_The Outcast_
The life of the underworld, of those thrown upon the scrap-heap of the
modern industrial machine; vivid and powerful passages portraying the
lives of tramps, criminals and prostitutes.
Not Guilty
BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD
(See page 66)
In defending the Bottom Dog I do not deal with hard science
only; but with the dearest faiths, the oldest wrongs and the
most awful relationships of the great human family, for whose
good I strive and to whose judgment I appeal. Knowing, as I do,
how the hard-working and hard-playing public shun laborious
thinking and serious writing, and how they hate to have their
ease disturbed or their prejudices handled rudely, I still make
bold to undertake this task, because of the vital nature of the
problems I shall probe.
The case for the Bottom Dog should touch the public heart
to the quick, for it affects the truth of our religions,
the justice of our laws and the destinies of our children
and our children's children. Much golden eloquence has been
squandered in praise of the successful and the good; much stern
condemnation has been vented upon the wicked. I venture now
to plead for those of our poor brothers and sisters who are
accursed of Christ and rejected of men.
Hitherto all the love, all the honors, all the applause of this
world, and all the rewards of heaven, have been lavished on the
fortunate and the strong; and the portion of the unfriended
Bottom Dog, in his adversity and weakness, has been curses,
blows, chains, the gallows and everlasting damnation. I shall
plead, then, for those who are loathed and tortured and branded
as the sinful and unclean; for those who have hated us and
wronged us, and have been wronged and hated by us. I shall
defend them for right's sake, for pity's sake and for the
benefit of society and the race. For these also are of our
flesh, these also have erred and gone astray, these also are
victims of an inscrutable and relentless Fate.
If it concerns us that the religions of the world are childish
dreams or nightmares; if it concerns us that our penal laws and
moral codes are survivals of barbarism and fear; if it concerns
us that our most cherished and venerable ideas of our relations
to God and to each other are illogical and savage, then the
case for the Bottom Dog concerns us nearly.
If it moves us to learn that disease may be prevented, that
ruin may be averted, that broken hearts and broken lives may
be made whole; if it inspires us to hear how beauty may be
conjured out of loathsomeness and glory out of shame; how
waste may be turned to wealth and death to life, and despair
to happiness, then the case for the Bottom Dog is a case to be
well and truly tried.
Moleskin Joe[A]
[A] By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.
(_From "Children of the Dead End"_)
BY PATRICK MACGILL
(See pages 32, 47)
'Twas towards the close of a fine day on the following summer
that we were at work in the dead end of a cutting, Moleskin and
I, when I, who had been musing on the quickly passing years,
turned to Moleskin and quoted a line from the Bible.
"Our years pass like a tale that is told," I said.
"Like a tale that is told damned bad," answered my mate,
picking stray crumbs of tobacco from his waistcoat pocket and
stuffing them into the heel of his pipe. "It's a strange world,
Flynn. Here today, gone tomorrow; always waiting for a good
time comin' and knowin' that it will never come. We work with
one mate this evenin', we beg for crumbs with another on the
mornin' after. It's a bad life, ours, and a poor one, when I
come to think of it, Flynn."
"It is all that," I assented heartily.
"Look at me!" said Joe, clenching his fists and squaring his
shoulders. "I must be close on forty years, maybe on the
graveyard side of it, for all I know. I've horsed it ever since
I can mind; I've worked like a mule for years, and what have I
to show for it all today, matey? Not the price of an ounce of
tobacco! A midsummer scarecrow wouldn't wear the duds that I've
to wrap around my hide! A cockle-picker that has no property
only when the tide is out is as rich as I am. Not the price of
an ounce of tobacco! There is something wrong with men like
us, surely, when we're treated like swine in a sty for all the
years of our life. It's not so bad here, but it's in the big
towns that a man can feel it most. No person cares for the
like of us, Flynn. I've worked nearly ev'rywhere; I've helped
to build bridges, dams, houses, ay, and towns! When they were
finished, what happened? Was it for us--the men who did the
buildin'--to live in the homes that we built, or walk through
the streets that we laid down? No earthly chance of that! It
was always, 'Slide! we don't need you any more,' and then a man
like me, as helped to build a thousand houses big as castles,
was hellish glad to get the shelter of a ten-acre field and
a shut-gate between me and the winds of night. I've spent all
my money, have I? It's bloomin' easy to spend all that fellows
like us can earn. When I was in London I saw a lady spend as
much on fur to decorate her carcase with as would keep me in
beer and tobacco for all the rest of my life. And that same
lady would decorate a dog in ribbons and fol-the-dols, and she
wouldn't give me the smell of a crust when I asked her for a
mouthful of bread. What could you expect from a woman who wears
the furry hide of some animal round her neck, anyhow? We are
not thought as much of as dogs, Flynn. By God! them rich buckos
do eat an awful lot. Many a time I crept up to a window just to
see them gorgin' themselves."
"I have looked in at windows too," I said.
"Most men do," answered Joe. "You've heard of old Moses goin'
up the hill to have a bit peep at the Promist Land. He was just
like me and you, Flynn, wantin' to have a peep at the things
which he'd never lay his claws on."
"Those women who sit half-naked at the table have big
appetites," I said.
"They're all gab and guts, like young crows," said Moleskin.
"And they think more of their dogs than they do of men like me
and you. I'm an Antichrist!"
"A what?"
"One of them sort of fellows as throws bombs at kings."
"You mean an Anarchist."
"Well, whatever they are, I'm one. What is the good of kings,
of fine-feathered ladies, of churches, of anything in the
country, to men like me and you?"
The Carter and the Carpenter[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See page 62)
The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved
upper lip, I should have taken in the United States for
anything from a master workman to a well-to-do farmer. The
Carpenter--well, I should have taken him for a carpenter. He
looked it, lean and wiry, with shrewd, observant eyes, and
hands that had grown twisted to the handles of tools through
forty-seven years' work at the trade. The chief difficulty with
these men was that they were old, and that their children,
instead of growing up to take care of them, had died. Their
years had told on them, and they had been forced out of the
whirl of industry by the younger and stronger competitors who
had taken their places.
These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel
Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse. Not much of
a show, they thought, but to chance it was all that remained
to us. It was Poplar, or the streets and night. Both men were
anxious for a bed, for they were "about gone," as they phrased
it. The Carter, fifty-eight years of age, had spent the last
three nights without shelter or sleep, while the Carpenter,
sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.
But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white
beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you
know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a
weary night on London's streets? Believe me, you would think
a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled
into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud
with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that
you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a
bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman
would rouse you and gruffly order you to "move on." You may
rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but
if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body
through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness,
seek some forlorn alley, or dark passage-way, and lie down, the
omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is
his business to rout you out. It is a law of the powers that be
that you shall be routed out.
