"Why do they not let liquor alone, after such a hard lesson?"
He laughed. He had a red, bloated, but not a bad face. He was an
Englishman.
"Some of us can't. Some don't want to, and some--some--it is about all
some can get."
Later on, I was told that this man was honest, a good worker, and that
he was "self-committed to get the liquor out of him. He's been here
before. When he gets out, he will be drunk before he gets three blocks
away from the dock, and he'll be sent here again--or to the Island!"
"And has this system gone on for a hundred years," I asked, "without
finding some remedy?"
"Well, since the women began to take a hand, some little has been done,"
the officer replied. "They built a coffee and lodging house right near
the landing, and take returning prisoners there, and give them a chance
to work if they want to--in a broom factory they built. Some get a start
that way and if they work and are honest, they get a letter saying so
when they find places. It is only a drop in the bucket, but it helps a
few."
"It looks a little as though, if women were to take a hand in public,
municipal, or governmental affairs, that reform, and not punishment,
might be made the object of imprisonment if imprisonment became
necessary, doesn't it?"
He laughed.
"Politics is no place for women. This they are doing is charity. That is
all very well, but they got no business meddling with city government,
and courts, and prisoners only _as_ charity."
"Yet you say that, for a hundred years, those who look after the criminal
population, thought very little of helping the men who came out, much
less did they think of beginning at the other end and trying to keep
them from going in. Women have been allowed to devise public charities,
even, for only a few years past. They had no experience in building
manufactories and conducting coffee and lodging houses; they have but
little money of their own to put into such things and yet they have
bethought them to start, in embryo, right here where the returning
convict lands, what appears to have vast possibilities as you say. Now
if this effort for the prevention of crime and want were at the other
end of the line in municipal government, don't you think it might go
even nearer the root of the matter and do more good?"
"How would you like to be a ward politician and a heeler?" he inquired,
wiping a smile away and looking at my gloves.
"I should not like it at all."
"Well, now, look at that! Of course no lady would, so--"
"Do you think it possible that the world might get on fairly comfortably
without having 'heelers' and 'ward politicians'--in the sense you
mean--in municipal or state government? And that it might be better
without such crime producers?" I added, as he began to laugh.
"You women are always visionary. Never practical. You--"
"I thought you said that the one and only really practical measure yet
taken to reduce the criminal population as it returns from the Islands
was invented and is conducted by women and--"
"You can just make up your mind that in every family of six there'll
be one hypocrite and one fool, either one of which is liable to be a
criminal, too, and the State has got to take care of 'em somehow. But
the prisons _are_ getting too full and the Almshouses and Insane Asylums
_are_ growing very large. But there is the Two Brothers' Island. I've
got to attend to my business now. Take the trip with me again some
time."
But it seems to me, I shall not need to go again, and that no judge
or legislator would need to take the journey more than once, unless,
perchance, he took it in the person of either the hypocrite or the fool
of his family; which, let us hope, no judge and no legislator is in a
position to do.