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 Morris and 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!
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.”
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 been some 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 poor _misérables_ were 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, there was 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.