But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you
home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the
story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would
grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would
become an Odyssey and you a Homer.
Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse
with me. And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and
women, in London Town this night. Please don't remember it as
you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be you may
not rest so well as usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy,
and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the
dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search
for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again,
and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full
of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?
I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter.
Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East
London, and there are tens of thousands of people abroad on it.
I tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall
describe in the next paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and
when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them,
cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in a strange
and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and
succeeded in making them believe, they took me for a "seafaring
man," who had spent his money in riotous living, lost his
clothes (no unusual occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and
was temporarily broke while looking for a ship. This accounted
for my ignorance of English ways in general and casual wards in
particular, and my curiosity concerning the same.
The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he
told me that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter,
lean and hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping
mournfully in the breeze, swung on in a lone and tireless
stride which reminded me strongly of the plains wolf or coyote.
Both kept their eyes upon the pavement as they walked and
talked, and every now and then one or the other would stoop
and pick something up, never missing his stride the while. I
thought it was cigar and cigarette stumps they were collecting,
and for some time took no notice. Then I did notice.
_From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking
up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they
were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked
between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up
stray crumbs of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black
and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these
things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them,
and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in
the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart
of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world
has ever seen._
These two men talked. They were not fools, they were merely
old. And, naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal,
they talked of bloody revolution. They talked as anarchists,
fanatics, and madmen would talk. And who shall blame them?
In spite of my three good meals that day, and the snug bed I
could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and my
evolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis
of things--in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk
rot with them or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not of their sort
are revolutions bred. And when they are dead and dust, which
will be shortly, other fools will talk bloody revolution as
they gather offal from the spittle-drenched sidewalk along Mile
End Road to Poplar Workhouse.
BY HORACE GREELEY.
(American editor, 1811-1872; prominent abolitionist)
Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in
gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind
barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a
winter night.
The Hunt for the Job
(_From "Pay Envelopes"_)
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
(See page 45)
The Hunt began early next morning--the Hunt for the Job. The
hunter, however, is really the hunted. Now and then he bares
his skin to the unthinking blows of the world, and runs off to
hide himself in the crowd. You may see him bobbing along the
turbulent man-currents of Broadway, a tide-tossed derelict in
the thousand-foot shadows of the sky-scrapers. The mob about
him is lusty with purpose, each unit making his appointed
place, the morning rush to work bearing the stenographer to
her machine, the broker to his ticker, the ironworker to his
sky-dangling beam. In the mighty machine of the city each
has his place, each is provided for, each gets the glow of
sharing in the world's work. The morning rush, splashed at
street crossings with the gold of the Eastern sun, is rippled
with fresh eyes and busy lips. They are all in the machine.
But our young man crouching in a corner of the crowded car
is not of these; slinking down Broadway he is aware that the
machine has thrown him out and he cannot get in. He is an exile
in the midst of his own people. The sense of loneliness and
inferiority eats the heart out of the breast; the good of life
is gone; the blackness soaks across the city and into his home,
his love, his soul.
Some go bitter and are for throwing bombs; some despair and
are for wiping themselves away; some--the rank and file--are
for fighting to the last ditch. Peter pendulated between all
three of these moods. In ordinary times he would have been
all fight; in these hard times, drenched with the broadcast
hopelessness of men, he knew he was foredoomed to defeat. Only
a miracle could save him.
Trudging up Seventy-ninth Street to Third Avenue, fresh with
Annie's kiss and the baby's pranks, he had the last bit of
daring dashed out of him by a strange throng of men. Before
a small Hebrew synagogue, packed in the deep area were forty
unemployed workers, jammed crowd-thick against the windows and
gate. It was fresh weather, not cold, yet the men shivered.
Their bodies had for long been unwarmed by sufficient food
or clothing; there was a grayness about them as of famished
wolves; their lips and fingers were blue; they were unshaved
and frowzy with some vile sleeping place. Hard times had
blotched the city with a myriad of such groups. And as Peter
stopped and imagined himself driven at last among them, he
saw a burly fellow emerge from the house and begin handing
out charity bowls of hot coffee and charity bread. Peter,
independent American workman, was stung at the sight; the souls
of these workers were somehow being outraged; they were eating
out of the hands of the comfortable, like so many gutter dogs.
The rest of the morning Peter dared now and then to present
himself at an office to ask work. At some places he tried
boldness, at others meekness, and at last he begged, "For
God's sake, I have a wife and baby--" He met with various
receptions at the hands of clerks, office boys, and bosses. A
few were sorry, some turned their backs, the rest hurried him
out. Each refusal, each "not wanted in the scheme of things,"
shot him out into the streets, stripped of another bit of
self-reliance. In spite of himself, he began to feel his poor
appearance, his drooping lip, his broken purpose. He was a
failure and the world could not use him. He hardly dared to
look a man in the eyes, to lift his voice above a whisper, to
make a demand, to dare a refusal. He slunk home at last like a
cowed and beaten animal.
The Unemployable
(_From "The Workers"_)
BY WALTER A. WYCKOFF
(A professor in Princeton University who went out and lived
for long periods as a laborer, in order to know the facts of
industry at first hand)
Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of
the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective
labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands
were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity.
One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I
overheard, early one morning, at a factory gate, an interview
between a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant
for a Russian Jew, who had at home an old mother and a wife
and two young children to support. He had had intermittent
employment throughout the winter in a sweater's den, barely
enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the
cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.
The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of
unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the
man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his
coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with
the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin
stretched over sinews and the outline of the bones. Pitiful
beyond words were his efforts to give a semblance of strength
to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of
the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a
contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned
down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with
a despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no
mortal tongue can speak.
The Bread Line
BY BERTON BRALEY
(Contemporary American poet)
Well, here they are--they stand and stamp and shiver
Waiting their food from some kind stranger hand,
Their weary limbs with eagerness a-quiver
Hungry and heartsick in a bounteous land.
"Beggars and bums?" Perhaps, and largely worthless.
Shaky with drink, unlovely, craven, low,
With obscene tongues and hollow laughter mirthless;
But who shall give them scorn for being so?
Yes, here they are--with gaunt and pallid faces,
With limbs ill-clad and fingers stiff and blued,
Shuffling and stamping on their pavement places,
Waiting and watching for their bit of food.
We boast of vast achievements and of power,
Of human progress knowing no defeat,
Of strange new marvels every day and hour--
And here's the bread line in the wintry street!
Ten thousand years of war and peace and glory,
Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,
Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams;
Ten thousand years replete with every wonder,
Of empires risen and of empires dead;
Yet still, while wasters roll in swollen plunder,
These broken men must stand in line--for bread!
