoners know that, as late as last October, a certain convict commonly referred to as "the old Englishman" was hung up by the wrists in one of them. And there were others.

Prison officials are political appointees, whose controlling aim must therefore be the security and prosperity of themselves, and only afterward (if at all) the welfare and just and decent treatment of the convicts. They have their salaries (niggardly enough if we regard the work they are supposed to do, but affluent in view of what they actually do), and they have the government appropriations for expenses and supplies for the penitentiary, which they are expected to handle economically. But economy, and decent and humane treatment of prisoners in a jail, are incompatible, even were the men kept steadily and productively at work under proper conditions, and paid for what they produced. A jail properly administered would be one of the most expensive investments in the world; but Congress, as at present advised, thinks only of cutting down the already miserably insufficient stipend; and that warden who can, at the end of his fiscal year, show a balance in favor of the government, may depend upon holding his position, and nobody considers the mortal tears, misery and outrage from which that favorable balance is derived. For not only if it be wisely and honestly expended is the supply of money insufficient, but much of it is wasted by mere ignorance, negligence and incompetence, and much more of it—as recent exposures in newspapers indicate—leaks away in the form of graft. For all this waste the convict must pay in privations and cruelties not authorized or contemplated by a government none too considerate at best; and men above grow fat and rosy gilled.

But nothing is so difficult to prove or so easy to conceal as graft; all the ingenuity and resources of the grafters are primarily and undeviatingly devoted to covering their tracks. So much is allowed for maintenance, subsistence, construction; the bills and receipts are shown; all seems right. And yet, somehow, buildings remain unfinished, grounds are a raw wilderness, men are clad in rags inherited from previous generations, and are starved and abused. Meanwhile, a warden on a four or five thousand dollar salary contrives to live at the rate of ten or twelve, and may own valuable real estate in the city.

Do miracles occur in jails, after having been so long discontinued elsewhere? Or must we at last realize that the comfort and soft living of a handful of rascals is obtained at the cost of the flesh and blood and despair of thousands of men—I believe there are five hundred thousand convicts in this country annually—gagged and helpless, to whom we give the name of convicts, but who, whatever their crimes, are still our own flesh and blood, brothers of ours, our own very selves but for special circumstances for which we can claim no merit; but for their souls and lives we are responsible, and to strive to redeem and succor them our own intelligent self-interest should prompt us to spend and labor lavishly. Instead of that, our habitual attitude toward them is that of indifference or even hostility. For why should we honest people waste our good money and precious sympathy on a convict? Has he not already robbed us enough?

It would be a shallow thing to hold up as monsters of hardheartedness and depravity the officials who have been entrusted with the conduct of our prisons. If they do wickedly and corruptly, it is not because they are to begin with preterhuman sinners, but because we summoned them to duties far above their capacity and training, which involve temptations and provocations which they lack will and power to resist, which give them power over fellow creatures which the most magnanimous and purest men might hesitate to assume, and which inevitably plunge men who are not magnanimous or pure into deeds of injustice, dishonor and inhumanity. In a sense, the officials are no less victims of the ignorance and frivolity of the community than are the prisoners themselves.

But, at any rate, the officials are few and the prisoners are many. If anything is to be done to make things better, there is more hope in dealing with the officials first. After they have been driven out, and their places filled with honorable and enlightened men, who will at least administer the law as it stands with integrity and judgment, we shall be in a better position to consider whether the law itself be beyond criticism, and its penalties justly and prudently devised. Crime as it exists is an enormous evil, and it costs us enormously; and cheap and pinchbeck methods will never rid us of it.

VIII

FOR LIFE

When a man hears rumors that his application for parole is likely to be acted upon favorably, a guard pauses at his cell door some morning, and tells him to go to the clothing shop at a certain hour. The prisoner, unless he has been forewarned, accepts this as proof positive that he will really be set at liberty, and presents himself before the head tailor with a smiling countenance. He is solemnly and specifically measured for a suit, looks over the material out of which it is to be made, perhaps ventures to mention some predilections as to the cut, and takes his departure with a light heart. The fact that the cloth is cheap, unshrunken goods, which will shrivel up at the first shower or severe humidity, and will, at all events, get wrinkled out of shape in a few days, does not dash the hopeful prisoner's jocundity; nor even the consideration that the "prison cut" will be instantly recognized all over the country, by every detective, private or federal, and acted upon as circumstances may indicate. It is not the clothes, good or bad, that makes his long-tried heart glad; it is the assurance of freedom. He would be more than content with a simple loin-cloth, if only freedom might go with it.

As a matter of fact, this measuring commonly means little, and guarantees nothing at all. Indeed, it has rather the appearance of a pleasant jest of the authorities—one of the cat-and-mouse plays with prisoners with which every old timer is familiar. One would say the authorities find amusement, amid the monotonous round of their avocations, in thus stimulating hopes which they know are not likely to be fulfilled. "Come, here is a heart not yet thoroughly broken; let us try another blow at it!" Days, weeks, months, drag tediously by, and nothing more is heard of the parole, or of the suit of new clothes. They have never been made up, or if they by chance have been, they are put away to gather dust on a shelf underground; they are old clothes now—years old, sometimes. And when at last they are brought out again, it is probable that they will be worn by some other, more fortunate man, who ignored the misfit for the sake of getting past the prison doors.

