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This eBook is a reproduction produced by the National Library of New Zealand from source material that we believe has no known copyright. Additional physical and digital editions are available from the National Library of New Zealand.

EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908327-49-2

PDF ISBN: 978-0-908330-45-4

The original publication details are as follows:

Title: People in prison

Author: Baughan, B. E. (Blanche Edith)

Published: Unicorn Press, Auckland, N.Z., 1936

PEOPLE IN PRISON

T. I. S.

Unicorn Press 1936

CONTENTS

1) Author’s Preface.

5) William

11) Miles

16) Tim and Co.

27) Joe and Co.

35) Pauper Spirits

42) Young Lochinvar

56) Cornelius and Co.

62) Robin Hood 75) Pearly 69) Cherry and Co. 82) Clara, Clarence and Co

75) Pearly

69) Cherry and Co.

82) Clara, Clarence and Co

94) Mucklemouth

90) Giglamps

102) Tannhauser and Others

114) Coppertop

123) Larry 129) Half-a-Star 138) Prisoners on Prisons

129) Half-a-Star

138) Prisoners on Prisons

152) Conclusions and Suggestions

r< Man’s ignorance of Man peoples the criminal world.”

“ TANNHAUSER,” a Prisoner.

“ If it is true that whatever a man sows he shall also reap, it is not less true that Society must expect the same result.”

“ YOUNG LOCHINVAR,” a Prisoner.

‘ There’s some good in the best of folk.”

“ CLARA,” a Prisoner.

“ Even in a rotten apple the pips is good.”

HERBERT JENKINS.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

What are “ people in prison” really like? Who are these law breakers, for the safe keeping of whom in gaol the rest of us have to pay?

There was a time when I had not the least idea. I just lumped them all together as a pack of wretches beneath the notice of decent folk like ourselves. Then “ chance” introduced me to one of them, one who had served so many sentences that he was considered incorrigible. He was, in fact, in prison at the time, and his story is told in these pages. He was good enough to lay the foundation of my education—not concerning prison but—concerning prisoners. On his release he left me introductions to others in the same place and this process has been repeated again and again; as a result it has transpired that prisons and ex-prisoners have occupied practically the whole of my time for some ten years. Part of this time I have had some official status, but in the main my work has been unofficial.

I would not have the reader think that I have believed all I have been told. The prison bars give a wrong perspective, and the prisoner may not have a proper respect for abstract truth. Even a truthful witness, ft is said, may not be a witness for the truth. Much, however, may be imparted unconsciously and a great deal more it has been possible to check. What I have learned has surprised me considerably, and I think it may surprise—and interest—others. lam certain that great good would follow if others, especially those of more influence than I possess, could be better informed concerning these disturbers of our social order. That is the reason for this book.

These “ People in Prison” have gradually, for me, sorted themselves —not according to what they had done, but according to what they are, taking into account especially their wits and their feelings. The wits and the feelings of the first group are sound, of the second group, unsound. Here and there the groups do certainly touch, but in the main they are quite distinct.

Members of the first group I have learned to call “ Socially Immature.” Sound they are, but limited as to

PEOPLE IN PRISON

development; full-grown in body, but not, as yet, in social understanding. “ Young souls,” the East would call them; and, in fact, some are very near the animals. Others are not much beyond savages, and many would do quite well in a simpler form of Society, in communities, perhaps, such as those of the South Seas. One may see the same stages of development in the ordinary child. The behaviour of the baby is mainly animal, that of the child of ten often that of a primitive. In fact, it is really as children, in varying degrees of growth, that these delinquents may most usefully be regarded. Many of them, like quite small children, wish only to spend life in play, with a special leaning to the gutter and mud-pies. Others, like some children of six or so whose wits and self-importance are in advance of their hearts, steal and lie without the smallest sense of shame; while others injure or destroy at the behest of their impulses, and, just like children, are bewildered afterwards at the sight of what they have done. All, like children, lack complete self-control; and all, like all other immature creatures, are far more at the mercy of environmen and “ circumstances” than the mature of their kind would be—a point to which I would draw special attention. Lastly, like children, these unripe can grow ripe, these moral delinquents can develop past their several stages of delinquency, and “ grow themselves up,” into good citizens—that is, if they get just the help that normal children require, namely, right outlets for the activities of head and heart and will, together with better-grown friends to provide help in time of need.

Not so, alas! the hapless members of my second group. In these, the deficiency lies too deep for development to have its due chance under any such simple conditions. So “ wanting within,” so unbalanced, so deformed or diseased of personality are they, that very special skill and safeguarding are required, if ordinary good conduct can with reason be asked of them. Are they incurable? That we have certainly no right to say, considering how little we have understood, so far, even their plight. Had they been blind physically, or lame of leg or hand, we should long since have recognised that we owe them a special duty,

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

which, as things are, we certainly do not discharge.

Of these groups, the first, I am glad to say, I have found much the larger.

It has been considered better, on the whole, to leave these “ People in Prison,” as far as possible, to tell their own stories. It must be remembered, however, that this imposes a duty of anonymity, because, despite our profession that prisons “ reform,” we still treat prisoners on release as social pariahs. It is for this reason that my “ country” and myself must go masked. Dominia is not in England, though she is part of the British Empire. She is a good place for the study of prisoners because she has, in proportion to population, an undue share of them. Moreover, she really believes in imprisonment. She considers a prison to be a Moral Hospital; and, indeed, physically, her prisons are clean and decent. Yet they fail lamentably as deterrent and reformative agencies. Why?

My own conclusions I shall leave to the final chapter. But let me offer here my hearty thanks co all who have, consciously or unconsciously, collaborated with me in the compiling of this book; and especially to that friend whose

“ revision” has practically resulted in the re-writing about half of it.

T. I. S.

WILLIAM

Let us begin with my first group, the “ socially immature,” and with one or two of its more hopeful members. Take, for instance, William.

William, according to the law of the land, was indubitably a “ criminal.’’ According to the Police, he was a “ hardened and dangerous” ruffian. According to all the chances of the game, being where he was and what he was, it was long odds on a hard run and a sudden finish. Yet William is to-day, in his own sphere, a good and highlyrespected citizen.

Why? And how did this come about?

Not, it must be confessed at once, through Judge or Jury or Prison System. Time after time, the Jury had, quite rightly, found him guilty. Time after time, the Judge had summed up with meticulous fairness, and, after a glance at his record, proceeded to “ protect society.” And, time after time, the Prison System had put him with his kind, and brought to bear its usual repressions. There was no effort to understand; no machinery for reform. The whole process was perfectly normal, and perfectly inefficient. Its interests, to tell the truth, were somewhat too circumscribed. The whole Judicial System was interested only in William-the-criwinal; as for William-the-man, with everything that that implies, like Gallic it “cared for none of those things.” Yet it was deep down in that neglected individuality of his that the root, first of his offences, later of his reform, proved to be.

What was William’s history?

He had been born into a “ respectable” family, a family, indeed, in fairly easy circumstances. He ran away from home (we shall see why later), when he was twelve, found work, and brought himself up—very well, too, so far as his body and his wits were concerned. But every human being is a good deal more than body plus wits, and something in the growing boy, something very essential, went short, and stopped growing. What was that “ something?” As indicated, the Prison records did not disclose it; yet without it the great healthy body and cool clean brain of

PEOPLE IN PRISON

William the man were a real danger to society. When I first knew him, he had already been “ in” on various occasions, and been guilty, not merely of dishonesty, but also of violence. What was that highly important something? It cannot be too often asserted—it far too seldom is—that every prisoner is, first of all, an individual! He has his own special temperament, his own tastes, possibly his own talents. He has his own desires, his own experiences and his own special stage of human development. This last creates difficulties of its own, because arrested and uneven development is not very easily diagnosed. We expect the normality with which, Good Reader, we endow ourselves. A much valued coadjutor to whom I shall refer now and hereafter as “ Miss M.” has a quick instinct in such matters. On discussion as to some rock on which one or other of our charges has come to grief she is apt to say, “ Well, you and I may have been born knowing that, but Claude (or Clara) just hasn’t waked up to it yet.” In such cases she is almost invariably right. True it is, at any rate, that there are men and women who have not yet become aware of what, to the rest of us, is self-evident: and this applies particularly to the sense of human relationships. William was a case in point. What he had not awakened to, through all his boyhood and youth, what he had missed seeing and in consequence, being, may best be told by himself. “ I see now,’’ he writes, “ where I’ve been a mug. When anything w'ent wrong with my business, I thought it was only Me that mattered. Now I see that everybody else matters, too.”

In other words, William had at last discovered that he was a real member of Society. And this discovery worked a miracle.