The Unemployed Problem
(_From "Past and Present"_)
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74)
And truly this first practical form of the Sphinx-question,
inarticulately and so audibly put there, is one of the most
impressive ever asked in the world. "Behold us here, so many
thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every
hour. We are right willing and able to work; and on the Planet
Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many.
We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead
us,--by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of
Time? Or if you declare that you cannot lead us? And expect
that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner
perish of starvation? What is it you expect of us? What is it
you mean to do with us?" This question, I say, has been put in
the hearing of all Britain; and will be again put, and ever
again, till some answer be given it.
An Answer
BY WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
(Ex-president of the United States; born 1857)
"What is a man to do who is starving, and cannot find work?"
"God knows."
The Parish Workhouse
BY GEORGE CRABBE
(See page 29)
Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapors flagging play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and--far the happiest they!--
The moping idiot and the madman gay.
Here too the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man:
Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide,
And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride imbitters what it can't deny.
Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who press the downy couch while slaves advance
With timid eye, to read the distant glance;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;
Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain and that alone can cure:
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would ye bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?
BY KENKŌ HOSHI
(Japanese Buddhist priest of the Fourteenth Century)
It is desirable for a ruler that no man should suffer from cold
and hunger under his rule. Man cannot maintain his standard of
morals when he has no ordinary means of living.
The Bread of Affliction
(_From "Children of the Ghetto"_)
BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL
(English poet and novelist, born 1864; has written with
tenderness and charm of the struggles of Judaism in contact
with modern commercialism)
At half-past five the stable-doors were thrown open, and
the crowd pressed through a long, narrow white-washed stone
corridor into a barn-like compartment, with a white-washed
ceiling traversed by wooden beams. Within this compartment,
and leaving but a narrow circumscribing border, was a sort
of cattle-pen, into which the paupers crushed, awaiting amid
discomfort and universal jabber the divine moment. The single
jet of gas-light depending from the ceiling flared upon the
strange simian faces, and touched them into a grotesque
picturesqueness that would have delighted Doré.
They felt hungry, these picturesque people; their near and
dear ones were hungering at home. Voluptuously savoring
in imagination the operation of the soup, they forgot its
operation as a dole in aid of wages; were unconscious of the
grave economical possibilities of pauperization and the rest,
and quite willing to swallow their independence with the soup.
Even Esther, who had read much, and was sensitive, accepted
unquestioningly the theory of the universe that was held by
most people about her, that human beings were distinguished
from animals in having to toil terribly for a meagre crust,
but that their lot was lightened by the existence of a small
and semi-divine class called _Takeefim_, or rich people, who
gave away what they didn't want. How these rich people came
to be, Esther did not inquire; they were as much a part of the
constitution of things as clouds and horses. The semi-celestial
variety was rarely to be met with. It lived far away from
the Ghetto, and a small family of it was said to occupy a
whole house. Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or
impressive broad-cloth, and radiating an indefinable aroma of
super-humanity, sometimes came to the school, preceded by the
beaming Head Mistress; and then all the little girls rose and
curtseyed, and the best of them, passing as average members
of the class, astonished the semi-divine persons by their
intimate acquaintance with the topography of the Pyrenees and
the disagreements of Saul and David, the intercourse of the two
species ending in effusive smiles and general satisfaction. But
the dullest of the girls was alive to the comedy, and had a
good-humored contempt for the unworldliness of the semi-divine
persons, who spoke to them as if they were not going to
recommence squabbling, and pulling one another's hair, and
copying one another's sums, and stealing one another's needles,
the moment the semi-celestial backs were turned.
[Illustration: WITHOUT A KENNEL
RYAN WALKER
(_American Socialist cartoonist, born 1870_)]
[Illustration: THE WHITE SLAVE
ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE
(_American sculptor, born 1878_)]
No. 5 John Street
BY RICHARD WHITEING
(English author and journalist, born 1840. The volume here
quoted is one of the most amazing pictures of slum-life ever
penned)
After midnight the gangs return in carousal from the gin shops,
the more thoughtful of them with stored liquor for the morning
draft. Now it is three stages of man--no more: man gushing,
confiding, uplifted, as he feels the effect of the lighter
fumes; disputatious, quarrelsome, as the heavier mount in a
second brew of hell; raging with wrath and hate, as the very
dregs send their emanations to the tortured brain.
The embrace, the wrangle, and the blow--this is the order
of succession. Till one--to mark it by the clock--we sing,
"'Art to 'art an' 'and to 'and." At about one forty-five you
may expect the tribal row between the gangs, who prey on one
another for recreation, and on society for a living. Our brutes
read the current gospel of the survival of the fittest in
their own way, and they dimly apprehend that mankind is still
organized as a predatory horde. The ever-open door brings us
much trouble from the outside. The unlighted staircase is a
place of rendezvous, and, not unfrequently, of deadly quarrel,
in undertones of concentrated fury, between wretches who seek
seclusion for the work of manslaughter. Our latest returning
inmate, the other night, stumbled over the body of a woman
not known at No. 5. She had been kicked to death within sight
and sound of lodgers who, believing it to be a matrimonial
difference, held interference to be no business of theirs.
The first thud of war between the "Hooligans" is generally for
two sharp. The seconds set to, along with their principals,
as in the older duel. For mark that in most things we are as
our betters were just so many centuries ago, and are simply
belated with our flint age. And now our shapelier waves of
sound break into a mere foam of oath and shriek. At times there
is an interval of silence more awful than the tumult; and you
may know that the knife is at its silent work, and that the
whole meaner conflict is suspended for an episode of tragedy.
If it is a hospital case, it closes the celebration. If it is
not, the entertainment probably dies out in a slanging match
between two of the fair; and the unnamable in invective and
vituperation rises, as in blackest vapor, from our pit to the
sky. At this, every room that holds a remnant of decency closes
its window, and all withdraw, except, perhaps, the little boys
and girls, who are beginning to pair according to the laws of
the ooze and of the slime....
Night in the Slums[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See pages 62, 125)
I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my
"seafaring" clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for
the creatures of prey that prowled up and down. At times,
between keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily,
gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of their hands,
of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a
gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small,
ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no
abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited,
rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men
must have exhibited. But there was strength in those meagre
bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and tear
and gripe and rend. When they spring upon their human prey they
are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body
till the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor
sentiment, and they will kill for half a sovereign, without
fear or favor....
The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions
of the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that
they exist. But they are here, alive, very much alive in their
jungle. And woe the day when England is fighting in her last
trench, and her able-bodied men are on the firing line! For
on that day they will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and
the people of the West End will see them, as the dear soft
aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another,
"Whence come they?" "Are they men?"
