XXI
It was our interest in the disowned, the outcast, the poor, and the criminal that drew us first together; that and the fact that we are gradually assuming the same attitude toward life. He was full of Tolstoy at that time, and we could talk of the great Russian, and I could introduce him to the other great Russians. He was then a little past fifty, and had just made the astounding discovery that there was such a thing as literature in the world: he had been so busy working all his life that he had never had time to read, and the whole world of letters burst upon his vision all suddenly, and the glorious prospect fairly intoxicated him, so that he stood like stout Cortez, though not so silent, upon a peak in Darien.
He was reading Mazzini also, and William Morrisand Emerson, who expressed his philosophy fully, or as fully as one man can express anything for another, and it was not long before Jones discovered an unusual facility for expressing himself, both with his voice and with his pen. The letters he wrote to the men in his shops—putting them in their pay-envelopes—are models of simplicity and sincerity, which show a genuine culture and have that beauty which is the despair of conscious art.[A]He had just learned of Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and he committed it to memory, or got it into his memory somehow, so that he would recite stanzas of it to anyone. He read Burns, too, with avidity, and I can see him now standing on the platform in one of his meetings, snapping his fingers as he recited:
A fig for those by law protected!Liberty’s a glorious feast!
A fig for those by law protected!Liberty’s a glorious feast!
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty’s a glorious feast!
But it was Walt Whitman whom he loved most, and his copy of “Leaves of Grass” was underscored in heavy lines with a red pencil until nearly every striking passage in the whole work had become a rubric. When anything struck him, he would have to come and tell me of it; sometimes he would not wait, but would call me up on the telephone and read it to me. I remember that occasion when his voice, over the wire, said:
“Listen to this [and he read]:
“The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair, redeeming sins past and to come,Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery.”
“The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair, redeeming sins past and to come,Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery.”
“The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair, redeeming sins past and to come,
Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery.”
Then he laughed, and his chuckle died away on the wire. That expressed him; that was exactly what he would have done for a brother, exactly what he did do for many a brother, since he regarded all men as his brothers, and treated them as such if they would let him. He was always going down to the city prisons, or to the workhouses, and talking to the poor devils there, quite as if he were one of them, which indeed he felt he was, and as all of us are, if we only knew it. And he was working all the time to get them out of prison, and finally he and I entered into a little compact by which he paid the expenses incident to their trials—the fees for stenographers and that sort of thing—if I would look after their cases. Hard as the work was, and sad as it was, and grievously as my law partners complained of the time it took, and of its probable effect on business (since no one wished to be known as a criminal lawyer!), it did pay in the satisfaction there was in doing a little to comfort and console—and, what was so much more, to compel in one city, at least, a discussion of the grounds and the purpose of our institutions. For instance, if some poor girl were arrested, and a jury trial were demanded for her, and her case were given all the care and attention it would have received had she beensome wealthy person, the police, when they found they could not convict, were apt to be a little more careful of the liberties of individuals: they began to have a little regard for human rights and for human life.
We completely broke up the old practice of arresting persons “on suspicion” and holding them at the will and pleasure of the police without any charge having been lodged against them; two or three trials before juries, the members of which could very easily be made to see, when it was pointed out to them a few times in the course of a three days’ trial, that there is nothing more absurd than that policemen should make criminals of people merely by suspecting them, and sending them to prison on that sole account, wrought a change. It annoyed the officials of course, because it interfered with their routine. It was no doubt exasperating to be compelled to stay in court two or three days and try some wretch according to the forms of law, just as if he were somebody of importance and consequence in the world, when they would so much rather have been out at the ball-game, or fishing, or playing pinochle in the guard-room at police headquarters with the detail that had been relieved. Jones managed to get himself fined for contempt one day, and he immediately turned the incident to his own advantage and made his point by drawing out his check-book with a flourish, writing his check for the amount of his fine, and declaring that this proved his contention that the only crime our civilization punishes is the crime of being poor.
But he was most in his element when the police judge was absent, as he was now and then. In that exigency the law gave Jones, as mayor, the power to appoint the acting police judge; and when Jones did not go down and sit as magistrate himself, he appointed me; and we always found some reason or other for letting all the culprits go. The foundations of society were shaken of course, and the editorials and sermons were heavy with all the predictions of disaster; one might have supposed that the whole wonderful and beautiful fabric of civilization which man had been so long in rearing was to fall forever into the awful abyss because a few miserable outcasts had not been put in prison. But nothing happened after all; the poormisérableswere back again in a few days, and made to resume their hopeless rounds through the prison doors; but the policemen of Toledo had their clubs taken away from them, and they became human, and learned to help people, and not to hurt them if they could avoid it; and that police judge who once fined Jones became in time one of the leaders in our city of the new social movement that has marked the last decade in America.
I learned to know a good many people in that underworld, many of whom were professed criminals, and there were some remarkable characters among them. I learned that, just as Jones had said, they were all people, just folks, and that they had so much more good than bad in them, that if some way could be devised whereby they might have a little better opportunity to develop the good, therewas hope for all of them. Of course, in any effort to help them,—and our efforts were not always perhaps wholly wise,—we encountered that most formidable and fundamental obstacle to prison reform, the desire in the human breast for revenge, the savage hatred which is perhaps some obscure instinct of protection against the anti-social members of society: it stands forever in the way of all prison reform, and of ameliorations of the lot of the poor. It is that which keeps the barbarity of capital punishment alive in the world; it is that which makes every prison in the land a hell, where from time to time the most revolting atrocities are practiced. Out of those experiences, out of the contemplation of the misery, the pathos, the hopelessness of the condition of those victims, I wrote “The Turn of the Balance.” I was very careful of my facts; I was purposely conservative, and, forgetting the advice of Goethe, softened things down; as for instance, where I had known of cases in which prisoners had been hung up in the bull-rings for thirty days,—being lowered to the floor each night of course,—I put it down as eight days, and so on. And the wise and virtuous judges and the preachers and the respectable people all said it was untrue, that such things could not be. Since then there have been investigations of prisons in most of the states, with revelations of conditions far worse than any I tried to portray. And such things have gone on, and are going on to-day; but nobody cares.