Now why did it take so long for this man, with his good sound brain, to discover the one simple fact. It was certainly not that he did not consider the problem. “ Another fellow here and myself” he once wrote from prison, “ were always discussing the uselessness of the life we were living, and planning how to beat it. He has since been all through the War and gained a splendid war-record, but it never learnt him to keep out of here. He is here now and we

WILLIAM

are still talking on the same subject. The first question he asked me after not seeing each other for years was, ‘ What’s the matter with us, Will? We have the appearance of intelligent people, and we have brains, still there’s something missing. What is it?’ ”

The cause was really not far to seek. The social sense, the naturally taking-other-folk-into-consideration, is not so much a matter of brain as of heart. William had altogether missed that stage of heart-education which is proper to the “ formative age” of the “ teens.” He missed it because he had no home-life. He had run away from a home which, on the death of a dearly-beloved mother, had for him grown harsh, cold and impossible. The natural school of social relations had failed him, and his hungry adolescent little soul was, as he wrote years afterwards to Miss M. “ starved for want of somebody who understood.” This in turn starved his social understanding, and so degraded his behaviour.

It was Miss M. who first took him in hand. She had been asked to see him by a former fellow-prisoner. “ William is a decent chap,” he had said, “ without a decent friend in the world.’’ So Miss M. wrote to him, just a friendly note, mentioning the other “ lad”—respectfully. “ It was no good,” she said, “ telling William how bad he was, or how good he ought to be—for he had had lots of that already. So I fished about for some liking he had for something sound, found that he had a taste for reading and argument, and lent him a book or two I was just then interested in myself— ‘ New Thought’ stuff mostly—and told him not to believe a single word blindly, but to challenge anything he wanted to. So we had some fine discussions, I can tell you, and he did quite a bit of thinking. Next, we got that nice old Mrs D. and her sport of a daughter, to visit him now and then. They did him no end of good, for they liked him and he them. But of course in the end it was really his jewel of a wife that saved William.”

What! A “hardened and dangerous” ruffian, cured by women! Yet, after all, when you think of it, most Hospital nurses are women? William himself gives evidence on this

PEOPLE IN PRISON

point. “ Women,” he writes, “ could often do a whole lot more for some of us chaps than men.” It cannot truthfully be said that Dominia encourages her women to try. Miss M., I know, has often enough had to encounter a stiff head-wind. Still, in this case, it undoubtedly was the influence of decent women, making friends with him while he was in prison, which started anew in William that social development whose “arrest” had so often led him into the Policeman’s arms. Then, on release, he managed so well that he won in marriage a girl as wise and brave as she was good. Before the betrothal he manfully “ told everything,” and she has seen most successfully to his education ever since. “ More in love with her everyday I am,” he told me, not long ago, and her version of the matter was, in its own way, instructive. “ I never see anything wrong in him, and he’s more broad-minded than my brothers, who never went wrong.”

The “ Reflections of William” as he was passing from “ dangerous criminal” to affectionate and law-abiding husband cannot be without interest to those who take a practical interest in their fellows.

“ One part of my time here,” he writes from prison, “ I would be like a bear with a sore head one moment, or looking for fight or trouble of any description the next. But since I have learned that heads are not merely for carrying hats on, I have made a wonderful improvement.”

Again he writes, “ I am fairly partial to an argument, and one is never at a loss in here. All you have to do is, go and ask any person how he came to fall, and he will tell you it was due to luck or chance or somebody else. There is a lot one puts down to ‘ chance’ and ‘ luck’ but when it is summed up it is simply ‘ ignorance.’ Most people fail to admit they (make) mistakes, simply putting it down to ‘ bad luck.’ Experiences, why who hasn”t had them? (but) instead of learning by experience, the majority simply turn away to look for another, and away they go.”

The leaven must have been working strongly a little later. “ People,” he writes, still from prison, “ are remarking the change in me. If anybody had told me I would

WILLIAM

have come to believe in the thoughts I have now, well, I shouldn’t have believed them. In fact: I had my life mapped out and it was to be a very thorny one, with every chance of its being a short one.” “ Thank you for the book.* One particular passage that caused me to think a lot was ‘ not what he wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns.’ Yet another, ‘ltis a question whether the great majority of people do not mar their happiness by lack of self-control.’ ”

It was one of William’s virtues that he tried to face the facts, as he saw them.

“ Self-reliance and self-confidence, one cannot get far without either. I have plenty of both, but unfortunately in the past I have been using them in the wrong direction. “ The average person is trying his best?’ I don’t agree! In my opinion the average person is not trying his best, in fact, they are not trying at all. Life here goes right back to the jungle days. And one has got to be a judge of character to five, that is, in peace and quietness. One must have a strong mind in here, if one desires to remain a man. And it is the one thing conspicuous by its absence. Like attracts like —of course that has always been noticeable in every class of life. Once come into these places and it is glaring.”

“ Reflection is what most are weak in that frequent these places. Still, apart from sexual offenders” (he might have added “and murderers”), “there are very few crimes committed on the impulse of the moment. The folk who say, ‘ I just thought I would, etc.,’ are just making excuses for themselves, for if they spoke the absolute truth, they would tell you that it looked easy, with a rosy chance of not being found out. . . The first question asked when contemplating a crime is, ‘ How much can I get out of it?’ Second, ‘ What’s the maximum sentence if I’m caught?’ and third, ‘ls there a chance of getting clear away with it?’ Most people ignore the first two and study only the third, and if there’s one feeble chance of carrying it out, you can stake your life on its being attempted. The less the chance

• J. L. Allen’s “ As A Man Thinketh."

10)

PEOPLE IN PRISON

there is of getting away with it, the greater fascination it has.”

And whatever value we may place on such conclusions as contributions to philosophy, at least we owe it to this strong, intelligent and hard-bitten wayfarer to consider these last words. “It is proved every day of our lives, where harshness and other remedies fail, kindness will win every time. Sympathy is another good thing, provided we know what to sympathise with. But ‘ sympathise with the sufferer, not with his suffering.’ (A quotation, apparently, from one of the books being studied.) Then we know we are on the right road.”

Well, William is certainly now upon the right road, both as to conduct and to wisdom. He has even found “ something” deeper still which had been “missing in him.” Let us leave him as he stands holding in strong arms his baby son. “ All the time, you know,” he murmurs shamefacedly, “ what really was wrong with me was only—that I hadn’t anybody to love!”

That of course was not the business of Dominia's Penal System.

MILES

Miles came into collision with the law when he was only some ten or eleven years old. He had been stealing. The law promptly put him into a “ Reformatory,” and he was “ reformed” so skilfully that, on release, he stole again. Again and again release was followed by conviction, and the sorry game continued until he was thirty-five years of age. During a period of nearly twenty-five years, that is to say, his education was principally the task of the prevailing prison system. In point of fact, incredible as it may seem, during that quarter of a century he appears to have been at liberty, in the aggregate, only eighteen months. During those years he must have cost his country, in Court cases and maintenance alone, some thousands of wasted pounds.

No wonder that, at this stage, the authorities considered him “ hopeless.” He was a confirmed thief. The homilies of Judges and Magistrates left him unmoved. Even worse, he was known to be practising, where he was, a far more serious offence than stealing, namely, a form of sex-perver-sion often learned in prison. Now it “ chanced,’” while Miles was in his thirty-fifth year, that Justice delivered into the same gaol some young men imprisoned for certain “ conscientious objections.’” These were, of course, herded with other malefactors. They met Miles, became interested in him, and in their inexperience, felt sure there was some good in him. Being sanguine themselves they managed to interest some equally sanguine young women, and of these one wrote to Miles. She received such an enthusiastically friendly letter in reply that she retreated in terror; but not without, in her turn, enlisting the sympathy of a friend. This friend was older. She took the same tack as Miss M. and looked for some trait of “ good taste” in her “ patient.’” Nor was she disappointed, though the case was very different from William’s. Miles proved to have a certain knack at drawing and painting and, what was much more, a true feeling for beauty. His aptitude suggested sign-writing as a congenial means of livelihood for him, and the idea of training him for it on release. But

PEOPLE IN PRISON

it was through his feeling for beauty that the direction of his desires was changed.

Your born beauty-lover is by no means always a “ good citizen.” It might even sometimes seem that he has come to this planet from some other—possibly happier—world, where duties between human beings are not in demand, for of these he seems often innocent as well as ignorant. If, however, he does not see the necessity for our laws and sanctions it may be that he has others, quite as definite, of his own. Miles proved to be a case in point, and his new correspondent managed to turn his personal convictions to great human advantage. But let her tell her own tale.