But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie.
They were only here and there, lurking in dark courts and
passing like grey shadows along the walls; but the women from
whose rotten loins they spring were everywhere. They whined
insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for pennies, and
worse. They held carouse in every boozing den, slatternly,
unkempt, bleary-eyed, and tousled, leering and gibbering,
overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in
debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably
repulsive, fearful to look upon.
And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and
twisted monstrosities that shouldered me on every side,
inconceivable types of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society,
the perambulating carcasses, the living deaths--women, blasted
by disease and drink till their shame brought not tuppence
in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by
hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their faces
in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling
like apes, dying with every step they took and every breath
they drew. And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty,
with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat,
who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift
fall. And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or
seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who
sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and
watched it all....
The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised
and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny
of prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and
children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in
brief, the prostitution of labor. If this is the best that
civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and
naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness
and desert, of the cave and the squatting place, than to be a
people of the machine and the Abyss.
A Night's Lodging
BY MAXIM GORKY
(A true voice of the Russian masses, born 1868; by turns peddler,
scullery-boy, baker's assistant and tramp, he became all at once the
most widely known of Russian writers. In this play he has portrayed
the misery of the outcasts of his country. The scene is in the cellar
of an inn, the haunt of thieves and tramps. Luka, the aged pilgrim, is
talking to a young girl)
LUKA:--Treat everyone with friendliness--injure no one.
NATASHA:--How good you are, grandfather! How is it that you are
so good?
LUKA:--I am good, you say. Nyah--if it is true, all right. But
you see, my girl--there must be some one to be good. We must
have pity on mankind. Christ, remember, had pity for us all and
so taught us. Have pity when there is still time, believe me,
that is right. I was once, for example, employed as a watchman,
at a country place which belonged to an engineer, not far from
the city of Tomsk, in Siberia. The house stood in the middle
of the forest, an out-of-the-way location; and it was winter
and I was all alone in the country house. It was beautiful
there--magnificent! And once--I heard them scrambling up!
NATASHA:--Thieves?
LUKA:--Yes. They crept higher, and I took my rifle and went
outside. I looked up--two men, opening a window, and so busy
that they did not see anything of me at all. I cried to them:
Hey, there, get out of that! And would you think it, they fell
on me with a hand ax! I warned them. Halt, I cried, or else I
fire! Then I aimed first at one and then at the other. They
fell on their knees saying, Pardon us! I was pretty hot--on
account of the hand ax, you remember. You devils, I cried, I
told you to clear out and you didn't! And now, I said, one of
you go into the brush and get a switch. It was done. And now,
I commanded, one of you stretch out on the ground, and the
other thrash him. And so they whipped each other at my command.
And when they had each had a sound beating, they said to me:
Grandfather, said they, for the sake of Christ give us a piece
of bread. We haven't a bite in our bodies. They, my daughter,
were the thieves who had fallen upon me with the hand ax.
Yes, they were a pair of splendid fellows. I said to them, If
you had asked for bread! Then they answered: We had gotten
past that. We had asked and asked, and nobody would give us
anything. Endurance was worn out. Nyah--and so they remained
with me the whole winter. One of them, Stephen by name, liked
to take the rifle and go into the woods. And the other,
Jakoff, was constantly ill, always coughing. The three of us
watched the place, and when spring came, they said, Farewell,
grandfather, and went away--to Russia.
NATASHA:--Were they convicts, escaping?
LUKA:--They were fugitives--they had left their colony. A pair
of splendid fellows. If I had not had pity on them--who knows
what would have happened? They might have killed me. Then they
would be taken to court again, put in prison, sent back to
Siberia--why all that? You can learn nothing good in prison,
nor in Siberia. But a man, what can he not learn!
The Menagerie
(_Night in a County Workhouse_)
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,
Come from your couches soft, your perfumed halls,
Come watch with me throughout the weary hours.
Here are there sounds to thrill your jaded nerves,
Such as the cave-men, your forefathers, heard,
Crouching in forests of primeval night;
Here tier on tier in steel-barred cages pent
The beasts ye breed and hunt throughout the world.
Hark to that snore--some beast that slumbers deep;
Hark to that roar--some beast that dreams of blood;
Hark to that moan--some beast that wakes and weeps;
And then in sudden stillness mark the sound--
Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide!
Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,
Come keep the watch with me; this show is yours.
Behold the source of all your joy and pride,
The beasts ye harness fast and set to draw
The chariots of your pageantry and pomp!
It is their blood ye shed to make your feasts,
It is their treadmill that moves all your world.
Come gather now, and think how it will be
When God shall send his flaming angel down
And break these bars--so hath he done of yore,
So doeth he to lords and ladies grand--
And loose these beasts to raven in your streets!
A Sentiment on Social Reform
BY EUGENE V. DEBS
(American locomotive engineer; born 1855; president of his
union, and later the best known of American Socialist lecturers)
While there is a lower class, I am in it.
While there is a criminal element, I am of it.
While there is a soul in jail, I am not free.
The "Solitary"
(_From "My Life in Prison"_)
BY DONALD LOWRIE
(The writer of this picture of prison life, after serving a
sentence of fifteen years in San Quentin, has become one of the
leaders in the prison reform movement in California)
He was a thin young man of medium height, with long, straggly
blonde hair and beard. He was garbed in a ragged suit of dirty
stripes. His steel-gray eyes blinked as though the light hurt
them, and yet they were very alert, and there was a defiance,
an indomitableness in their depths. They protruded slightly,
as the eyes of persons who have suffered so frequently do.
The lines radiating from the corners bespoke mental as well
as physical distress, as did the spasmodic twitching of his
mouth. His skin was akin to the color of a thirsty road and
his garments looked as though he had not had them off for
months--the knees and elbows bulged and the frayed edges of the
coat curled under. I was conscious of a warring within me. I
had not yet learned who he was, and still I knew I was gazing
at a human creature who had been through hell....
"Treat Morrell right," admonished the lieutenant as he withdrew
from the room and left us together.
Morrell! The notorious "Ed" Morrell, about whom I had heard so
much, and who had been confined in the "incorrigibles" for five
years!
The majority of the prisoners, as well as the freemen, believed
him innocent of the offence with which he had been charged and
for which he had been subjected to such awful punishment. So
this man was Ed Morrell! No wonder I had been agitated....
He arose from the chair and stood dejectedly while I took the
necessary measurements, and then I led the way to the back
room, where the bathtub was located. I started to return to
the front room for the purpose of marking his clothes, but he
stopped me.
"Wait a minute," he urged. "Wait and see what a man looks like
after five years in hell. I was a husky when I went up there,
hard as nails and full of red blood, but look at me now."