When this little drama was acted for my benefit, I noticed a man sitting in a certain chair amid the other tailor prisoners, stitching away perfunctorily at a piece of goods. I call him a man, but he looked, to my fancy, like an ancient frog, or the semblance of what had once been a frog, from which, however, all the impulses and juices that had made him alive had slowly leaked away, until nothing but the shell was left. He was a pithless automaton, in whom mind and emotions had long since become inert, and only enough sensibility was left to enable him to feel dimly miserable. Who was he—or, better, who had he been? I learned that for seven years he had sat in that same chair from morning till night, doing the same job of sewing on one suit after another of prison clothing. Seven years! But was he capable of no other employment? Might he not have been given the relief of a change? Maybe; but what would be the use? They couldn't be bothered finding him new stunts all the time, since he had learned how to do that one thing satisfactorily. He was a "lifer."

Life—your entire lifetime—means, perhaps, a good deal to you; even its sorrows, in the retrospect, were good in their way; they meant something. And you look forward to happier things in the future; it will be a long and on the whole a successful future perhaps. Think of the variety and the opportunity which this great, multiform, breathing world holds forth to a man; the friends, the activities, the changes of scene, the surprises, the conflicts, success and failure, hope and fear, triumph, defeat—life, in a word. It is a divine thing, a glorious thing, the God-given birthright of all men. It is the molding of character, the endless, stimulating struggle, the growing sense of human brotherhood, the faces and hands of our fellow creatures, the longer, deeper thoughts aroused by the slow revelations of experience as to the plan of human destiny,—and therefore are the words well chosen which condemn a man like yourself to penal servitude "for life"?

But human language has no word to convey the significance of lifelong imprisonment. It is surely not life: nor is it death—Oh, death would be welcome! For death means either (as you may imagine you believe) total extinction, or it means increased life, free from material trammels. But death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for example, spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured life—the sacred Creative gift, imparted to all things, conscious or unconscious, without restriction? Life, the mystery, which we are impotent to bestow, and which even death, self-inflicted or inflicted by others, cannot take away; which one thing only can take away—the death-in-life of penal imprisonment; is it not a formidable thought that we have incurred the burden of this crime, which does not transfer life from one phase to another, but seeks to annihilate it absolutely?

Death would be welcome; the infliction of it can find forgiveness; but how can we forgive the infliction of death-in-life? How can God forgive it, this profane meddling with sacred and fathomless life? Will He accept the plea that we did it "for the protection of society?—for the man's own good?—or a warning to others?" In that day of questioning, I would rather take my chances with the man sitting in the chair in the prison tailor's shop for seven years, a "lifer"! Infinite mercy may find means to compensate him for what we robbed him of; but what can it do with us, the robbers?

In the Federal prison there were a score or more of lifers, with some of whom it was my fortune to become acquainted. I stood in a sort of awe of them; the thought of their fate was so overwhelming that my mind could not compass it, though my heart might approach some conception of it through obscure channels of intuition. Their treatment by the prison officials was not ordinarily severe; even a warden or a guard could feel that clubbing and dark-celling would be a kind of anticlimax for a man sentenced for life. Some of them—usually negroes—would be given easy jobs, and not held too strictly to the petty regulations whose special object is to humiliate the ordinary prisoner, under guise of disciplining and reforming him. Nothing was to be gained by disciplining or reforming a "lifer." Others, however, in whom despair had taken the expression of obstinacy or savagery, were savagely handled; one of them bears terrible scars from a shooting by one of the guards, and he told me that, out of the twenty-two years he had already served, eight had been spent in the punishment cells. Others are maltreated for a while, experimentally, or to "put the fear of God in their hearts," and afterward let alone. But as a rule, there is not much fun to be got out of a "lifer" by the prison keepers, and they prefer to ignore him.

The introduction of the law allowing the privilege of applying for parole, did, to be sure, place in the hands of the authorities a weapon with which they could "get beneath the hide" (as they might term it) of these obdurate subjects. Needless to say, this measure, which provides that "lifers" may be paroled (at the discretion of the parole board) after having served fifteen years with a good prison record, did not contemplate introducing thereby a new element of misery into their lives. But the men to whose hands the "lifer" is entrusted found in it a means of making him more readily amenable to discipline by holding over him the threat of an adverse report should he prove intractable. They could keep him indefinitely in that state of torturing suspense as to his fate, which is perhaps the worst of all tortures, by withholding from him all information as to whether or not his appeal was likely to succeed.

Several cases of this kind came under my observation. In one, the release came before the man had collapsed; in others, too late. In only one or two that I know of was there any pretext that his conduct during imprisonment had been unsatisfactory. The delay was never explained; it was due to wilful or careless neglect. Two men were carried out feet foremost in a deal box after they had endured suspense up to the extreme limit of mortal capacity. They died of broken hearts—gradually broken through long months of hope slowly fading into despair.