“It wasn’t one atom of good talking to Miles about ‘ good’ and ‘ bad,’ ” she said, “ for they meant nothing at all to him. But ‘ light’ and ‘ darkness,’ ‘ beauty’ and ‘ ugliness’—those were the terms that were to him immensely real and important, and a choice between them was a choice he understood. I, too. So we made friends that way, and, bit by bit, my letters—for we did not meet till his discharge—tried to show him that they are just as full of meaning for the way we treat each other as they are for painting, and every bit as important. Then, one day, about six weeks before his discharge was due, there came a most excited letter from him. It excited me, too! He said that ‘ something,’ he couldn’t explain what, had happened to him in reading his last letter from me—there had seemed to be some kind of a ‘ Light,’ which had made him ‘ get into the mind’ of the writer; and that had been so much more ‘ beautiful’ than his own as to change it greatly, so that he was going out now with ‘ very different intentions.’ No, I’m sorry, but I didn’t keep his letter. But he knew already the time of discharge, so that it wasn’t a case of ‘ I’se a good boy now, Mummy, do get them to let me out.’ And ‘ something’ does really seem to have happened, for that is over ten years ago, and as you know, he has never been ‘ in’ since.”

But “ converts” always have to be built up afterwards. And Miles was more than lucky in the friends found for him on release. Mr and Mrs L. took him when he first

MILES

came out, and one Mr A. taught him the painting trade. Above all, Mr A. and his sister took him to live with them, and for the first time he knew what “ home” meant. The right work and the right friends are what all dischargees need most—the right work alone is not enough.

In fact, there were three factors at work—the changed desires, the congenial work, the wise friends—and all three were none too many for Miles. His belated “ socialising” was not accomplished in a day, even though the penal system took no hand. “ There have been little thievings,” wrote anxious Mr L. “ I get into all sorts of trouble about money,” wrote Miles, puzzled and anxious too, protesting that he really was “ trying,” but adding that, somehow, try as he would, he always “ seemed to spend” more than he had and—l can’t possibly borrow any more or I will never get out of it.” He was given to “ letting customers have what they wanted under cost price,” and seemed not to see why not! Once, “ seeing a poor chap travelling without a ticket,” he had just naturally “ stepped forward and paid for him.” “ I only done what you would have done yourself,” added he, modestly.

Now what did all this mean? Clearly that Miles was lacking in “ money-sense.” Yes, but why? Why had he no more “ savvy” about the management of money than a child of ten or eleven? The answer is plain enough. It was because, since he was ten or eleven, when the State took him in charge—“ in the interests of Society”—he had never been taught to manage money, and seldom, indeed, had he had the chance to try. You do not have money to handle in the places to which the State had sent him. The inmates of Dominia’s penal institutions earn some; they even get some on release; but, while “ in,” they never have to spend one cent on meals, or lodging, or clothes, and on such essentials they never have one cent to spend. Suppose that you and I, for two or three years, had no occasion to balance need and supply—how wisely would we be likely to spend a scant store of shillings in the first few weeks or our re-entry into the world of reality, a world full of the things we had badly missed and sadly wanted? However it may be with us, experience seems

PEOPLE IN PRISON

to show that none of Dominia’s “ well-treated” prisoners are able to manage money on release—nor that other essential—Time. For years the responsibility in both respects has been taken from their shoulders, and they can neither balance a budget nor keep an appointment. In such ways does Dorainia unconsciously cripple those whom she professes to cure. It may be hazarded that these two factors, inability to manage money and inability to manage time, account for more returns to prison in that country than any others—certainly much more than poverty.

Miles, then, when in years a mature man, was still managing money like the ten-year-old he was when the law first stopped his normal social life. In addition, he possessed the usual “ artistic” indifference to the commodity and, with the best intentions, he used it very much as though it were as free and plentiful as air. When he had plenty and you had not, he would readily share his cash with you—-as in the case of that ticket. When, on the other hand, he had not enough and you had, it seemed to him but natural and right that you should share with him, particularly if you were his friend!

So the good L’s and A’s had to set about the task of protecting society by understanding Miles’ ignorance and negligence in point of time some twenty-five years after society had commenced paying its penal system for undertaking the job. And a much better job they made of it! “We tried,” wrote Mr L., “ to make him feel his responsibilities through ours.” This proved most successful, and during the process Miles was writing—“ You could hardly credit how happy I am.” In the family life that he was permitted so generously to share, his own really sweet human qualities at last had fair play, and presently Miss A. could write, “ The only thing I am sorry for is that there are not more with the like disposition.” He became, too, we learned, “ quite a lion among the ladies,” and we learned it with untold relief for it proved that the hideous prisontaught sex habit was not to him natural, persistent and unbreakable. He had been caught by the vile sexual

MILES

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miasma of prison life but he had retained the capacity to escape.

Always a good and deft worker, he soon put his adroit fingers to the more “ social’” industries taught them by Mr A. “ Even when it is only cheap work,” he wrote, “ I try to do it well.” Before long he had acquired as a wife a girl lovely as a Madonna and now he has a bunch of blooming babies. This hopeless criminal has, like William, become a loving husband and father, and, into the bargain, a good citizen.

He made one mistake, however. Less “ manly,” or maybe more sensitive, than William, he concealed from his bride his prison-past. Years later, as usually happens, malice raked it up. She stuck to him nobly, as did his real friends. To one of these, at that time of stress, he wrote, “ Would that I had never gone wrong. It hurts when one thinks of the good people there are in the world.”

The “ goodness” of his friends had been applied to his

“ guilt” just as the teacher’s knowledge is applied to a child’s ignorance—in such a way that he had learned to outgrow it.

TIM AND CO

Not always, however, even with training and experience, is it so easy to find and foster the natural “growingpoint,” especially of the “ Happy-go-Lucky’s.” Consider Tim and Company.

Tim was bequeathed to me by William, and he has been an “in and out” correspondent of mine for years. He belongs to a very early “ social stage,” much earlier than William’s. Witness his account of how he once “ happened” to “ get in again.” (“ In,” of course, means prison). “ I was working once,” he wrote, “ earning good wages, and working with me was a friend. Coming home to lunch one day we met my friend’s brother, who had a pal with him. They had just come from the North and money was no object with the two strangers. The four of us, after grogging up, proceeded home to lunch. After lunch we proceeded back to work, and these two friends, walking part of the way with us, decided to have a grog at the ‘ Pink and Lily.’ Another grog, then the fun starts. I and my friend agree to toss a penny, and if it came down head we were to go back to work, if tail, we agreed to go home, dress in our Sunday best and make a day of it. Tail decided. Of course the following day finds us unfit for work. One week passes by, still no work for me and my friend. A few nights later my friend lost his life through being accidentally shot. I myself had a very narrow escape, and I leave for the North w'here I am very lucky while at the races. Last of all, a permanent boarder here in prison for the next six years, all through that wretched penny.”

Aye, there we have Tim! Tim the “ good company”— with all his zest for enjoyment, his light heart, his kittenish love of play—Tim the irresponsible, the able but fitful worker, the “ sport” not to be sobered for more than a moment even by the sight—and menace—of death. Tim, the wilful playmate, and the willy-nilly plaything, of “luck.” And there, too, we may catch the clue to the “ in-and-out” propensity of many another “ Naughty Ned and Nancy”—“ In-and-out like an old concertina,” says Rosa, who is one of them; adding brightly, “ I make all

TIM AND CO

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sorts of good resolutions while I’m in, only they don’t seem to last when I gets out.”

Nina is another of these blithe, cheery little infantile souls. To use the words of a Friendly Wardress —“ nice as anything in prison, bright as a bird, always goodnatured, you couldn’t help liking her.” “ A really jolly thing in the house and a treasure of a maid,” said the clever and understanding mistress, who took her once on release. This “ treasure,” it is true, after a day’s outing in the neighbouring town had to be retrieved, somewhat intoxicated, from a vehicle which also contained a young man, similarly gay—a chance young man picked up that happy day—and her mistress had to pack her bodily into the train for home. But Nina, though reluctant, showed no rancour. She “ sang all the way, made a brave display of garters,” and, back at home, appeared as jolly as before. Unfortunately, a chance of higher wages presented itself, so Nina was helped to the “ better job,” which turned out, however, not a better job, but a sore mistake, for money was by no means Nina’s most real need. Once out of the understanding grip that had hauled and held her so surely above the gutter, our sprightly sparrow hopped back into it and out of our ken, until, one fine day, she re-appeared in Court on the old charge of “ idle and disorderly.” Her reason for flight she had put well and clearly in a letter to some pal, half-written and, characteristically, carelessly left behind. “ It’s alright here,” this missive said, “ and they’re very kind, but for god’s sake send a wire and get me away—it’s so dam tame.”