While speaking, he had dropped off the outer rags, and a
moment after stood nude beside the tub of warm water. The
enormity of what he had suffered could not have been more
forcibly demonstrated. His limbs were horribly emaciated, the
knee, elbow, and shoulder bones stood out like huge knots
through the drawn and yellow skin, while his ribs reminded
me of the carcass of a sheep hanging in front of a butcher's
establishment. The hollows between them were deep and dark.
I thought of the picture I had seen of the famine-stricken
wretches of India....
"What are those scars on your back?" I asked as he sank onto
his knees in the water.
"Scars," he laughed, sardonically. "Scars? Those ain't scars.
They're only the marks where the devil prodded me. I was in the
jacket, cinched up so that I was breathing from my throat when
he came and tried to make me 'come through,' and when I sneered
at him he kicked me over the kidneys. I don't know how many
times he kicked; the first kick took my breath away and I saw
black, but after they took me out of the sack I couldn't get
up, and I had running sores down here for months afterwards.
I ain't right down there now; I've got a bad rupture, and
sometimes it feels as if there was a knife being twisted around
inside of me. It wouldn't be so bad if they'd got me right, but
to give a man a deal like that dead wrong is hell, let me tell
you...."
As we stepped into the barber shop there was a noticeable air
of expectancy. The word had passed through the prison that the
new warden had released "Ed" Morrell from "solitary." All but
one of the half dozen barbers were strangers to Morrell. They
had been committed to the prison after his siege of solitary
confinement had begun. The one exception was old Frank, a lifer
with twenty years' service behind him....
He took a step backward and a hush fell over the little group.
"With all due respect, Ed, you're the finest living picture of
Jesus Christ that I've ever seen, so help me God. And, Ed," he
added, hastily, his voice breaking, "we're all Jesus Christs,
if we'd only remember it."
Prisons
BY EMMA GOLDMAN
(Anarchist lecturer and writer; born in Russia, 1869)
Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world
an emaciated, deformed, will-less shipwrecked crew of humanity,
with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed,
all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but
hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink
back into crime as the only possibility of existence. It is
not at all an unusual thing to find men and women who have
spent half their lives--nay, almost their entire existence--in
prison. I know a woman on Blackwell's Island, who has been in
and out thirty-eight times; and through a friend I learn that
a young boy of seventeen, whom he had nursed and cared for in
the Pittsburgh penitentiary, had never known the meaning of
liberty. From the reformatory to the penitentiary had been
the path of this boy's life, until, broken in body, he died
a victim of social revenge. These personal experiences are
substantiated by extensive data giving overwhelming proof of
the futility of prisons as a means of deterrence or reform.
The Prison System
(_From "Resurrection"_)
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110)
"It is just as if a problem had been set: to find the best,
the surest means, of depraving the greatest number of people!"
thought Nehlúdof, while getting an insight into the deeds that
were being done in the prisons and halting-stations. Every year
hundreds of thousands were brought to the highest pitch of
depravity, and when completely depraved they were liberated to
spread broadcast the moral disease they had caught in prison.
In the prisons of Tumén, Ekáterinburg, Tomsk, and at the
halting-stations, Nehlúdof saw how successfully the object
society seemed to have set itself was attained. Ordinary simple
men holding the Russian peasant social and Christian morality
lost this conception, and formed a new, prison, one founded
chiefly on the idea that any outrage to or violation of human
beings is justifiable, if it seems profitable. After living in
prison these people became conscious with the whole of their
being that, judging by what was happening to themselves, all
those moral laws of respect and sympathy for others which
the Church and the moral teachers preach, were set aside in
real life, and that therefore they, too, need not keep these
laws. Nehlúdof noticed this effect of prison life in all the
prisoners he knew. He learnt, during his journey, that tramps
who escape into the marshes will persuade comrades to escape
with them, and will then kill them and feed on their flesh.
He saw a living man who was accused of this, and acknowledged
the act. And the most terrible thing was, that this was
not a solitary case of cannibalism, but that the thing was
continually recurring.
Only by a special cultivation of vice such as was carried
on in these establishments, could a Russian be brought to
the state of these tramps, who excelled Nietzsche's newest
teaching, holding everything allowable and nothing forbidden,
and spreading this teaching, first among the convicts and then
among the people in general.
The only explanation of what was being done was that it aimed
at the prevention of crime, at inspiring awe, at correcting
offenders, and at dealing out to them "lawful vengeance," as
the books said. But in reality nothing in the least resembling
these results came to pass. Instead of vice being put a stop
to, it only spread farther; instead of being frightened, the
criminals were encouraged (many a tramp returned to prison of
his own free will); instead of correction, every kind of vice
was systematically instilled; while the desire for vengeance,
far from being weakened by the measures of Government, was
instilled into the people to whom it was not natural.
"Then why is it done?" Nehlúdof asked himself, and could find
no answer.
FROM THE PSALMS
He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary ... to
hear the sighing of the prisoner; to loose those that are
appointed to death.
Ballade of Misery and Iron
BY GEORGE CARTER
(Some years ago the _Century Magazine_ received several poems from
an inmate of the State penitentiary of Minnesota. Upon investigation
it was found that the poet, a young Englishman, had been driven to
stealing by starvation. Subsequently his pardon was procured)
Haggard faces and trembling knees,
Eyes that shine with a weakling's hate,
Lips that mutter their blasphemies,
Murderous hearts that darkly wait:
These are they who were men of late,
Fit to hold a plow or a sword.
If a prayer this wall may penetrate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
Poets sing of life at the lees
In tender verses and delicate;
Of tears and manifold agonies--
Little they know of what they prate.
Out of this silence, passionate
Sounds a deeper, a wilder chord.
If sound be heard through the narrow grate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
Hark, that wail of the distant breeze,
Piercing ever the close-barred gate,
Fraught with torturing memories
Of eyes that kindle and lips that mate.
Ah, by the loved ones desolate,
Whose anguish never can pen record,
If thou be truly compassionate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
L'ENVOI
These are pawns that the hand of Fate
Careless sweeps from the checker-board.
Thou that know'st if the game be straight,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
BY KENKŌ HOSHI
(See page 135)
So long as people, being ill-governed, suffer from hunger,
criminals will never disappear. It is extremely unkind to
punish those who, being sufferers from hunger, are compelled to
violate laws.
