XXII
And yet somebody after all did care about all those miserable souls who are immured in the terrible prisons which society maintains as monuments to the strange and implacable hatred in the breast of mankind; perhaps, in the last chapter of these vagrant memories, I allowed to creep into my utterance some of the old bitterness which now and then would taint our efforts, do what we might. And that is not at all the note I would adopt, though it used at times to be very difficult not to do so; one cannot, day after day, beat against the old and solid and impregnable wall of human institutions without becoming sore and sick in one’s soul.
And there is no institution which society so cherishes as she does her penal institutions, and most sacrosanct of these are the ax, the guillotine, the garrote, the gibbet, the electric chair. We tried at each session of the legislature to secure the passage of a bill abolishing capital punishment, but the good people, those who felt that they held in their keeping the morals of the state, always opposed it and defeated it. Beloved and sacred institution! No wonder the ship-wrecked sailor, cast upon an unknown shore, on looking up and beholding a gallows, fell on his knees and said; “Thank God, I’m in a Christian land!”
Travelers visit prisons and places of execution, those historic spots where humanity made red blots on its pathway in the notion that it was doing justice,and always they sigh and shake their heads, beholding in those events only a supreme folly and a supreme cruelty.
All the executions, all the imprisonments of the past are seen to have been mistakes made by savages; there is not one for which to-day a word is uttered in excuse. All the Golgothas of the world have become Calvaries, where men go in pity and in tears in the hope that their regret may somehow work a retroactive expiation of the guilt of their cruel ancestors—and they rise from their knees and go forth and acquiesce in brutalities that are to-day different only in the slightest of degrees from those they bemoan.
And so all the other executions of death sentences, on subjects less distinguished, with no glimmer of the halo of romance, no meed of martyrdom to illumine them, are seen to have been huge and grotesque mistakes of a humanity that at times gives itself over to the elemental savage lust of the blood of its fellows.
I do not say, of course, that there was any similarity between the offenses of those whom Jones and I were concerned about in those days and those striking figures who illustrate the history of the world and mark the slow spiral path of the progress of mankind; these were the commonest of common criminals, poor, mistaken, misshapen beings, somehow marred in the making.
It was my lot to defend a number of those who had committed murders, some of them murders sofoul that there was nothing to say in their behalf. All one could say was in behalf of those whom one would save from committing another murder. But when you have come to know even a murderer, when day after day you have visited him in his cell, and have talked with him, and have seen him laugh and cry, and have had him tell you about his family, and that amazing complexity which he calls his life, when gradually you come to know him, no matter how undeserving he may be in the abstract, he undergoes a strange and subtle metamorphosis; slowly and gradually, without your being aware, he ceases to be a murderer, and becomes a human being, very much like all those about you. Thus, there is no such thing as a human being in the abstract; they are all thoroughly and essentially concrete.
I have wandered far in these speculations, but I hope I have not wandered too far to make it clear that Jones’s point of view was always and invariably the human point of view; he knew no such thing as murderers, or even criminals, or “good” people, or “bad” people, they were all to him men and, indeed, brothers. And if society did not care about them, except in its desire to make way with them, Jones did care, and there were others who cared; the poor cared, the working people cared,—though they might themselves at times give way to the same elemental social rage,—they always endorsed Jones’s leniency whenever they had the opportunity. They had this opportunity at the polls every two years, and they never failed him.
They did not fail him even in that last campaign of his, though every means known to man was tried to win them away from their peculiar allegiance. It was a strange campaign; I suppose there was never another like it in America. As I think of it there come back the recollections of those raw spring nights; we held our municipal elections in the spring in those days, that is, spring as we know it in the region of the Great Lakes. It is not so much spring as it is a final summing-up and recapitulation of winter, a coda to a monstrous meteorological concerto as doleful as the allegro lamentoso of Tschaikovsky’s “Sixth Symphony.” There is nowhere in the world, so far as I know, or care to know, such an abominable manifestation of the meanness of nature; it is meaner than the meanness of human nature, entailing a constant struggle with winds, a perpetual bending to gusts of snow that is rain, or a rain that is hail, with an east wind that blows persistently off Lake Erie for two months, with little stinging barbs of ice on its breath—and then, suddenly, it is summer without any gentle airs at all to introduce its heat.