Life, in fact, to these “ socially-six-year-olds,” is still just a matter of getting as many jam-tarts and marbles as possible (translated into the adult body’s equivalents of mating and drinking), with all the company possible, for they are nothing if not gregarious. Their bodies are early-matured and strong. Their wits are sound, too; not in the least aie they feeble-minded. But they are grown-up babies, wanting nothing but play, and incapable, as yet, of any delights higher than those of the senses. As I glance back along the steep and bare fields of prison-endeavour, their childish souls laugh up at me like daisies —so frank

I *

H'jfLS IM

****' •* t»f and care-free, so innocent of ' ' ' '•*•*'•'''■ • ■ ' ==• '• -•:•■ i. • -4..v are; And 1 y ( *.?» *■» fctafc at them. A* happy, healthv, bloom- - / 'At.,*; , x „.r-* —.-.n> 1.-lan :. wliat so.-ial OWta aidmarua wmdd be! How skilfully the - • - - -M ;■ : . i: . h OW ■■ : ■" : • V -•" But our own >rrf<wi thoagh ft to. is miles too mature for '• .«• <a.; ~,r I f. a: ..t,.. ****- the brothel gather into doom the ’' : ' • ' ' ?••••- - ' tests. flames * r »."* ewtbs; and, often, too, their destruction WydMtlidtai to others. They nerer reaUy Mfend to 7* . *.** “f**. bs*. alas’ they manage to do a good **> ** *• «■ a good deal more; for their abilities caeafcat, >Ut their idea of kindness is merely ■"■ grace, and their sense of duty niL “ 1 did not think,” *”*f m r m ®” *w maasiaTighter resnlting from abortion, ■..it my htadacas to others would lead me to such punTimT* last sertesee (so far) was for “ receiving” Cj*ads doks hy friends aroeh worse than he is; Neville upped into trust funds for the sake of a ladv who took his eniag fancy: aad at the cad of a long letter, writes: f forgot to mention that . . I tried to destrov myself by shooting myself in the head. I also look the life of a tady. Why I fid that is a question I have been asktagmywdr ww stare. And I was found guilty of manfrgher aad seat* Mid to imprisonment with hard labour. Bur I can honestly say that I have not lost one mark for uau conduct I find that good behaviour is the best policy.” Half-witted"’ Xot he" Merely “ bird-brained” as yet. with no sense of responsibility or of proportion. The term **~ w-—adataty.’*’ aaed tar his pupils by the schoolmaster in "• Dandelion Days.” expresses the idea. Still, as :ne of -hose pupils wrote that book, and delineated that "■ Doctor* we wtH not despan of Nigel ’

Not always r» these ha hies the product of “ poor homes” •r nftnnll JWL tar tataace. writes; “ I was ttaatii s£ s Ctltgi. **d when I became twsocy-one I ;oe im» » taw taaaai ynwdn that soon

TIM AND CO

vanished—horse-racing and billiards. I cannot say ‘ bad company,’ because I was always with my cousins. They were as bad as me, they all had a lot of money.” And Neville, already referred to, went to the University and later had an allowance of five or six hundred pounds supplied by his father. “My father,” he writes, “ also used to pay my debts from time to time ... I have certainly reaped and the bin is certainly full, as there is nothing more on this earth that I can lose.” Yet somehow he seems to feel no remorse for the waste of so many good things. Remorse, indeed, is far too adult an emotion for these infants. Never conscious of having willed the evil they have brought to pass, they attribute everything to “ bad luck,” or to some “wretched penny.” It is curiously characteristic, too, that what Neville, a “ gentleman,” belonging to one of the learned professions, found most dreadful about imprisonment was not the “ company,” but the cutting off from that company after the day’s work! He laments “ the awful loneliness” of his cell like a child afraid of the dark —which, poor thing, was exactly what, in soul, he was. Our status in society is not always the same as our actual “ social status.”

“ Kids,” Tim calls his kind, and wonders, in one of his letters “that such a lot of us remain kids. Why is it?” Not for want of telling certainly! There is the Magistrate. There is the Chaplain. But then, these do contradict one another so! “ The Parson, he tells you to forgive your enemies,” says Rosa, “ but then the Magistrate—well, he don’t do no forgiving, do he?”

It is one thing, too, to be told that you are a fool, and quite another to want to stop fooling. You may not even agree with your mentor as to the standard by which you judge “ real fooling.” There were once two little brothers dining on soup in their Mother’s presence. Roy, the younger, greatly enjoying the soup, smacked his lips heartily over it. Mother reproved him, but David, the elder, looked sympathetically across the table at the culprit.

“ Roy thought that was a nice noise to make, Mummy,” he explained. “Didn’t you, Roy?”

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“ Yeth, Davy, me did,” whimpered Roy.

Yes, Roy, I know you did,” returned David, a born consoler, “ and so do I think it was a nice noise, too. But you see,” and he gave a respectful nod at Mummy “ She doesn’t.”

And that is just these “ Kids’ ” situation

Lots of Tims are Roy unrepentant. Nance, continues most obstinately to “ make noises” she considers “ nice.” One day, during an interval of freedom, she was found cooking an enormous pot of Benger’s Food over the kitchen fire of a working man whose wife was in hospital.

“ Doctor’s ordered it for Baby,” she told Miss M. importantly.

“ But surely,” Miss M. expostulated, “ Baby can’t eat all that? And it’s such expensive stuff!”

“ Not he—But they all of ’em likes it, so I lets all of ’em have it,” says Nance, beaming with benevolence.

“ But they don’t need it, and only think how dear it is!” cries Miss M.

“They likes it!” said Nance obstinately; and felt justified.

Does this incident throw no light on Nance’s appearance lately in Court, on a charge of “ keeping a disorderly house?” She was guilty, too, according to our lights, but she was not guilty according to her own, or that of the

“ Naughty Neds” she had been obliging. They, and she, considered hers a “ nice noise.” Society professes to think differently, but here is a queer thing. Only the

“ Nancies,” not a single one of the partner “ Neds,” appeared in custody to be called by the Magistrate a “ menace to Society.” They were present, O dear yes! But only on the back benches, as silent spectators. Society, in Dominia, evidently agreeing with the poet:

“ The sin which ye do by two and two

Must be paid for one by one,”

but by one side only. All the policemen called to give evidence against one sinning woman after another wore an air of the most painstaking piety. Every legal brother, and the place was packed with them, looked extremely smug. “ Spicy kind of case,” said one of them afterwards*

TIM AND CO

“ I was told to be sure not to miss it. Really, quite Hogarthian, wasn’t it?” Well, it was, too. It seemed to me, nevertheless, that the commentator had missed the best of the satire, and I wondered whether our wretched old Nance, repulsive as she looked, and was, was anywhere near the ugliest reality in that Court of “Justice?”

Putting these babes in prison is not the least help to their social development. There they meet so many of their mates that they can maintain their own current standards and desires with less than no trouble. They are not even necessarily depressed, though naturally they would prefer their untrammelled freedom. The heart and mind with not much in them can well afford to be light, and this is how Tim describes himself in one letter: “ Still doing my little best to eat and smile and continue so. Funny old world, isn’t it, friend? We are never satisfied, and as for myself I never trouble. It can rain, or hail, and I say,—Take no notice, what’s the good of worrying.”

Tim had had, so he told me, the best of homes, in full view of a gaol. Nor was it any lack of love that had turned him from it. “ Beautiful and all as my home was,” the story goes, “ and the love my parents bestowed on me, at the age of ten I was breaking my heart to leave home and become a jockey.” Yet he was quite affectionate in the accepted way of the “ ten-year-old” stage, and once, during an “ interval ” wrote that he had hopes of “ making a lady” of our pretty, but decidedly “ disorderly,” Rosa. No more came of this, however, than might have been expected, for when toddler leads toddler, tumbles are common; and both, eventually, though separately, appeared “ inside” again. William, however, when told of Tim’s return, proffered consolation. “ If you knew Tim as well as I do,” said he, “ you would think he had done very well, for him, to keep out two whole years!” Tim, to whom this was reported, was greatly pleased by the touch of appreciation. “ Thank Will,” he wrote, “ for the credit he gave me in keeping within the law this past few years. Tell him I said I was a trier at any rate.” He added that he would “ try to do better next time,” just like the little boy he is. Told that William had now a little son, he remarks:

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“ I would very much like to stand Godfather, but as you say, I think we will have to find somebody else. I don’t think I am quite up to standard,” he adds, “ with regards setting the little fellow an example.”

Can it be, though, that he is really growing up a bit? William, while in prison, had got him to read a book or two, but at the time they did not seem to leave much impression upon his volatile mind. During his last term, however, he seemed to be getting to grips with something.