The Red Robe
BY EUGÈNE BRIEUX
(French dramatist, born 1858; author of a series of powerful dramas
exposing the sources of corruption in French social, political and
business life. The present play has for its theme the law as a snare
for the feet of the poor and friendless. The principal character is a
government prosecuting attorney, driven by professional ambition and
jealousy, and the nagging of his wife and daughters. A murder has been
committed, and the newspapers are scolding because the criminal has
not been caught. Suspicion falls upon a poor wretch of a smuggler, who
is hounded and bullied into incriminating himself. At the last moment,
when the case is in the hands of the jury, the prosecuting attorney's
conscience is troubled, and he realizes that he is sending an innocent
man to the gallows)
MME. VAGRET:--But--these circumstances, how could you have
ignored them up to now?
VAGRET (_his head bowed_):--You think I have ignored
them?--Would I dare to tell you all? I am not a bad man, you'd
grant? I wouldn't desire that anyone should suffer through
my fault. Well!--Oh! but how it shames me to confess it, to
say it aloud, after having confessed it to myself! Well! When
I studied this case, I had got it so fixed in my head, in
advance, that this fellow Etchepare was a criminal, that when
an argument in his favor presented itself to my mind, I kept
it away from me, shrugging my shoulders. As to the facts about
which I am telling you, and from which suddenly my doubt has
been born--at first I sought only to prove to myself that these
facts were false, taking, in the testimony of the witnesses,
only what would combat their exactness, repelling all the rest,
with a frightful _naiveté_ in my bad faith.--And in the end, to
dissipate my last scruples, I said to myself, like you: "It is
the affair of the defense, not mine!" Listen and see to just
what point the exercise of the profession of prosecutor renders
us unjust and cruel; I had, myself--I had a thrill of joy at
first, when I saw that the judge, in his questioning, left in
the shadow the sum of those little facts. There, that is the
trade! you understand, the trade! Ah! poor creatures that we
are, poor creatures!
MME. VAGRET:--Possibly the jury may not condemn him?
VAGRET:--It will condemn him.
MME. VAGRET:--Or that it will admit some extenuating
circumstances.
VAGRET:--No. I urged them too emphatically against this. Was I
not ardent enough, my God! violent enough?
MME. VAGRET:--That's true. Why should you have developed your
argument with so much passion?
VAGRET:--Ah! why! why! Long before the session, it was so well
understood by everyone that the accused was the culprit! And
then, everyone was trying to rouse my dander, trying to make
me drunk! I was the spokesman for humanity, I had to reassure
the country, bring peace to the family--I don't know what all
else! My first demands were comparatively moderate. But when I
saw that famous advocate make the jury weep, I thought I was
lost; I felt that the case was getting away from me. Contrary
to my custom, I made a reply. When I stood up again, I was
like a combattant who goes to meet defeat, and who fights with
desperation. From that moment, Etchepare no longer existed, so
to speak. I no longer had the care to defend society, or to
maintain the accusation--I was fighting against that advocate;
it was a tourney of orators, a contest of actors; I had to
come out the conqueror at all hazards. I had to convince the
jury, to seize it and tear from it the "Yes" of a verdict.
It was no longer a question of Etchepare, I tell you; it was
a question of myself, of my vanity, of my reputation, of my
honor, of my future. It's shameful, I repeat, it's shameful!
At any cost, I wanted to avoid the acquittal which I felt was
certain. And I was possessed by such a fear of not succeeding,
that I employed all the arguments, good and bad--even those
which consisted in representing to those frightened men their
homes in flames, their loved ones assassinated. I spoke of
the vengeance of God upon judges who had no severity. And all
that in good faith--or rather without consciousness, in a fit
of passion, in a fit of passion against the advocate whom I
hated with all my forces.... The success was even greater than
I could have wished; the jury is ready to obey me, and for
myself, my dear--I let myself be congratulated, and I pressed
the hands which were held out to me.--That's what it is to be a
prosecutor!
MME. VAGRET:--Console yourself. There are perhaps not ten men
in France who would have acted otherwise.
VAGRET:--You are right. Only--if one reflects, it is precisely
that which is frightful.
BY KENKŌ HOSHI
(See pages 135, 151)
The governing class should stop their luxurious expenditures in
order to help the governed class. For only when a man has been
provided with the ordinary means of living, and yet steals, may
he be really called a thief.
A Hanging in Prison
(_From "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"_)
BY OSCAR WILDE
(English poet and dramatist, 1856-1900, leader of the so-called
"esthetes." The poem from which these extracts are taken was the fruit
of his long imprisonment, and is one of the most moving and terrible
narratives in English poetry)
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade;
We did not care; we knew we were
The Devil's Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.
So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave;
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.
With yawning mouth the yellow hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalt ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.
Right in we went, with soul intent
On Death and Dread and Doom:
The hangman, with his little bag,
Went shuffling through the gloom:
And each man trembled as he crept
Into his numbered tomb.
That night the empty corridors
Were full of forms of Fear,
And up and down the iron town
Stole feet we could not hear,
And through the bars that hide the stars
White faces seemed to peer....
We were as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope:
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or to give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
For Man's grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide
We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:
For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man accursed,
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and the worst
We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man's heart beat thick and quick
Like a madman on a drum!
With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
From some leper in his lair.
And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And heard the prayer the hangman's snare
Strangled into a scream.
And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
There is no chapel on the day
On which they hang a man:
The Chaplain's heart is far too sick,
Or his face is far too wan,
Or there is that written in his eyes
Which none should look upon.
So they kept us close till nigh on noon,
And then they rang the bell,
And the Warders with their jingling keys
Opened each listening cell,
And down the iron stairs we tramped,
Each from his separate Hell.
Out into God's sweet air we went,
But not in wonted way,
For this man's face was white with fear,
And that man's face was grey,
And I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners call the sky,
And at every careless cloud that passed
In happy freedom by....
The Warders strutted up and down,
And kept their herd of brutes,
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they were their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at
By the quicklime on their boots.
For where a grave had opened wide
There was no grave at all:
Only a stretch of mud and sand
By the hideous prison-wall,
And a little heap of burning lime,
That the man should have his pall.
For he has a pall, this wretched man,
Such as few men can claim;
Deep down below a prison-yard,
Naked for greater shame,
He lies, with fetters on each foot,
Wrapt in a sheet of flame!...
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in jail
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know--and wise it were
If each could know the same--
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
The Punishment of Thieves
(_From "Utopia"_)
BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(One of the great classic Utopias, written by the English
statesman, 1478-1535; executed upon Tower Hill, for opposing
the will of King Henry VIII)
In this poynte, not you onlye, but also the most part of the
world, be like evyll scholemaisters, which be readyer to
beate, than to teache, their scholers. For great and horrible
punishmentes be appointed for theves, whereas much rather
provision should have ben made, that there were some meanes,
whereby they myght get their livyng, so that no man shoulde be
dryven to this extreme necessitie, firste to steale, and then
to dye.
