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 so foul 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 full of 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 sense of 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 noble effect when
the crowd sang it. It was the _Gad 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 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!”