“ He had,” he wrote, “ a longing to learn from experience, sooner than have the knowledge thrown at you . . . because a person knows but cannot bring what he knows to the surface, until he has come a crash, and then he says to himself, ‘ I have always known, why couldn’t I recall it befoie?’ Which of us does not know from experience the gap between Recognising and Realising? “ Some men,” he goes on, “ take years before they wake up that it does not pay to live by crime . , . He knows he is doing wrong at the time, course he does, we all do to a certain extent, but too weak at that point to resist temptation. . . . Sometimes we choose the down-hill trail because it looks the easiest at the time, but when we arrive at the bottom we find it has been a hard and rough journey. . . I remember one old horse I had” (Tim was devoted to horses, and had infinite patience with them),

“he was just like me (not so good-looking of course), when it came to the up-hill stunt, he would insist on going down-hill, and at times I had to be cruel with him before he would take on the up-hill route. Humans have the power to choose, but when they don’t take advantage of that power, well, there are times when someone else must choose for them, like my old horse. Hence my return to College, eh? I understand the subject well enough, but as you say, conscience is lacking, therefore I will endeavour to wake it up a little.” Tim’s observations on his surroundings are sometimes not without interest. “ Some of the years I have spent in these places,” he says in one of his letters, “ has not been altogether wasted. I have met many classes of men and also done a heap of thinking over the same. There was a time when I thought men

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convicted of murder should be caged up and fed like animals, but of all the men I have met in prison I have never seen any murderers that you would be really afraid of; in fact, some are very soft, in a heap of cases only children when it comes to the fair dinkum stuff.’’

Tim’s experience is the common one—the worst deeds are by no means always done by the worst men. Tim, however, if he is well-disposed towards murderers, “ has no use for a man or woman that is always telling lies. A thief is bad enough, but a liar would get a man hung.” Have you ever told lies, Tim?” “ Certainly I have,” was the reply, “ but I have never been good enough for a certificate.”

Tim has come to the conclusion, too, like “ Jack Black,” the quondam American cracksman, that at lawbreaking “ you can’t win,” “ A few,” he writes, “ still maintain they can if they plays their cards right. As for myself, lam quite satisfied we can’t. Even if we escape this place there is a time when we must pay the price. It may be sickness, accident, or some other way, but you can’t escape. Now, friend, don’t think I am religious and want to sign the pledge, for such is not the case. Though lam aware of the above, God knows if I will make use of the hardearned knowledge in the future. If anyone was to ask me if I was ever coming back to prison after I get my freedom, the only answer I could give them would be —I don’t know what is in store for me yet . . . yet I see light where I only seen darkness before, do you get me?”

Do I not! “Approving the better” has by no means always saved me at once from following the worse. Has it you?

Yet experience does teach, especially when deepened by reflection, and Tim, at last hearing, had managed to keep “ out” for some three years. He was virtuously indignant at an attempt on the part of the police to fasten on him an offence perpetrated, probably, by the “ Old Brigade” whose company he really had forsworn for some time. A little sense of virtue, besides tasting very sweet, is most nourishing to incipient morality. And I have the more hope, too, for our Timmy because of Noel and Noeline.

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, nn N °?,i a ff Noehne, some years back, had each a long, °f o f. , st . of convictions, and were both considered disy hopeless. There was, however, a genuine affec-twb-M Ben . them -„ and although at the time this led to vet it nrnloH IS “ d accumulating more reprobation, ami M l h6 ht i e Ilvmg s P ark of good which, fanned ftfnnw’w! tl ' rned mto a respectable hearth-fire. The nnmg began by a prison innovation, visits from “ good” gm i g " V- 16111 their own standards of mantrn«inn” d i als ‘ Noehne at the time resented the innirTntn’th Came a , nasty coM draught, this whiff of clean air into the psychical atmosphere of the prison. The comst™ £ Slu -S Pile- Then H h.ppS, i nrt tftL , J hat a neW war dress won her robust fancv; that £,i W ° *? W ° rked together on their lump that Noehne, shortly after her subsequent release deSJ** h Ut iH Ut the booze -” She decided, moreover, mm S )e * sh ° uld cut out, too, and that he should maintain her by steady work. She decided, in fact to set un a house, to keep it “ nice,” to admit no bad company and to be known as Mrs Noel.” All which her good strong wi! actnaliy brought to pass. Then came the hated Police” who must needs want to “ put Noel away again on that silly old maintaining charge.” There was nothing for it b ’ f to ,?° nsult . one o f “ them prison-ladies”—Miss M. With m S i entr^ c ® duite a flood of light came pouring m- n °f only on the immediate problem, but upon the whole case Noel v the Law.” For Noel, having no money to pay a lawyer, had never faced his charge, but had simply tried to dodge, succeeding when his luck was in, but generally going over the hill for the umpteenth time on the same old charge.” Miss M., for the sake of preserving the pair s manifest upward trend, took the necessarv steps and the matter was adjusted, as it could and should have been long before. Dominia, however, which has out-door departments for her Hospitals, has none for her Courts though these would clear away many “ offences” due onlv to ignorance. Having disposed of one trouble Miss M then turned round and asked Noel—“ Why don’t vou mamv Noehne?” Floods more light on further floods of

TIM AND CO

helplessness! Noel, it appeared, would be only too delighted to marry Noeline, but—the Law wouldn’t let him! There was an impediment. Again Miss M. came to the rescue, for the impediment was removable. “ Though a fine dance we had with it,” she reported, “ so I don’t wonder those infants didn’t see how, and just didn’t bother. Anyway, it was fixed up at last, and one fine evening there was a wedding in a Manse parlour that was the most decorous thing you ever saw. To be sure, the bride and bridegroom arrived in a limousine together, which maybe is not usual; and the bride was attended by a prison wardress and two “ prison-ladies,” and that, maybe, out of prison, is not usual either. But at any rate the bride matched the other women so well in dress and demeanour that the Minister had to ask which of the four Noel was to marry! . . . As for Noel, he not only looked as good as gold, but after the ceremony he actually paid the parson with some! After which we all piled into the car together and sped to the happy pair’s usual home, where the bride had provided the prettiest little wedding-cake, all over silver bells. Unfortunately the cake could not be displayed to the neighbours, acquainted already for months with “ Mr and Mrs Noel.” Noeline must fairly have ached to, all the same. For wasn’t she now “really respectable at last?”

And outwardly “ respectable” she long remained. “ H’m, got a lot to lose now, haven’t I?” she demands proudly, looking round on house and garden both beautifully kept. Latterly she has rebuked Miss M. for “ being foolish.” Noel is doing well, too. A year or so since, it is true, he put us in mind of the little maid who found the joys of Heaven (as depicted by Mamma) too severely grown-up—

“ Mummy,” she said, “ if I am very good indeed all the week, would God perhaps excuse me now and then of a Saturday afternoon, for a game with the little devils?” For Noel, left a legacy of several pounds, “ blew” the whole of it at one delicious party to which his Noeline he had not bidden. She discovered this, however, as soon as he reached home, and although he had escaped the Police on his way, it may be doubted whether, on arrival, ho thought his luck altogether “ in.”

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■*" F ? r ’” she told us > bursting with indignation, “ I had intended to spend that money of his on buying a motor car. Later, she actually did acquire a car, and in it went tor a joy-ride which almost took her back to prison. But not quite! So impressed was the Court with her absence from it for some eight or nine years, that she was let off with a fine—and a publicity she would much rather have gone without. It was a timely reminder and it did some good.

JOE AND CO

Joe’s crime was a loathsome one—incest. “ What a brute! What a beast!” do you say? I did, when I heard of it; and I fear I was far from pleased, a little later, to receive a letter from the man himself.

“ I have taken the pen in my hand,” it said, “ to write you a few lines as I am under the impression that you take great interest in prisoners well-fair. I am very much ashamed of myself to have to write to you ... I have committed a very serious offence ... I was verry verry drunk at the time and I have never remember anything about the affair but my owen countrymen found me guilty. . . The drink was my trouble and downfawl to this crime. I have not always been drinking, only the past few years I took to the drink. I was before this happened a very clean-living man which you may see if you could call and see my wife.” (He gave also the names of his employers, and of the Church of which he had been an active member until drink took charge). “ Yes, my word, I ought to be kicked, I am very much ashamed of myself.”

To this frank letter I seem to have sent an equally frank reply, for he next thanks me for my “ most straight forwarded letter.” “ Yes,’’ he says, “ You wrote it to the point. . . I feel like kicking myself ... no pen can write the feeling I have got for night after night I sit and think what Mr Booze has done for me. . . What a fool! I have been spending my hard earning like I done just to keep them fat pub house men ... no more for this chicken now I will say. ... I am and had been a good man, but when that drink got holt of me I was no man at all, only a drunkin Pig now.”