The Turn of the Balance[A]
[A] Copyright, 1907. Used by special permission of the
publishers, Bobbs-Merrill Co.
BY BRAND WHITLOCK
(American novelist and reformer, born 1869; for many years mayor of
Toledo, Ohio, and now Minister to Belgium. The present novel is the
life-story of Archie Koerner, a boy of the tenements, who is driven to
crime by the evil forces of society)
"All ready, Archie."
Jimmy Ball touched him on the shoulder. He glanced toward the
open grated door, thence across the flagging to the other door,
and tried to take a step. Out there he could see one or two
faces thrust forward suddenly; they peered in, then hastily
withdrew. He tried again to take a step, but one leg had gone
to sleep, it prickled, and as he bore his weight upon it,
it seemed to swell suddenly to elephantine proportions. And
he seemed to have no knees at all; if he stood up he would
collapse. How was he ever to walk that distance?
"Here!" said Ball. "Get on that other side of him, Warden."
Then they started. The Reverend Mr. Hoerr, waiting by the door,
had begun to read something in a strange, unnatural voice, out
of a little red book he held at his breast in both his hands.
"Good-by, Archie!" they called from behind, and he turned,
swayed a little, and looked back over his shoulder.
"Good-by, boys," he said. He had a glimpse of their faces; they
looked gray and ugly, worse even than they had that evening--or
was it that evening when with sudden fear he had seen them
crouching there behind him?
Perhaps just at the last minute the governor would change
his mind. They were walking the long way to the door, six
yards off. The flagging was cold to his bare feet; his slit
trouser-legs flapped miserably, revealing his white calves.
Walking had suddenly become laborious; he had to lift each leg
separately and manage it; he walked much as that man in the
rear rank of Company 21 walked. He would have liked to stop and
rest an instant, but Ball and the warden walked beside him,
urged him resistlessly along, each gripping him at the wrist
and upper arm.
In the room outside, Archie recognized the reporters standing
in the sawdust. What they were to write that night would be
in the newspapers the next morning, but he would not read it.
He heard Beck lock the door of the death chamber, locking it
hurriedly, so that he could be in time to look on. Archie had
no friend in the group of men that waited in silence, glancing
curiously at him, their faces white as the whitewashed wall.
The doctors held their watches in their hands. And there before
him was the chair, its oil-cloth cover now removed, its cane
bottom exposed. But he would have to step up on the little
platform to get to it.
"No--yes, there you are, Archie, my boy!" whispered Ball.
"There!"
He was in it, at last. He leaned back; then, as his back
touched the back of the chair, he started violently. But there
were hands on his shoulders pressing him down, until he could
feel his back touch the chair from his shoulders down to the
very end of his spine. Some one had seized his legs, turned
back the slit trousers from his calves.
"Be quick!" he heard the warden say in a scared voice. He was
at his right where the switch and the indicator were.
There were hands, too, at his head, at his arms--hands all
over him. He took one last look. Had the governor--? Then
the leather mask was strapped over his eyes and it was dark.
He could only feel and hear now--feel the cold metal on his
legs, feel the moist sponge on the top of his head where the
barber had shaved him, feel the leather straps binding his legs
and arms to the legs and the arms of the chair, binding them
tightly, so that they gave him pain, and he could not move.
Helpless he lay there, and waited. He heard the loud ticking
of a watch; then on the other side of him the loud ticking of
another watch; fingers were at his wrists. There was no sound
but the mumble of Mr. Hoerr's voice. Then some one said:
"All ready."
He waited a second, or an age, then, suddenly, it seemed as
if he must leap from the chair, his body was swelling to
some monstrous, impossible, unhuman shape; his muscles were
stretched, millions of hot and dreadful needles were piercing
and pricking him, a stupendous roaring was in his ears, then a
million colors, colors he had never seen or imagined before,
colors beyond the range of the spectra, new, undiscovered,
summoned by some mysterious agency from distant corners of the
universe, played before his eyes. Suddenly they were shattered
by a terrific explosion in his brain--then darkness.
But no, there was still sensation; a dull purple color slowly
spread before him, gradually grew lighter, expanded, and
with a mighty pain he struggled, groping his way in torture
and torment over fearful obstacles from some far distance,
remote as black stars in the cold abyss of the universe; he
struggled back to life--then an appalling confusion, a grasp at
consciousness; he heard the ticking of the two watches--then,
through his brain there slowly trickled a thread of thought
that squirmed and glowed like a white-hot wire....
A faint groan escaped the pale lips below the black leather
mask, a tremor ran through the form in the chair, then it
relaxed and was still.
"It's all over." The doctor, lifting his fingers from Archie's
wrist, tried to smile, and wiped the perspiration from his face
with a handkerchief.
Some one flung up a window, and a draught of cool air
sucked through the room. On the draught was borne from the
death-chamber the stale odor of Russian cigarettes. And then
a demoniacal roar shook the cell-house. The convicts had been
awake.
The Police-Court Reporter
(_From "Midstream"_)
BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
(American novelist and war-correspondent, born 1878)
When I think of prisons; of the men who send other men there;
of chairs of death and hangings, and of all that bring these
things about--it comes to me that the City is organized hell;
that there is no end to our cruelty and stupidity. I bought
from door to door in city streets the stuff that makes murder;
I sat in the forenoon under the corrective forces, which were
quite as blindly stupid and cruel.
The women I passed in the night, appeared often in the morning.
I talked to them in the nights, and heard them weep in the
days; I saw them in the nights with the men who judged them
in the days. Out of all that evil, there was no voice; out of
all the corrective force there was no voice. The City covered
us all. I was one and the other. The women thought themselves
beasts; the men thought themselves men--and, voiceless between
them, the City stood.
The most tragic sentence I ever heard, was from the lips
of one of these women.... I talked with her through the
night. She called it her work; she had an ideal about her
work. Every turning in her life had been man-directed. She
confessed that she had begun with an unabatable passion; that
men had found her sensuousness very attractive when it was
fresh. She had preserved a certain sweetness; through such
stresses that the upper world would never credit. Thousands
of men had come to her; all perversions, all obsessions, all
madness, and drunkenness, to her alone in this little room.
She told of nights when twenty came. Yet there was something
inextinguishable about her--something patient and optimistic.
In the midst of it all, it was like a little girl speaking:
"_I wake up in the morning, and find a man beside me. I am
always frightened, even yet,--until I remember. I remember
who I am and what I am.... Then I try to think what he is
like--what his companions called him--what he said to me. I try
to remember how he looked--because you know in the morning, his
face is always turned away._"
Does it help you to see that we are all one?... Yet I couldn't
have seen then, trained by men and the City. I belonged to the
ranks of the corrective forces in the eyes of the City--and
she, to the destructive.... She would have gone to the pen, I
sitting opposite waiting for something more important to make
a news bulletin.... From the City's point of view, I was at
large, safe and sane....