The warden sat serene in his office, attending to business as a good official should, writing reports to the Department which testified to his efficiency and economy, welcoming visitors with his genial smile, occasionally reading encomiums upon himself in a local newspaper, written and inserted there by somebody; the guards sauntered jauntily about, cocking their caps and making their clubs dance at the end of the cords; eight hundred unsightly felons, who had once been men like you and me, filed drearily in to their meals, and out again, the worse for the experience; and all the while, from morning till night, Dennis sat on the corner of his cot in the hospital room, waiting for the news of his release. He felt, and said, at first, that it was sure to come; it would come in a day or two, or at the end of the week anyway; or at the beginning of the week after. He knew his application had been accepted; of course, those big officials had lots to do, and could not be expected to attend to him at once; but they would not forget him.

For several weeks—a month or two—Dennis kept up his spirits well; he had been in prison many years, more than the number required for parole, and he had no bad marks against him. His wife and two daughters were still living, however, and he was full of plans for his future life with them; what he would do, where he would live, how happy they all would be together, after that separation. But one day as he sat on his cot, or paced slowly up and down the hospital chamber, news was brought to him, bad news, news that his wife had died unexpectedly.

He survived it; some men survive miraculously in prison, and some die easily. Dennis had his daughters left to him still; and the release was sure to come now—they would not surely delay it any longer. He had been a tall, powerful mulatto when he first came to prison; he was a gaunt, bent skeleton of a man now, with great, bony, strengthless hands, that closed round mine with a sort of appealing, lingering pressure when we met, as if he feared to let go his hold upon a man who was sorry for him. The doctor knew—any competent physician, at least, might have known—that he could not last much longer; but the doctor said nothing and did nothing. Then—for the stars in their courses seemed to fight against Dennie—came another piece of news for him; not news of parole, but news that his daughters, both of them, had followed their mother; they too were dead. Dennis, who had begun to plan out a life with them, to be father and mother both to them, to comfort them and work for them, and to die at last with their love and companionship comforting him, was now alone in the world, and still in prison.

Time had gone by; it was six months since he had begun to look for freedom. What would freedom mean for him now, with no one in the world to go to or to be with? Probably he gave up looking for it at this point; at any rate, he spoke of it no more. He spoke very little after that, and he very seldom rose from his seat on the corner of his cot, or took notice of any one or of anything in the hospital room. He sat there, day after day, all day long, with his eyes fixed upon a certain point of vacancy; what he saw, what he thought, no one knew. His hands lay before him on his bony knees, lax and inert. Half a lifetime in prison, and now he was nearing the end, mute and motionless, making no complaint or protest—the power for that had gone by. He no longer spoke of parole; and no parole came. No doubt, the great officials were busy, and what was Dennis that they should remember him, and draw out that paper from its pigeonhole, and sign it, and send it to him? The world could get along without Dennis.

So, one day, Dennis died; and after his body had been laid in its box, the old market wagon, with the old mule between the shafts, was backed up to the door, and the box with the gray old corpse in it was shoved in and driven round to the prison burying ground and dumped into its red clay hole. There it lies; but I am not sure that that is the end of Dennis. A time may be coming, after this earthly show is over, when persons who were so much pressed for time that they could find no moment to sign a paper to save a fellow man's life, may see him again under awkward circumstances, and be asked to explain. Justice, after all, is an Immortal, and belongs to eternity. We should beware of measuring, by the apparent slowness of her movements on this lower plane, the likelihood of her final victory.

If you have some imagination to spare, put yourself in the place of a convict who finds himself, to-day, facing a sentence of imprisonment for life. The imagination of it, even, is so appalling that you will need more than common courage to picture it to yourself. What, then, must the reality of it be? It is hard to understand how any human heart and brain can withstand the prospect of it. If it has not stopped your heart at once—if your brain has not immediately collapsed under the shock—you will think of suicide. But, perhaps, before you can find means or resolution to seek that escape, you will become conscious, in the background of your mind, of a stirring of that almost ineradicable thing that we call hope. You cannot quite bring yourself to believe that your entire earthly future is to be passed in a prison cell. Some event will occur, some beneficent freak of destiny, some earthquake or lightning bolt, some national revolution or catastrophe, some belated sense of humanity in your brother man, some new law repealing the impious cruelty of the old law, that will break your bars before the end can come. You cannot believe that you will actually live and die in jail.

Thus you are tided over your first hours and days, and with each new day that you survive the chances of your surviving altogether increase. By and by, you fall into the prison routine, and your existence becomes mechanical and automatic. There will be occasional flamings-out of rage and despair, but they pass, and become progressively more infrequent. You have slipped down into a merely animal stratum of existence; you live to-day because you lived yesterday, and you do not forecast to-morrow. Perhaps you learn to assuage and deceive the hunger of your immortal soul by forcing your attention upon the petty ripple of daily events and duties, until you present, to the outsider, the appearance of a commonplace, non-tragic person, bearing no noticeable scars of the crime which society perpetrated on you. You perhaps lose, at last, the realization of your own inhuman plight, and are received, unawares, into the gray prison protoplasm, no longer really sensitive to impressions, though presenting the semblance of human reactions. You drift down the stream, passive, in a sort of ghastly contentment. You have forgotten that you ever were a man.