Asked what started him drinking, since drink can’t make “ drunkin pigs” of those who don’t drink it, he cries: “ Oh my, you have come to the point and the part that aches so much. . . . My wife charged me with carrying on with another young woman. ... I only laugh at her but as the years went on it got so serious. ... I took a drink to drown my sorrows, and the more I drank the more this would play on my mind. Now I said look some

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day you will have to pay dearly for what you have said I will give you cause. Maybe now she has this in he heart . . . but when I said I would give her cause, nr God, I never meant to do to my owen flesh and blood.”

Miss M. visited the wife, a decent, starved-looking litth body, working hard to support her five children. Joe, sht said, had really been all right till he began drinking, abou five years before the catastrophe. Latterly he had beer quite unspeakable, and one night had nearly murdered hei with an axe. Yet somehow there had still survived a rea affection in the family for the husband and father who hac so disgraced the name he gave them. Even the pool daughter had forgiven him. Even the doubly-outragec wife wrote to him once a week. At Christmas she sent hirr “ a little bit of everything we had ourselves,” earned as it was by her own hands. He had, it appeared, before the reign of King “ Booze” been, according to his lights, an unusually fond family-man. “ The children always looked for me on pay nights for there was always plenty of sweeties and fruit. Of course the wife would buy them some also, but I would stuff them up and make them sic, ah, ah, when I think of it, I have been a good father to them all, I have never punished any of them. Night after night when they were small in arms walking the floor with them till early hours in morning then off to work dogtired for want of sleep. ... I would not give in so as I could keep those littel mouths full.”

He had been a good playmate, too, and loved what he calls a “ cherry jock” (cheery joke). He had brought into the home that little bit of sparkle that children love so much. “ I was not always drunk,” he explains. “ I used to go to hear the Band playing, and take the wife and oldest girl to the pictures, and on Saturday the wife and I would go fishing. . . “ Once,’’ he continues, “ away on the grassy downs she had rubber heels on her shoes which slipped on the dried grass, and it was no fun for her, but it was fun for me to see her slipping down, get up, down again. ... I got Hell for laughing at her . . . poor thing, she was so frightened she shaked like an earthquake.”

JOE AND CO

Sometimes he would slip naturally into little bits of rhyme, such as children relish. “ Suppose you were free for just one day,” he was asked, “ how would you spend it?” He responds with glee:—“ O my, you have hit the nail straight on the head. ... I had a whole week thinking this out for you. I had all sorts of stuff and then I put 2 and 2 together and it came out just like this —

If I had a day, a whole day free,

Then home to my wife my game would be.

And there at the door I would lift my hat

And throw it in from the old door mat

If there that hat remained secure

I’d know my chances were not so poor

And I’d follow the hat and meet them all

With a big hug here and there—Well, woulden you?

When we’d talk of the past and the future too

But from then on sir, it might be quiet

Course I would surely like to stay all night

But here is the end of that perfect day

With my wife near I would humbly pray

But I’d curse the one who came for me

At the end of one only day I am free.”

He does not sound so very bad, do you think, now that the “ bull and tiger,” the “ brute and beast” (still lurking, alas! in most of us!) have given place to the man, sober and in his right senses again. “I am not so black as I am painted you know,” he pleads, “ we are all born but we are not all berried yet—there are such things as wowsers, take anything behind the door, but I have been a fool straight and open with it all.”

It may be remembered in Joe’s favour that the strong sex-appetite is in itself no bad and evil thing, although civilisation demands that the higher qualities shall be stronger still. Moreover, while the law does not and probably cannot recognise drunkenness as an excuse, it is clear, from the moral point of view, that the problem of responsibility is not a normal one, when passions are unleashed by drugs such as alcohol. Nevertheless, Joe’s “ civilisation” in regard to womanhood had probably never

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been at a very high level. “ I think he is still thinking of women only as females,” observed Miss M., and after a consultation with his wife she took a hand with him, to his extreme delight. “ Advice from a woman makes me think more special over it,” he says, and her first visit was “ the only good cackle I’ve had these years and years.” She wrote to him, too, for prisons are so dull that a letter coming freshly there from the outside stands a chance of being read over and over again. And she found that his favourite topic was ever that of Sex. “We have much to learn from the common beasts, and meanwhile,” he wrote, “ men and women exists only for the fulfilment of nature, or the laws of procreation.” Met with the flat assertion, by a woman, that this might be true of cows, but that women were really more than female animals, he seemed frankly astonished. “Do you suppose,” he wonders, “ that Adam could have foisted that apple upon Eve?” This may be a quotation, but the next argument at any rate was all his own. “ A married man must be the boss.” “And booze the boss of him?” she asked, and had him there. “ You have got me thinking hard this week,” he confesses, “ I am trying to cut the devil from my soul.”

“ I found that he loved stories,” writes Miss M. again, “ so I took to sending him some, clipped from magazines, stories which gave the woman’s point of view about home, and work and so on. These were quite novel to him, and very welcome. He had the rudiments, too, of a beautysense, and was unexpectedly charmed by a calendar at Christmas. There was a pretty bunch of flowers on it which he was never done admiring.” “ My favourite flowers,” wrote this “ brute,” “ is mignonette and snowdrops. Always did like a flower in my coat. Sense of beauty, well I did have one time, when women and girls,” he slyly adds, “ had lovely long hair, and no ledges (legs), but ah, now you see them all ledges and no hair!”

This interchange of opinions with a woman he respected, and the attention to himself which gave him such enjoyment, gradually had its effect. He conceded that “ women have become better pals for men since they have entered into a greater variety of provessions,” and he seemed, in

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the matter of Sex, to be getting on to two feet, instead of four. He began to write to me about “ making myself into a real man.” “ I am going to try hard to do so,” he goes on, “ I myself knows well which is the best life ... I sit and think what a kind-hearted woman Miss M. must be to write such nice kind letters—l have been low rather than bad, but I must tell you that I am climbing up high but not too fast, slow and sure. I only hope with the help of my good God He may give me power to overcome these bad babbits for the future. lam very hard at work studying out a few inventions—and I am trying to do something and be something. I have made up my mind never to touch any more drink, or do anything wrong again as far as my will can bear it.”

A fortunate accident sent him to a Hospital “ outside” soon after this, and gave him a chance to test the resolution at least against drink. It was Christmas time, and stout was served round as a treat. Joe stood firm. “ And then at night,” he told his confidante, “ there I had to sleep with the rest of them that had drunk the stuff all round me, and their breaths stinking of it, and it fair sickened me, and, says I to meself, ‘ Good God, and did my wife have to sleep with me, and me stinking like theml The poor woman! and night after night!”

Given a bit of friendly guidance, re-united to the church he reveres, we may well hope that Joe will go straight on release. Certainly he is a better fortified man, because his desires have become a bit humanised. In addition, he recognises some of his limitations and knows some of his pit-falls. Such as he are especially the task for women, for they, whether they are mated or not, are born “mothers of men.” They know how to handle these human cubs, ungainly and unseemly cubs sometimes, though still no Calibans, more skilfully than we. Perhaps it is that their appeal is never to force. “I am not a self-starter,” writes our “ monster” humbly to his little “ old maid” friend; adding sagely, “ Often we discover what will do by finding out what will not do, and probably He (sic) who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”

Jude, “ in” for rape, seems to have become intoxicated

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by passion, rather than by drinking, and after-events showed that the girl was not so innocent as she seemed. Genuinely fond all the time of his delicate little wife, he burst out sobbing like a child when she went to see him in prison. “ I never thought you’d have anything to do with me again,” he whispered. Her subsequent privations and sufferings, and those of his three little girls, all devoted to Daddy, have cut him to the heart. “To think that I have myself to blame for it, well it’s terrible. I’ve never done calling myself names for the position I have placed them all in and will endeavour to make up to them all for my madness.” “ I’m terribly afraid for her” he writes of his ailing wife, “ I trust she will be spared so that I can show her how much I think and care.” Like Joe, Jude is just a strongly-sexed, affectionate male in the hard process of being made man. “ You can’t control power till you have some,” and such as he have power in plenty. It is the control, the voluntary control, that needs to be taught. In Jude’s case, the wife’s magnanimity, and his own deep devotion now to her, and to the children he has robbed of their father’s care, are teaching it. The “ next step up” for all these immature personalities seems, in general, to be best supplied by family life, family love, and a due sense of family responsibility.

Jerry, who has committed the same kind of crime, cannot be convinced of the heinousness by the same arguments. He is unmarried, middle-aged, quite undomesticated, and he stoutly maintains, as a justification,—“ the woman tempted me—l only done what nature endowed me,” even though the “ woman” was under the age of consent. He is a bachelor, used to a roving life, and to strong drink. But he has a capacity for friendship, he is very honest, he has a proper contempt for “ sneaks” and “ snakes,’’ and, though he considers his punishment quite unfair, shows the manhood to stand up to it. “ I have told you before,” he writes, “ that I would take it like a man, never fear that I will overcome this difficulty as I have others.” He has meanwhile come to have a great respect for the “ faithfulness” of Miss M.—Which is something.