The extreme seriousness with which men regard themselves as
municipal correctives--as soldiers, lovers, monopolists--has
risen for me into one of the most remarkable facts of life.
The Straight Road
BY PAUL HANNA
(Contemporary American poet)
They got y', kid: they got y'--just like I said they would.
You tried to walk the narrow path,
You tried, and got an awful laugh;
And laughs are all y' did get, kid--they got y' good!
They never knew the little kid--the kid I used to know;
The little bare-legged girl back home,
The little kid that played alone--
They don't know half the things I know, kid, ain't it so?
They got y', kid, they got y'--you know they got y' right;
They waited till they saw y' limp,
Then introduced y' to the pimp--
Ah, you were down then, kid, and couldn't fight!
I guess y' know what some don't know, and others know damn well--
That sweatshops don't grow angels' wings,
That workin' girls is easy things,
And poverty's the straightest road t' Hell!
The "Cadet"
(_From "The House of Bondage"_)
BY REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
(See page 53)
Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he is there. Wherever
there is distress crying for succor, discontent complaining for
relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this missionary,
offering the quack salvation of his temporal church. He knows
and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish sisters sent to work
for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish, the Germans,
the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another economic
mill; the restless neurotic native daughters untrained for work
and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when
it releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air;
he is at the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt
unwholesome noonday food handed about by underpaid waitresses;
he lurks around the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk.
He remembers that these are girls too tired to do household
work in their evenings, too untaught to find continued solace
in books; that they must go out, that they must move about;
and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants and
theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies,
the dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where
immigrants, long before they learn to make a half-complete
sentence of what they call the American language, learn what
they are told are American dances: the whirling "spiel" with
blowing skirts, the "half-time waltz" with jerking hips. He may
frequent the more sophisticated forms of these places, may even
be seen in the more expensive cafés, or may journey into the
provinces. But he scents poverty from afar.
The Priestess of Humanity
(_From "A History of European Morals"_)
BY WILLIAM E. H. LECKY
(English historian and philosopher, 1838-1903. The following
much quoted passage may be said to represent the Victorian view
of its subject)
Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure
which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects
the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell.
That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who
counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection,
and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is
scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for
the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early
death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the
degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of
vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue.
But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes
would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their
untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder,
would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one
degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that
might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while
creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess
of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.
Sisterhood
BY MARY CRAIG SINCLAIR
(Contemporary American writer)
Last night I woke, and in my tranquil bed
I lay, and thanked my God with fervent prayer
That I had food and warmth, a cosy chair
Beside a jolly fire, and roses red
To give my room a touch of light and grace.
And I thanked God, oh thanked Him! that my face
Was beautiful, that it was fair to men:
I thought awhile, then thanked my God again.
For yesterday, on Broadway I had walked,
And I had stopped to watch them as they stalked
Their prey; and I was glad I had no sons
To look with me upon those woeful ones--
Paint on their lips, and from a corpse their hair,
And eyes of simulated lust, astare!
The Woman of the Streets
BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD
(See pages 66, 121)
Consider now the outcast Jezebel of the London pavement. Fierce
and cunning, and false and vile. Ghastly of visage under her
paint and grease. A creature debased below the level of the
brute, with the hate of a devil in her soul and the fire of
hell in her eyes. Lewd of gesture, strident of voice, wanton
of gaze, using language so foul as to shock the pot-house
ruffian, and laughter whose sound makes the blood run cold. A
dreadful spectre, shameless, heartless, reckless, and horrible.
A creature whose touch is contamination, whose words burn like
a flame, whose leers and ogles make the soul sick. A creature
living in drunkenness and filth. A moral blight. A beast of
prey who has cast down many wounded, whose victims fill the
lunatic ward and the morgue; a thief, a liar, a hopeless, lost,
degraded wretch, of whom it has been well said, "Her feet take
hold of hell; her house is the way to the grave, going down to
the chamber of death."
In the Strand
BY ARTHUR SYMONS
(English poet and critic, born 1865)
With eyes and hands and voice convulsively
She craves the bestial wages. In her face
What now is left of woman? whose lost place
Is filled with greed's last eating agony.
She lives to be rejected and abhorred,
Like a dread thing forgotten. One by one
She hails the passers, whispers blindly; none
Heeds now the voice that had not once implored
Those alms in vain. The hour has struck for her,
And now damnation is scarce possible
Here on the earth; it waits for her in hell.
God! to be spurned of the last wayfarer
That haunts a dark street after midnight! Now
Shame's last disgrace is hot upon her brow.
The Bridge of Sighs
BY THOMAS HOOD
(See page 59)
One more Unfortunate
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!
Look at her garments
Clinging like cerements;
Whilst the wave constantly
Drips from her clothing;
Take her up instantly,
Loving, not loathing.
Touch her not scornfully;
Think of her mournfully,
Gently and humanly;
Not of the stains of her--
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.
Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful:
Past all dishonor,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.
Still, for all slips of hers,
One of Eve's family--
Wipe those poor lips of hers
Oozing so clammily.
Loop up her tresses
Escaped from the comb,
Her fair auburn tresses;
Whilst wonderment guesses
Where was her home?
Who was her father?
Who was her mother?
Had she a sister?
Had she a brother?
Or was there a dearer one
Still, and a nearer one
Yet, than all other?
Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
O! it was pitiful!
Near a whole city full,
Home she had none.
Sisterly, brotherly,
Fatherly, motherly,
Feelings had changed;
Love, by harsh evidence,
Thrown from its eminence;
Even God's providence
Seeming estranged.
Where the lamps quiver
So far in the river,
With many a light
From window and casement,
From garret to basement,
She stood, with amazement,
Houseless by night.
The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery
Swift to be hurl'd--
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!
In she plunged boldly,
No matter how coldly
The rough river ran;
Over the brink of it,--
Picture it, think of it,
Dissolute Man!
Lave in it, drink of it
Then, if you can!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!
Ere her limbs frigidly
Stiffen too rigidly,
Decently, kindly,
Smooth and compose them;
And her eyes, close them,
Staring so blindly!
Dreadfully staring
Thro' muddy impurity,
As when with the daring
Last look of despairing
Fix'd on futurity.
Perishing gloomily,
Spurr'd by contumely,
Cold inhumanity,
Burning insanity,
Into her rest.
--Cross her hands humbly
As if praying dumbly,
Over her breast!
Owning her weakness,
Her evil behavior,
And leaving, with meekness,
Her sins to her Saviour!