But I am merely speculating in the direction of truths that I do not know and cannot reach. The lifers themselves whom I knew could tell me nothing; they were less demonstrative than the men of five or ten years' sentence. We can never fathom the dealings of the Almighty with His creatures, and they, perhaps, can fathom them as little as we can. In ways inconceivable to us, they are supported.

There was a little old man known as Uncle Billy. If the parole board has kept faith with him, he should have been set free the 23rd of December. Uncle Billy's right arm had been amputated at the shoulder, the result of a shot through the arm from his own gun while he was getting out of a buggy. He lived in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, at the time of his story. Billy was married to a woman who must have had some attractiveness, for a journeying pedler, who periodically passed through the region, formed a liaison with her. There was at that time a daughter, who had just reached marriageable age. The pedler was wont practically to put Billy out of his own house during his sojourns, and usurped his place as master of the household. At one time he secured Billy's conviction on some minor offense, and had him jailed for six months. What Billy thought of the situation I don't know; he was a small, slight man, under five foot three, and of an intellectual cast. But he seems not to have attempted active measures, until one day he discovered that the pedler, not satisfied with the wife, was attempting the seduction of the daughter likewise.

Then, one night, Billy came to his house, and found that going on which his patience could not tolerate. He got hold of an ax, and, stealing into the room, struck the pedler, as he lay in bed, with his one arm, and split his head open. What passed then between him and his wife is not known. Billy, I believe, was for giving himself up to the authorities at once; but the woman prevailed upon him to conceal the deed. She tied the body to the tail of the horse, and dragged it across the fields to a ditch, where she covered it with dirt and rubbish. There it lay for some weeks, until a couple of men out hunting saw an end of a suspender sticking out of the ground, and pulling at it, discovered the murdered corpse. Billy confessed, and he and his wife were lodged in jail pending their trial. The woman died there; but Billy was tried and convicted, and in consideration of the peculiar circumstances, was "let off" with a life sentence. When I knew him, he had been in a cell nearly fifteen years.

The weather was chilly; some of the prisoners were let out in the yard every day at one o'clock, to pace round in a ring for forty minutes. I saw the little, bent, thin old man, with one arm, hobbling round and round with his cane. Conversation was not permitted under the rules, but the rule was often overlooked. After I had gained an outline of his story from some old timers, I spoke to him, and he looked up at me with a pair of singularly intelligent brown eyes, and with a kindly expression of his meager little face. We conversed a little on general subjects, and I found him well educated, observant, thoughtful, with a distinct vein of subdued humor. Afterward I saw him in his cell, though there was a rule against that, too; but the guard was tolerant.

He had a violin there which he had made himself, his tools being a knife made out of a nail hammered flat and the edge sharpened, and a piece of broken glass. It was admirably fashioned, and except that it was not varnished, would have been taken for such an instrument as you buy in a shop; its tone, too, was pleasing, and Billy could discourse excellent music on it. It was in the manufacture of these fiddles that his time was passed; the fact that he had but one hand to work with did not embarrass him. His contrivance for playing on the instrument was as remarkable as the instrument itself; he had rigged up a sort of jury arm of wood and metal, with an elbow to it, and a grip to lay hold of the bow. Persons who play on violins will doubtless be more puzzled than I was to conceive how he could do it; but he did it. And for aught I could see, he was content with his singular industry; it gave him constant occupation and enabled him, I suppose, to keep thoughts of other things out of the way. Otherwise, he was utterly unobtrusive, almost invisible, and the guards let him alone. But the government of the United States had kept him there for fifteen years, as a menace to society. You can see him in fancy, had he been set free for doing what most human beings must have done, ranging up and down the country, dealing out terror and slaughter. Such wild beasts must be restrained. They must be disciplined and reformed, and jail is the way to do it.

Just before I left the jail, I spoke to Billy about his parole. "You and I will get out almost together," I said. "No, no," he replied, with his curious little humorous smile, "they can't get rid of me as easy as that; I've got three months yet, and I'm going to stick it out to the end." I have not heard the sequel; but I can hardly believe that the authorities mean to play the cat-and-mouse game with him.

I have perhaps mentioned John Ross, who died, under promise of parole, after thirty-three years behind the bars. And there was Thomas Bram, a prisoner hardly less remarkable, freed on parole after seventeen years' confinement. He had persistently asserted his innocence from the first, and nobody so far as I know doubted his assertion. The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, and there was another man in the case who seemed, to judge by the reports of the trial, to have been at least as likely to be guilty. Bram's record in prison was wholly blameless, and though there was some opposition to freeing him, it sufficed only to obtain a delay of a few weeks beyond the date set for his release. But during those few weeks, his sufferings were trying to witness, and he was near collapse before the end came. He told me that the Attorney-General had personally promised him freedom two years before, but had done nothing toward keeping his promise. "It wasn't right, Mr. Hawthorne," was all the comment he allowed himself to make. Bram's self-control was great, and his manner always soft and ingratiating; he was politic and prudent, and had probably resolved from the outset of his prison career to obtain pardon or mitigation if good conduct and unfaltering adherence to his plea of innocence could compass it. He was given a job which procured him some indulgences, and was never punished. But if a life sentence for a guilty man be intolerable, what shall be said if he were guiltless? Think it over in your leisure moments.