Jealousy and pride can let the tiger loose, it seems

JOE AND CO

quite as readily as liquor or lust. Angus tried to shoot his wife, because he “ saw red, and couldn’t stop himself,” through something she did. He is a prosperous tradesman, and quite a decent man, fully aware that he did wrong. And Jonathan, falsely accused of cheating at cards, brooded over his hurt till it became intolerable, and then, still somewhat the worse for liquor, went in search of his accuser. He struck a fatal blow and his sentence was virtually “life.” In prison he went on brooding. “ There is a man here,” wrote William, moved to sympathy with a nature in pride and strength so like his own—“ elderly, and with a terrible long sentence. He is straight as a die and the hardest worker I have ever met. A person in here who is doing a very long term, unless he has a friend he can communicate with, or, in other words, something to look forward to—gets very callous towards everyone. And I shouldn’t like to see happen to this chap what I have seen happen to scores of others and very nearly including myself—namely, going bad in “ cold storage.’ ” We had seen that very thing happen too, so we sought out Jonathan, through William’s good offices, and found a morose, proud, honourable nature, limited in outlook and sympathy, and accustomed to find in drink the only enhancement of life. He owned no family ties and desired none, but he was honest to the core. “ I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t do it, for I done it; and I’m not sorry that I hit him, for he deserved it; but lam sorry he died,” he wrote. Afterwards, when he had come to value that brightening of atmosphere which friendly contact from outside brings, he confided that for the first five years of his sentence he had lived in a hell of Hate, the murky cell leaving its shadow upon the character. “ Many nights” he said, “ I have paced around the cell with some of the worst thoughts that it is possible for a man to think, nothing but hatred. Night after night I used to be awake and stare out into the darkness, and staring back at me was the one word— Alone. My face didn’t seem to belong to me at all, it seemed a curious unfamiliar face.” It had needed but a very little more, in fact, for the tiger to devour the man altogether and turn dour Jonathan into a raging maniac. What good

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would that have done Dominia? William was just in time to save his mate’s reason, and by and by that unjust sentence was revised. Jonathan has long been free of prison, but he is alas, not free from the dourness nor the drinking. His “ tiger” cage has been strengthened, but the “ tiger” is far from tamed.

PAUPER SPIRITS

It is not the bull or the tiger, as in Joe, Jonathan & Co., that lurks beneath the threshold of such natures as Old And it’s. It is more like the ass—or the sheep. ,

“Andy really was a good old man,” one discerning officer observed to me shortly after the old fellow’s death in prison. And so he was, though the law—being, as is well known a “ Hass” itself—not only decided otherwise, but even branded him “incorrigible.’’ A capable tradesman, and something of an inventor, he could appreciate and reciprocate kindness, had a keen sense of honour, was most industrious, and, in his own way was genuinely and deeply religious. “ He’s been coming in and out this thirty years to my knowledge” said another, less discerning, officer, with a sneer, as he ushered the shamfaced Andy to the interview he had begged. Tears trickled unchecked down his miserable old face as he told me of the good friends he had had, the distress he had caused, of his wretchedness and his remorse. Tears do trickle very often down such feeble faces, and not crocodiles’ tears, either. Your crocodile is a “ very different bird.”

“ Does every hour of her sentence, don’t she” says lightweight Nina, quarter pitying, three-quarters scornful, of Annie, another of these weaklings. They are no “ kids,” like Nina—they are too limp for play, too forlorn for fun; and I cannot recall one of them who was not cast down in gaol, and ravaged incessantly by conscience. They are not “ feeble-minded.” On the contrary their intelligence and education are often above the average. They certainly are not “ bad” for they never wish to hurt even a fly, and long and loud are their lamentations over the hurts they have always, unluckily, inflicted upon those who love them. They are often quite lovable, too, even though, to the last degree, exasperating. “ Banana-mentalities” they are wellabove, but “ pauper-spirits” they may, very aptly, be termed. One is sometimes tempted to wish, for their own poor sakes, that they could each and all be assigned—to firm and kind masters —as slaves. They could then be very happy and most useful.

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Slaves, as it is, they are, but the very miserable slaves of bad masters. “ When I look at my past life and see how I’ve wrecked it, I can hardly believe it to be true,” wrote Bertie. “It’s not as if I had to learn how to behave, for I had been living the life of an honourable citizen, and then I put a foot on the slippery slope, and down I went. There were no dishonest intentions committed,” he pleads, but “ I’ve been a fool and a dunce. . . . For about nine years I had been at my trade and having to stop because of my health I took to hawking, which did not pay. One day, finding a window open and no one at home, I, on the impulse, went in and found in a drawer a few pounds— It was a pity I did not get a scare at the first attempt” he reflects sensibly, “ but I got caught in about three weeks. The prosecuting side asked the magistrate to follow back my career. But it was only the dishonest part. They did not know or try to folloic hack any other part, and there were seven charges in all. I got six months. On discharge I went to work, but was dismissed from two good billets on my employer hearing that I had been in prison—l started to drink which soon took control of what weaknesses I had in me, and I went to prison again for theft which I repeatedly did.” So it happened that he was soon ranked as “ incorrigible.” “It is all on our part in not impressing ourselves firmly the disaster we put ourselves in if we take the wrong step” he adds humbly, and then, with the kindly feeling common to such weaklings, “ Hoping Miss Annie will not be like me, to go on making life a Hell.”

“I am just an unfortunate fool, who has acted on the spur of impulse when under the stress of heavy worry,” writes Colin, for ever “in and out.” “Is there such a thing as a true friend,” asks wistful Alfred. “ One’s mother and one’s God are to my mind the only friends a man or woman has, and if you lose one or the other it is all up with you—Only now and then I’ve took a spell at the Booze which always landed me back in prison for some paltry offence. O to God that I had a friend, a good true friend in the years that have gone. What a difference it could have made in my life.” True enough possibly? “It was

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my mother’s death drove me to drinking,” sobs Alice. And of course, in many such cases, when one quests after causes—“ It was the drink that did it.”

But how came “ the drink” to get a chance with natures generally so sensitive and refined, and conscience awake? “ Well, I was so miserable, 1 thought maybe just one glass would cheer me up, but it’s the first glass that does the mischief, it always leads to more,” moans Bess. “It was a business tangle, and I thought just one glass would clear my head,” laments Andy, whose speciality was valueless cheques, drawn on Banks where he really—once—had an account. Now this is not at all the same thing as Tim’s gay “ grogging up,” is it? Nor is it the same as Noeline’s reason for a “ glass instead of a nice cup of coffee,” given Miss M—once when she was a neophyte and Noeline a “concertina.” “ Coffee for Booze, Miss?” cried Noeline in hearty derision. “ Lord love you, I could never get merry on coffee!” In all these cases, if we look deeper, we shall see men and women seeking some “ enhancement of life”— some escape from the unbearable, through the too-low door of the senses. Maybe the weakling is thus, in the merciful words of Vivekananda, the Indian teacher, “ only looking for God in a bottle, which is the wrong place in which to find Him.” The weakling is perhaps a shade more conscious in his search than the banana-babe. He really is stretching out for help, and that is why he is generally, quite ineffectively- “ religious” and prayerful. Would that the version of Christianity commonly preached in prison inculcated more of the positive, self-conquering, remedial life taught by the Master, and less of the putting of one’s burdens on somebody else’s back! Prisoners are already over-fond of misplacing the burdens. What these weak wills require is not a let-off, nor a mere resting place

—but “ a bigger hand for the little hand to slip into” and a guide whose understanding will give purpose to the faltering steps.

“Why do they falter so?” Well, many a spoilt child, taught from infancy to expect gratification without exertion, is among the stumblers. “Aurelius,” his sister confesses, “ was always given his own way at home,” and now

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Aurelius, young, agreeable, and with no desire whatever to do wrong, can’t deny himself “ a glass” whenever things get a bit hard. So now he is “ back,” by no means for the first time, for “ stealing when drunk.” This time, in despair of ever stopping otherwise, he gave himself up—poor chap! Angie, too, generous and charming and good hearted, says she “ often hears the key lock her in with a sigh of relief,” which is scarcely what her over-doting parents can have wished their only child to come to. And Warren’s mother writes: “ It is a foolish thing to treat as a criminal any unfortunate creature who is afflicted like my dear boy. Will they ever have understanding enough to see the folly of it? Warren was a good, clever boy, with always sympathy for the under-dog. Everyone loved him, and as you say, he is sensitive and highly strung. He was a great success for six or seven years at his business—was made an inspector, travelled; to get the business he had to meet men who asked him to drink with them. Up till that time he had never tasted strong drink. I was always afraid of it for him with his temperament, for his paternal grandfather was a victim to the same cravings, but he never did anything againt the Law like my poor black sheep— When the craving was on him he never left the house. Warren’s father is a very just man but has no sympathy with the wrong-doer; he told me never to mention his name to him.” Which sounds a good deal more like pride than justice, and certainly gave no help to the hapless son! Here is Warren’s own story, after his second conviction for dishonesty. The craving had been on him and, according to the custom in Dominia, he had, like old Andy, been punished as an ordinary “ falsifier.”