Jones was not very well that spring; and his throaty ailment was the very one that should have been spared such dreadful exposures as he was subjected to in that campaign. It was in the days before motor cars, and he and I drove about every night from one meeting to another in a little buggy he had, drawn by an old white mare named Molly, whose shedding of her coat was the only vernal sign to be detected anywhere. But Jones was so fullof humor that he laughed at nearly everything—even his enemies, whom he never would call enemies. I can see him now—climbing down out of the buggy, carefully blanketing old Molly against the raw blasts, then brushing the white hairs from his front with his enormous hands, and running like a boy up the stairway to the dim little hall in the Polish quarter where the crowd had gathered. The men set up a shout when they saw him, and he leaped on the stage and, without waiting for the chairman to introduce him,—he scorned every convention that obtruded itself,—he leaned over the front of the platform and said:
“What is the Polish word for liberty?”
The crowd of Poles, huddling about a stove in the middle of the hall, their caps on, their pipes going furiously, their bodies covered with the strange garments they had brought with them across the sea, shouted in reply.
“Wolność!”
And Jones paused and listened, cocked his head, wrinkled his brows, and said:
“What was that? Say it again!”
Again they shouted it.
“Say it again—once more!” he demanded. And again they shouted it in a splendid chorus. And then——
“Well,” said Golden Rule Jones, “I can’t pronounce it, but it sounds good, and that is what we are after in this campaign.”
Now that I have written it down, I have a feeling that I have utterly failed to give an adequate senseof the entire spontaneity and simplicity with which this was done. It was, of course, tremendously effective as a bit of campaigning, but only because it was so wholly sincere. Five minutes later he was hotly debating with a working man who had interrupted him to accuse him of being unfair to union labor in his shops, and there was no coddling, no truckling, no effort to win or to please on his part, though he would take boundlessly patient pains to explain to anyone who really wanted to know anything about him or his official acts.
He was natural, simple and unspoiled, as naïve as a child, and “except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” He fully realized that the kingdom of heaven is within one’s self; he was not looking for it, or expecting it anywhere outside of himself, certainly he was not expecting it in a political campaign, or in the mere process of being elected to an office. He regarded his office, indeed, only as an opportunity to serve, and he had been in that office long enough to have lost any illusions he may ever have had concerning it; one term will suffice to teach a man that lesson, even though he seek the office again.
He was like an evangelist, in a way, and his meetings were in the broad sense religious, though he had long since left his church, not because its ministers were always condemning him, but for the same reasons that Tolstoy left his church. His evangel was that of liberty. He had written a number of little songs. One of them, set to the tune of an old hymn he had heard in Wales as a boy, had a nobleeffect when the crowd sang it. It was theGad im Deimle. His wife, who is an accomplished musician, had transposed its minors into majors, and in its strains, as they were sung by the men in his shops,—and there was singing for you!—or by the people in his political meetings, there was all the Welsh love of music, all the Welsh love of liberty, and a high and pure emotion in the chorus:
Ever growing, swiftly flowing,Like a mighty riverSweeping on from shore to shore,Love will rule this wide world o’er.
Ever growing, swiftly flowing,Like a mighty riverSweeping on from shore to shore,Love will rule this wide world o’er.
Ever growing, swiftly flowing,
Like a mighty river
Sweeping on from shore to shore,
Love will rule this wide world o’er.
It was his Welsh blood, this Celtic strain in him, that accounted for much that was in his temperament, his wit, his humor, his instinctive appreciation of art, his contempt for artificial distinctions, his love of liberty, his passionate democracy. Sitting one evening not long ago in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons I saw the great Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, saw him enter and take his seat on the government bench. And as I looked at him I was impressed by his resemblance to someone I had known; there was a strange, haunting likeness, not in any physical characteristic, though there was the same Welsh ruddiness, and the hair was something like—but when Mr. Lloyd George turned and whispered to the prime minister and smiled I started, and said to myself: “It is Jones!”