I find my list is far too long to be dismissed in one chapter; and in cases where the men are still in confinement, discussion of them might prove injurious. There was a young fellow there who looked like a slender boy of seventeen; he was really over thirty years of age. But he had been imprisoned since his fifteenth year, and his face since then had not developed or taken the contours of manhood; and his manner was boyish. He was well educated in the grammar school sense, however, though I believe he had picked up most of what he knew in prison. He had a distinct, emphatic way of speaking, and believed, I fancy, that he was quite a man of the world, though, of course, he was almost totally devoid of other than prison experience. He would have been an interesting study, had not the pathos of his condition, of which he was himself unaware, made one shrink from probing it.

He had killed a man at the instigation of and under the influence of a step-father, who wished the man removed for ends of his own, and forced the child (he was nothing else) to take the job off his hands, and the law of Indian Territory, which was the scene of the affair, condemned him for life. After serving fifteen years, he applied for his parole under the law; there appeared to be no grounds so far as his prison record went for denying it; nevertheless, he was rejected. He asked the reason, and was told that it was not considered safe to set him at liberty; he had a "bad temper"—that was, I think, the explanation.

Psychological insight is a good thing in its way and place, but it may be carried too far, or employed amiss; and this looks like an illustration. The boy, in more than fifteen years, had never done anything in prison that called for discipline; but because some self-constituted and arbitrary psychologist chose to believe, or to say, that his temper was not under full control, he was doomed to spend the rest of his life in a cell. This prisoner knows, of course, that he has been wronged, but he does not know how much; he does not know what life in a world of free men is. But he, after being kept for half of his lifetime under duress, must submit to the caprice of a man to whom the country has entrusted absolute power. No man is qualified to exercise absolute power; no man is justified in accepting it; but we bestow it upon every chance political appointee, and what he does with it puts us to shame, whether or not we can as yet realize it.

There was at least one life prisoner in Atlanta who merits a chapter to himself; but I cannot speak of him now. He is one of the unreconciled, and his horoscope is still too cloudy to make it safe to tell his story. A desperate criminal, he would be termed by prison experts. In truth, he is a warm-hearted, generous, high minded man, sentenced to death in his boyhood for a deed which would have been properly punished by a few months in a reformatory, afterward obtaining a commutation to life imprisonment, and now a man of more than forty years, bearing upon his body terrible scars of severities practised upon him for trying to resist wrongs which no manly man could tamely endure. A Balzac might find in him a more human and lovable Vautrin; a Victor Hugo could make him the hero of another Les Miserables; a Charles Reade could win new renown by summoning us to put ourselves in his place. But the best service I can do him now is to give him silence. He is not quite desperate yet; should he become so, the world will know his history.

IX

THE TOIL OF SLAVERY

Before the Civil War there were some millions of negro slaves in the South, whom to set free we spent some billions of dollars and several hundred thousand lives. It was held that the result was worth the cost. But to-day we are creating some five hundred thousand slaves, white and black, each year—or that is about the number of made slaves each year in the United States; it costs us several millions to keep them in an enslaved condition, and their depredations upon society, before and after slavery, amount to several millions more. I have not the precise data, but the figures hazarded are not excessive. A sound statistician would make a more sensational showing; and when he proceeded to cast up his account for the aggregate of the years since the war, and of the estimated amounts for the coming fifty years, the bill would look large even with a hundred million paymasters to foot it.

In that bill, probably the smallest item would be the cost of crime itself—the actual loss caused to the community by the thieving of thieves,—of the thieves, that is, who have been convicted and condemned as such; for there is no way of figuring on how much the undetected thieves steal. Every time we shake the social body, in this or that spasm of probing and reform, hundreds drop out, like moths from an unprotected garment; so that at last we are prone to suspect that the thief, overt or covert, is more the rule than the exception, and that a good part of the cash in circulation was more or less dishonestly come by. But, leaving this aside, the money or values appropriated by thieves accredited as such and sent to jail, is an amount relatively inconsiderable, and by no means enough to pay the expenses of their apprehension, trial, and prison sojourn. It is, then, politically uneconomical to imprison them.

The reply to this is, of course, that penal slavery is preventive of crime; that if we did not prosecute malefactors, crime would multiply and abound, like weeds in a neglected garden. Perhaps it would; but the point is, that it multiplies and abounds even in the teeth of prosecutions; every year the number of convictions is greater, and the jails are already cracking their seams to contain the convicts. One might almost conclude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate crime instead of preventing it, and that we are in the predicament of Hercules in the fable, who, as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw two others sprout in its place. At which rate, we might be led on to the surmise that it would be financially cheaper to let crime run on; the cost of our futile efforts to stop it would be saved, and might be set over against the loss from the increased annual depredations.

