But I must not get away from my personal experiences in these
international statistics. Sometimes, when night overtakes us, we stop
and camp beside the road, and set about getting our supper of eggs and
bread and butter and cheese, or the fruits that are ripening all round
us. Since my experience with that pullet I go meekly mushrooming in
the fields and pastures; and when I have set the mushrooms stewing over
an open fire, Aristides makes the coffee, and in a little while we
have a banquet fit for kings--or for the poor things in every grade below
them that serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is
always water, for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the
mountains--there is not much rainfall--and carried in little concrete
channels along the road--side from village to village, something like
those conduits the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the
Maritime Alps to their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle
of it the whole night long, and day long, too, whenever you stop. After
supper we can read awhile by our electric lamp (we tap the current in the
telephone wires anywhere), or Aristides sacrifices himself to me in a
lesson of Altrurian grammar. Then we creep back into our van and fall
asleep with the Southern Cross glittering over our heads. It is perfectly
safe, though it was a long time before I could imagine the perfect safety
of it. In a country where there are no thieves, because a thief here
would not know what to do with his booty, we are secure from human
molestation, and the land has long been cleared of all sorts of wild
beasts, without being unpleasantly tamed. It is like England in that, and
yet it has a touch of the sylvan, which you feel nowhere as you do in our
dear New England hill country. There was one night, however, when we were
lured on and on, and did not stop to camp till fairly in the dusk. Then
we went to sleep without supper, for we had had rather a late lunch and
were not hungry, and about one o'clock in the morning I was awakened by
voices speaking Altrurian together. I recognized my husband's voice,
which is always so kind, but which seemed to have a peculiarly tender and
compassionate note in it now. The other was lower and of a sadness which
wrung my heart, though I did not know in the least what the person was
saying. The talk went on a long time, at first about some matter of
immediate interest, as I fancied, and then apparently it branched off
on some topic which seemed to concern the stranger, whoever he was. Then
it seemed to get more indistinct, as if the stranger were leaving us and
Aristides were going a little way with him. Presently I heard him coming
back, and he put his head in at the van curtains, as if to see whether I
was asleep.
“Well?” I said, and he said how sorry he was for having waked me. “Oh, I
don't mind,” I said. “Whom were you talking with? He had the saddest
voice I ever heard. What did he want?”
“Oh, it seems that we are not far from the ruins of one of the old
capitalistic cities, which have been left for a sort of warning against
the former conditions, and he wished to caution us against the malarial
influences from it. I think perhaps we had better push on a little way,
if you don't mind.”
The moon was shining clearly, and of course I did not mind, and Aristides
got his hand on the lever, and we were soon getting out of the dangerous
zone. “I think,” he said, “they ought to abolish that pest-hole. I doubt
if it serves any good purpose, now, though it has been useful in times
past as an object-lesson.”
“But who was your unknown friend?” I asked, a great deal more curious
about him than about the capitalistic ruin.
“Oh, just a poor murderer,” he answered easily, and I shuddered back:
“A murderer!”
“Yes. He killed his friend some fifteen years ago in a jealous rage, and
he is pursued by remorse that gives him no peace.”
“And is the remorse his only punishment?” I asked, rather indignantly.
“Isn't that enough? God seemed to think it was, in the case of the first
murderer, who killed his brother. All that he did to Cain was to set a
mark on him. But we have not felt sure that we have the right to do this.
We let God mark him, and He has done it with this man in the sorrow of
his face. I was rather glad you, couldn't see him, my dear. It is an
awful face.”
I confess that this sounded like mere sentimentalism to me, and I said,
“Really, Aristides, I can't follow you. How are innocent people to be
protected against this wretch, if he wanders about among them at will?”
“They are as safe from him as from any other man in Altruria. His case
was carefully looked into by the medical authorities, and it was decided
that he was perfectly sane, so that he could be safely left at large, to
expiate his misdeed in the only possible way that such a misdeed can be
expiated--by doing good to others. What would you have had us do with
him?”
The question rather staggered me, but I said, “He ought to have been
imprisoned at least a year for manslaughter.”
“Cain was not imprisoned an hour.”
“That was a very different thing. But suppose you let a man go at large
who has killed his friend in a jealous rage, what do you do with other
murderers?”
“In Altruria there can be no other murderers. People cannot kill here for
money, which prompts every other kind of murder in capitalistic
countries, as well as every other kind of crime. I know, my dear, that
this seems very strange to you, but you will accustom yourself to the
idea, and then you will see the reasonableness of the Altrurian plan. On
the whole, I am sorry you could not have seen that hapless man, and
heard him. He had a face like death--”
“And a voice like death, too!” I put in.
“You noticed that? He wanted to talk about his crime with me. He wants to
talk about it with any one who will listen to him. He is consumed with an
undying pity for the man he slew. That is the first thing, the only
thing, in his mind. If he could, I believe he would give his life for the
life he took at any moment. But you cannot recreate one life by
destroying another. There is no human means of ascertaining justice, but
we can always do mercy with divine omniscience.” As he spoke the sun
pierced the edge of the eastern horizon, and lit up the marble walls and
roofs of the Regionic capital which we were approaching.
At the meeting we had there in the afternoon, Aristides reported our
having been warned against our danger in the night by that murderer, and
public record of the fact was made. The Altrurians consider any sort of
punishment which is not expiation a far greater sin than the wrong it
visits, and altogether barren and useless. After the record in this case
had been made, the conference naturally turned upon what Aristides had
seen of the treatment of criminals in America, and when, he told of our
prisons, where people merely arrested and not yet openly accused are
kept, I did not know which way to look, for you know I am still an
American at heart, Dolly. Did you ever see the inside of one of our
police-stations at night? Or smell it? I did, once, when I went to give
bail for a wretched girl who had been my servant, and had gone wrong, but
had been arrested for theft, and I assure you that the sight and the
smell woke me in the night for a month afterwards, and I have never quite
ceased to dream about it.
The Altrurians listened in silence, and I hoped they could not realize
the facts, though the story was every word true; but what seemed to make
them the most indignant was the treatment of the families of the
prisoners in what we call our penitentiaries and reformatories. At first
they did not conceive of it, apparently, because it was so stupidly
barbarous; they have no patience with stupidity; and when Aristides had
carefully explained, it seemed as if they could not believe it. They
thought it right that the convicts should be made to work, but they could
not understand that the state really took away their wages, and left
their families to suffer for want of the support which it had deprived
them of. They said this was punishing the mothers and sisters, the wives
and children of the prisoners, and was like putting out the eyes of an
offender's innocent relatives as they had read was done in Oriental
countries. They asked if there was never any sort of protest against such
an atrocious perversion of justice, and when the question was put to me
I was obliged to own that I had never heard the system even criticised.
Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my own knowledge.