Part 52

Just as many kinds of faces as you see in a city street you see in that prison--but there you see more than elsewhere the failures, the human weeds.

But at least there is a striving to make things better. Society no longer willingly tortures its failures. It controls, punishes, but does not hate them. There are no beatings, no tortures, no close-cropped heads, even, for the convict may grow his hair as he chooses.

Every man who knows no trade is taught one. There is a feeling of moral responsibility to the criminal, and a desire at least to make him NO WORSE.

The prisoners are divided into two classes: those whose faces and skulls tell of evil birth and predestined failure, and those who are simply like others--average men, victims of chance, of temptation, of ability ill-balanced, of ignorance, of drink, or even of accident.

In one great room the convicts are weaving--working at hand looms. The work is desperately hard. Both hands and both feet are going constantly. Human power is used, that the greatest amount of labor and least competition with the outside working world may be simultaneously achieved.

At one loom sits a poor creature, a dismal human failure. His forehead is half an inch high and a bony ridge-telling of unfortunate prenatal influence--runs high along the top of his head. His small eyes are close together. His exaggerated chin protrudes; only a cunning look directed now and then toward the watchful warden tells that any thinking goes on in that miserable being. His best place, perhaps, is there. He is protected against himself, and society has no other way of taking care of him.

Near him sits a young boy in his teens. His face is intelligent; he is not a born criminal. He is above the average in intelligence, and in him there are all possibilities of success and usefulness.

A boyish piece of criminal foolishness brought him there--and he must now spend years degenerating into real criminality under the influences around him.

There are the two extreme samples of humanity in that cage which we build to protect ourselves against ourselves.

It is a dismal garden set apart for human weeds and in it many a good plant is hopelessly driven into the weed class.

Of the men in that prison may truly be said what a great student of plant life--Luther Burbank-- says of the poor weeds that we despise among plants:

There is not one weed or flower, wild or domesticated, which will not, sooner or later, respond liberally to good cultivation and persistent selection. * * * Weeds are weeds because they are jostled, crowded, cropped and trampled upon, scorched by fierce heat, starved, or, perhaps, suffering with cold, wet feet, tormented by insect pests or lack of nourishing food and sunshine.

Most of them have no opportunity for blossoming out in luxurious beauty and abundance. * * * When a plant once wakes up to the new influences brought to bear upon it the road is opened for endless improvement in all directions.

More pitiable than any weeds in a garden and more worthy of sympathy are those poor human weeds in the great prison.

Crowded and kept ignorant in youth, tempted, ill-fed, cold and worried in after years, their lot was hard--and their fall almost inevitable. They must be confined, they must be protected against themselves, they must suffer for the poor start given to them.

But the duty of those who are FREE and fortunate is to treat kindly those who fall, and especially to deal in such fashion with the young as shall minimize the crop of weeds later.

Fortunately, it may truly be said that humanity begins to realize its responsibilities in both lines of effort.

Kindness reaches the convict in his prison.

And Education, the thrice blessed AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL, does steadily the work that makes useful plants of growing youth, diminishing year by year the crop of weeds.

Kindness and EDUCATION--go to Auburn prison and you will realize how much work they have still to do in our country.

CRIME IS DYING OUT

Many of us feel that crime is the striking feature of modern life, that this century sits among the skulls of crime's victims, and that Father Time, after all his ages of travel, sees no improvement.

But those discouraged by modern crime misunderstand the meaning of events and fail to make a just comparison between the past and the present.

It is true that crime to-day is shocking in its frequency. Each day we see spread out before us murders.

But first of all remember this:

We often mistake widespread NEWS of crime for increase in crime itself. The newspapers are multiplied in number by tens of thousands, and they all tell what happens. It seems as though crime had increased, whereas in reality we have simply increased facilities for letting all the people know what goes on among us. ----

We are shocked occasionally by crimes of poisoning. Go back a few centuries and you find men and women making a regular business of selling poison to those who want to commit murder. The crimes that fill us with horror would not have been noticed in those days.

We hear of a father killing his own child, and we declare that humanity is going to destruction. Yet but a few centuries back and THE LAW RECOGNIZED EVERY FATHER'S RIGHT TO KILL HIS CHILD IF HE CHOSE.