But finance is not the whole story; what about morality? and who can forecast the ruin of anarchy? The problem cannot be so crudely solved.

Crime must be prevented; doubtless nine-tenths even of the men in jail would agree to that proposition. The question is, can the jail system prevent it? and the answer is that, judged by long experience—the experience of thousands of years—it cannot. There are several reasons why it cannot, into some of which we may enquire later; but the objection to the jail system which I wish to emphasize just now is, that it not only makes slaves of convicts, but, unlike the more reasonable southern negro slavery, it makes them unproductive slaves. Either it withholds this vast body of men from production altogether, or else it forces them to toil under conditions which bring forth results the smallest possible and the most unsatisfactory. The men are not paid for what they do. Whatever profit (in "contract" prisons) accrues from their toil goes into the pockets of the contractors, or, perhaps, is used to defray the cost of their keep to the community. Or, again, if it is made to appear to go into the prisoners' pockets, it is deftly taken out again the next moment by an ingenious system of fines, which no prisoner can escape.

In short, prison labor is slave labor, and slave labor of a worse kind than was ever practised in negro slavery times. For on southern plantations, though slaves were not paid wages, they got wages' worth in good food and lodging, and (uniformly) in humane treatment, including, above all, the companionship of their wives and families; and they were able, in many instances, to buy themselves into freedom. Most of the negroes, moreover, had never known what it was to be free; their race, for generations unknown, had been slaves in their own country; they had never been free citizens of the United States, never had education, were unconscious of any disgrace in their condition, and were as happy as ever in their lives they had been or were capable of being—happier, indeed, than most negroes are in the community to-day. In all respects their condition compares favorably with that of our half million annual prison slaves, manufactured deliberately out of our own flesh and blood.

I used to contemplate the population in the Atlanta Penitentiary—the eight hundred of us—and then look at the construction work, the gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge, the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work of clearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and I marveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilled in this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capable of active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if given intelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually and educationally equipped to plan and direct industrial operations; and yet, with all this great potential force at command, all that was actually accomplished might have been done as well or better by a corporal's guard of willing and well managed men. The mere economic waste of such material was criminal, without regard to the evil effect of inadequate or misapplied labor upon the men's moral and mental state. Can it be, I asked myself, that this extravagant idleness is forced upon the prisoners as part, and not the least evil part of their punishment? Or is it the result of ignorance, incompetence, or indifference on the part of those appointed and paid to take care of men sentenced to "hard labor"?

That the men suffer from it is beyond question. And I cannot find that the law provides or intends that their suffering shall be of this kind. Much of the insanity in the prison is due to the way they are made, or made not, to work. There is a legend of a warden who, being unable to keep his prisoners otherwise busy, set them to piling up paving stones on one side of the yard, and then taking down the pile and repiling it on the other side. After a week of this, most of them were maniacs. It was not the severity of the labor that destroyed their minds, but the uselessness and objectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonable employment; idleness, or irrational work disintegrates their minds. They want to see and to foresee intelligible results from their toil; mere toil without such results is maddening, or it rots men's minds as scurvy rots their bodies. The reason is, that the men are human; and if you have hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, the insanity which so constantly follows upon prison idleness or mis-employment should correct you.

Others may describe the horrors, almost indescribable, of contract labor in prisons; I saw nothing of that at Atlanta—type of another widespread system of prison work—though I heard enough about it from men who had undergone it in state prisons. But during the few first days of my imprisonment, I saw a building gang at work (to call it work) upon a new wing destined to contain dormitories for the inmates. It was to be a seemly structure of granite, massive and well proportioned. But after three days, work on it was stopped, and was not resumed until a week or so before I left this prison, six months later. Meanwhile, I read in the Congressional Record the report of a debate in the House, in which, on the authority of a Texas representative, charges of graft or waste were laid against persons concerned in the erection of this building which seemed incredible, but of which I was able to find no refutation. The hospital building is open to the same criticism, and another, which I believe is designed to be the laundry, had got no further, at the date of my arrival, than a square hole in the ground, and when I left had been furthered by a single course of stone or cement laid round the hole. A New York contractor, graft or no graft, would have had all three of them finished and in commission in the same time, and with no better material in the way of laborers than our prison could supply.

The thirty-four foot wall surrounding the buildings, a mile in circuit, built of cement, had been completed before my time. I read in a report of the warden's that its existence was due to his enterprise, and that he looked upon it as a worthy monument to his activity and intelligence. At every hundred yards or so of its length it was strengthened by a tower, containing accommodations for a guard, day and night, who watches with his rifle in hand, ready to shoot down any prisoner who seems to be acting suspiciously. No such shooting by a tower guard has as yet taken place to my knowledge, and none ever will on the pretext suggested; for the wall is absolutely unscalable; being five or six feet thick, it is impenetrable, and its foundations going down six or eight feet below ground, it cannot be beaten by tunneling; yet the towers and the guards are there.

But the point is that the wall itself is quite preposterous and unnecessary. Escape for prisoners was quite as difficult before it was built as after. There are a hundred guards in the penitentiary—one for every eight prisoners—all armed and eager for action; every article of a prisoner's clothing bears the prison mark; and the population outside the walls is penetrated with the idea that the apprehension of escaping prisoners is morally as well as financially profitable. Every prisoner knows that an attempt to escape would be suicide—"you might get hurt," as the prison rule book euphemistically phrases it—and they generally prefer suicide in some other form.

The wall, then, is superfluous; a fence of electrified wire would have served as good a purpose at about one-thousandth of one per cent. of the cost. And what did the wall cost? Let the prison archives declare. And then, perhaps, it would be interesting to investigate the discrepancy, if any exist, between the price which the United States paid for the work, and the actual cost of erecting it.

The wall was some time in the building, but it seems to have been the only thing built in the prison, work upon which was continuous and energetic. And it was a useless work, better left undone. The warden was proud of it, however, and there it stands.

As for the twenty-seven acre enclosure, in which the prison buildings are, which is—according to official prognostics—to be graded, leveled, drained, cultivated and planted till it looks like a private millionaire's park, it is a raw, rough unsightly waste of red clay and weeds, gouged out here and there with random and meaningless excavations, heaped up in other places with piles of earth; diversified in one quarter with some forlorn chicken coops and fences, made by the voluntary and unskilled labor of one of the convicts; and adjoining these, with the Tuberculosis Camp, a row of a dozen or more tents mounted on wooden platforms, with little flower beds in front and behind, and a pigeon house at one end. The only part of these grounds on which any visible thought and labor has been expended is the baseball diamond, adjoining the northeast corner of the wall. Here, the ground has been leveled and smoothed over a space sufficient to include the diamond itself, and a few yards on its south and north sides; beyond that is waste ground, and along the northern boundary is a parapet of earth five or six feet high, presumably made of the material scraped off the diamond. A ball vigorously struck by a batter either goes over this parapet into the swamp ground beyond, or sails away toward the Tuberculosis Camp, to be retrieved from the weeds and rubbish in that vicinity.

There are some forty score men behind the bars who would rejoice to be allowed to put these grounds in order, and who, under proper guidance, could do the job in a month. It would be a useful work, it would benefit the men both in the doing and in the accomplishment, and it would be an excellent advertisement of the penitentiary for the visitors who daily stroll about the enclosure; yet months and years go by and nothing whatever is changed.

One day, in midsummer, I saw a gang of negroes digging a trench in front of the southern gate, and cutting out a heavy growth of weeds and underbrush on the slope above. Drain pipes were carted out and dumped in the vicinity of the trench, and three or four of them were laid down in it. This went on for three or four days, the whole gang of ten or a dozen men not achieving in that period more than one or two capable Irish or Italian navvies would have done in the same time. Then the gang disappeared; the open trench and the pipes remained in statu quo, and the weeds gradually resumed their ancient sway. So far as I know, work has not been resumed there since.

It is a typical example; even such work as is done, is done in such a discontinuous and futile way that it is impossible for any one doing it to feel any interest in it, or stimulus to do it well. Time, toil and money are frittered away, with nothing definite or substantial to show for it. Intermittent and barren tasks are doubly onerous. The overseers may not be to blame; they may be incompetent; they may be hampered by the ignorance, incompetence or voluntary policy of the prison authorities; the consequences, at all events, are disastrous. If a handful of hearty, clever, driving men were given control of the various industrial operations in the prison, the results would seem magical.

There is dry rot or something worse everywhere; and it is difficult to believe that anything is gained by it either for the convict or for the country. It is to be sure punishment for the former, and a bad form of punishment, but it would be grotesque to assume that it is inflicted by design of our lawmakers. It cannot be that the government deliberately proposes to destroy convicts, mind and body; on the contrary, we must suppose that it wishes to reform them and render them again useful agents in the community. There is no way to do this better than to give them honest and productive work while in jail, so that they may acquire the habit of such work, and be encouraged to pursue it when they get out.

But in order to induce them to work economically, it is indispensable to give them continuous, intelligent, and manifestly useful work, and to pay them for doing it. It can be and it is done in some jails even now. Warden Fenton, of the Nebraska State Prison, has been putting his men on the honor system, and sending squads of them out to work on farms or for contractors, without guards or other precautions, sometimes for weeks at a time; all he asks of them is their promise to return when the job is done, which they uniformly do. And for this work, he causes them to be regularly paid; he retains their wages for them until the term of their imprisonment has expired, and then hands it back to them. The men are encouraged and inspirited by this treatment, and the neighbors among whom their work is done, seem disposed to take a helpful and cooperative view of the enterprise. If the neighbors—the community—loses nothing by this system, and if the convicts gain by it, why should it not be made the general practise? Convicts in Nebraska are the same sort of people as those in Atlanta.

Warden Fenton is progressive, but most other wardens are not, and there is no certainty that future wardens of Nebraska prisons will be; therefore he has not solved the problem for good and all; something more than the benevolent or wise ideas of any individual is needed for that. Mr. Fenton has absolute power—power, therefore, to give or withhold favors as he may choose. Enlightened legislation would deprive him and other wardens of absolute power, and make it mandatory to treat prisoners as he is doing it voluntarily.

Moreover, if men will go off and work without guards for three weeks at a stretch, and then return uncompelled to the prison, what is the use of making them return to the prison at all, or of having any prison for them to return to? Is not their conviction prison enough for most of them? And for such as prove incorrigible, or are criminal degenerates, ought not pathological care, instead of penal slavery, to be provided? Professor Marchiafava, physician to the Pope, said recently, "Eighty per cent of youthful criminals are children of drunkards." That is a serious indictment of alcohol; but it indicts no less the policy which punishes victims of disease as if they were deliberate and freely choosing malefactors.

But leaving sick folk out of the argument, I say that, in view of Mr. Fenton's experiment, and others like it, conviction is prison enough for most persons who have slipped a cog in their moral machinery. Means could readily be found to make such persons recognizable at need, and they would have as great a stimulus to render themselves free from that stigma as they have now, and far better opportunities for doing it. They would have their families with them, or within touch, and they would no longer be slaves; and if they had been slaves to their own passions and propensities, the expediency of breaking such chains would become far more obvious than it ever can be when a guard and a warden is always round the corner waiting to club or dungeon them for infringement of a whimsical prison rule. It does not help a man to his manhood to see his keepers acting constantly the part of tyrants and torturers.

This is perhaps a novel doctrine, because, as the editorial writer in the Saturday Evening Post remarked the other day, "The truth is that, at least two times out of three, we send a man to jail because we do not know anything rational to do with him, and will not take the pains to find out." We lack imagination to devise more effective treatment, and we are wonderfully ignorant as to what prison treatment really means. And this indictment lies not only against the public at large, but against the Department of Justice and the Congress, who pass their judgments and inflict their penalties without in the least understanding what they are doing to human bodies and souls like their own.

Jail is the conventional and time-honored nostrum, which is administered with a glow of moral self-esteem, and no more thought about it. When a murderer is sent to jail for life, or a bank burglar or white slaver or financial crook for his specified term, do we not sit back in our chairs and clear our throats with a self-satisfied "hem!" and "There's one scoundrel has got his deserts, anyway!" Had it been your brother, father, son, or yourself, would you employ such language? Would you not rather say, "If the whole truth were known, this could not have happened?" But every case is a special case to the victim. And which of us who has not been a convict in prison has the right to declare that prison is the "desert" of any man? We do not know what we are talking about.

I was looking out of the window of the Isolation Building one day, with the runner, Ned, beside me; I did my writing there, and he was assigned for duty to the same building. Ned, to whom I have already referred, was a thoughtful young man, and often said a word that went to the center of the subject. We had no business, of course, to be conversing together, but the guard was absent for the moment. We were watching the convicts form in the yard for the march to their several places of occupation; there was a double row of them down there in front of us being marshaled to go to the stone-shed, about fifty yards away. There they would remain till evening, chipping away at blocks of granite, and breathing the dust created by their labor.

The stone-shed men were mostly recruited from the so-called hard cases among the convicts; the work was hard, and rapid-fire guards were generally picked to take care of them. A man had been shot to death there about five years before by a guard, on no better grounds than that the man had not moved quickly enough in response to an order. No action against the guard was taken, and he is still on duty in the prison; perhaps he knows too much. The stone-shed men prepare the stone used in the construction of the buildings already mentioned; and they are also employed at times, by no regulation to be found in any of the books, to do odd jobs for members of the prison force; as when, for example, they were required to turn out a monument for the wife or other relative of a guard who had died, and for whom he was unable to provide a suitable memorial at his own expense. For whatever purpose the stone work is done, legitimate or illegitimate, the workers are not enthusiastic about it, and probably not many of them will live long enough, at least in prison, to see their handiwork in practical use.

Arrayed near them was another file, destined to work on the grounds belonging to the prison outside the warden's famous wall, where turnips, potatoes, corn and other vegetables are grown. The vegetables grow—it can hardly be said that they are cultivated; I don't know what a New York market gardener would say to them. They grow, and in due season some of them appear on the prison table; others do not appear, but whether they are left to rot in the ground, or are put to a more remunerative use, I do not personally know. There is no great enthusiasm among the gardeners, either.

Suddenly, Ned groaned out, "Oh, the aimlessness of it! Why don't you write a piece in our paper about the aimlessness of prison work? Aimless—that's what it is! How can a fellow feel interested in what he's doing, when he never knows what he's doing it for, or what becomes of it when it's done—let alone that he isn't paid for it? Aimlessness—that's what we get here in prison, and that's all we learn here. Did you ever think what a prison would be if there was any common sense aim in anything? Those fellows could make this place the finest thing you could imagine, if they were taken hold of by somebody with common sense, and put on jobs that had any sense in them. But they are kept dawdling around, and never know where they're at. It kills 'em—that's what it does! You'd think a criminal would be taught anything but aimlessness; it was aimlessness that got him here in the first place, nine times out of ten.

"Why, take what goes on in the printing office that you were assigned to, for instance," he went on, with a sidelong grin at me. "You have a month to get out the paper, four to six pages large quarto. How long would it take to do that stunt in New York?"