“ It is impossible for me to give you an adequate idea of how badly I feel over what has happened —l have lost everything, even my hope for the future. It is a terrible thing to have to say, but I am convinced now that where I am is the only safe place for me—You have no idea—people read and hear about remorse and contrition, but don’t know the weight of it. When I know the sorrow I have caused, the weight on my soul is as heavy as a mountain —I’m afraid now my case is a hopeless one, and . . .

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I am doomed to a life-time of sorrow and suffering not only as far as I am concerned, but those near and dear to me. lam utterly miserable and despondent to do much but contemplate suicide. When a man loses all that life holds dearest to him, and feels beyond the pale, flagellation with scorpions is a mere nothing in comparison with the remorse he experiences, and the fact that his loss is due to his own folly and weakness only makes his contrition more intense.” —Felo de se in fact appeared the only solution when a clarion call came in a letter from an old friend—“Do not despair!” “ That letter,” he wrote some time after, “ saved me from myself.” In the interval he had at least learned something, something, indeed, that his admired father and his admirable wife had not yet learned; for he was able to write:—“ I have reached a point now where I couldn’t possibly take it upon myself to judge any man, however bad he was or appeared to be. If I can help him, 1 will. This world would be a vastly different place were there a few more comrades-in-arms to help us fight the battle we must fight against ourselves, a battle which lasts from the cradle to the grave. The test of a man’s metal is the crucible of trial, and one can’t dodge temptation all life long—it must be vanquished and overcome.”

But it is not John Barleycorn who alone enslaves these weaklings. Sometimes it is John Smith, or Jane. Put in prison with natures stronger but more depraved, Bertie, Angie, and such are often dogged by these on release and, with the threat of knowledge and the bribe of refuge, they become easy prey and useful tools. (What a way prison has of reforming delinquents and protecting the public!) Bertie “ received” for some of these prison friends. Nance, and worse than Nance, make in prison the acquaintance of fresh “ recruits.” And Amy was for years in the grip of two abominable brothers who used her according to their will. She served them, poor silly thing, and, in serving them served also many a sentence they and their male pals should have served. Death at last relieved his country of one of these brothers, and it was thought that Amy might now elude the other. Work at a safe distance was found, not without difficulty. Profuse in her gratitude, and with every

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appearance of thankfulness that it was over, she told loathsome details of her slavery. Will it be believed that, within a week or two, she had written and given her “ bully” her address! Before long, perhaps mercifully, but still in his stead, she was back in goal, and there Miss M. found her. “ O Amy, why did you let him know where you were?” “ She looked up at me” wrote Miss M.—“ with those great blue eyes, all sunken with crying and deep with pain, and was dumb. But that look of helpless agony said enough. ‘ Are you really so fond of him after all, poor lass?’ said I. ‘ Silly fond!’ she said.”

“ Well, our dander was well aroused by this disgusting defeat,” writes the dauntless Miss M— “ So, when the next release drew near and the “ bully” sent his “ dear mother” to see his victim and arrange her home-coming to him (they took no notice of her otherwise, while “ in”) we prevailed on her to agree to return to her own State —too far away for Mr Spider to visit her and fetch her back. For two years or so she wrote thence to us, more or less happily. But we know our Amy too well, poor soul, to feel certain that no other spider, or spideress, has since enslaved her.”

“ About Amelia we are happier,” said Miss M—on one of her visits. “ Recently she came to see me. It is now quite three years since she bravely went back home last time. She hadn’t had a holiday and had really done so well that she deserved one. There she sat, comfortable and content and very neat, and told proudly of having been offered drink on the way by Blanche whom she had originally met in prison, but ‘ found the strength to turn her down. Not that I think myself better than her, you know, child,’ she went on, ‘ but —Oh, I said, you must excuse me, I said, I don’t drink any more and I’m in a bit of a bustle, I said, and with that I got away, God giving me strength. Really remarkable He is, you know, God is. Yes, by Jove, dear, that He is! Better than any patient medicines!” “Well,” finished Miss M—with a thump of the fist at the end of her laugh, “ Dear Amelia is a booby, of course, but she’s a booby triumphant. It hasn’t been easy for her either, drudging day after day with no ‘ let up.’ I reckon she can

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well afford to be a little absurd, and still give a point or two to us smug things that have never been tempted. She shall have my hat with the violets.”

Amelia will love that flowery hat all the more because it has crowned Miss M’s— adored head first. Warren had fresh heart put into him by that letter from a comrade-in-arms, saying, “Do not despair!” which probably cost the writer little time or trouble —only a little thought and understanding. Responsive, sensitive, humble and grateful, there is often the most excellent human material in these weaklings of ours. Would that the community would take more trouble to fend for them when they are defenceless, guide them when they are lost, shelter them from the storms! Most of them would gladly die for such preservers. But dying is a passive thing and needs no effort. It is living that is so hard for these; living without the right taskmasters and protectors.

YOUNG LOCHINVAR

Of Young Lochinvar his mother wrote—“ He is an affectionate, high-spirited lad, his loving nature has been his downfall. He has a weakness for clothes and cleanliness is one of his best points. He never knew the love of a Dad —got into bad company and went first to an industrial school, then to a Reformatory—he has never had a chance —would have made a pretty girl—he has a lovely complexion any girl might be proud of.”

He had; but I didn’t feel so sure that he could rightly be proud of having a wise mother. As for his “ loving nature” there was little doubt about that and he very soon put it beyond dispute. Beryl, one of our “ banana-babes,” first sent us on his trail, though, at the moment, it was not she, but one Pearl who was in possession of his accommodating heart. Pearl, however, it appeared, was definitely turning him off, because he had recently returned to gaol, and “ I must have someone to love,” he mourned. “ Don’t you think you could put in a little word for me about Beryl? Really I think it has been Beryl all the time. I don’t think you will think me conceited when I say that it lies in my power to make her happiness complete. Do you ever have anybody write in such a way as I do? I don’t think so. I have never met a man yet that can talk openly on love.”

But he could; he could indeed! I have never met anyone, boy or girl, man or woman, who could do so with such plentitude and ease—and did. His letters were, in that first period, full of nothing else. “ For a person,” he wrote, “ that cannot be moved by love, there is something wrong. Life without love would be a dull, tasteless and hopeless business. I think that when one has found a soul attuned to his own, that person is on the right track of knowing the fullness of life, and not before —I don’t think anyone has caused his mother more trouble than 1 have mine, but yet she still loves me and wants me—What we want most in this country, is more love towards each other.” And all those early letters are beflowered, too, with little honeyed love-ditties, whether of his own composition or not, I never knew.

They may have been, for Lochinvar was nothing if not

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lyrical, and, if I am to believe him, both played music and sang. Here is a specimen:

A ripple of girl’s light laughter,

The scent of a girl’s soft hair;

A kiss, a caress for a moment.

Then she left him standing there

As Beryl did, I suppose, for soon: “ You might thank Miss Beryl for the kind interest she has taken in me. I have evidently made the sad mistake of being conceited and now see where it has led me—not for the first time by any means. You say, ‘Widen your idea of love!’ Well by all accounts I haven’t the slightest idea of what the word means. I have had a good try at learning, but come a cropper each time.” “ Perhaps,” he adds bravely, “ I’ll have another try later on.”

He lost no time about it. Here is part of a letter he wrote soon after —to Esmeralda:

“ One thing more, lovey, I don’t know how it will appeal to you, but I think too much of you to take you under any other circumstances, if you think that you could care enough for me I want to make you my wife as soon as we reach (another country). I know that I am not much to offer a girl, but I think that love and a good home is all that goes to make two people happy, and I will give you both Sweetheart. Perhaps you will tell yourself that I have told this to other girls. True I was engaged, but she started double-dealing with me, and I won’t stand that from anyone, lovey.—lt was through her I left the stage and started acting the goat. But one thing always leads to another, Pet, and I am happy to say that this one has led me to you. I see you sitting beside the piano whilst I play and sing to you. Time passes till the happiest moment of our lives comes, can you see it, darling? Why, you are the dear little mother of our child. There I see myself with my little wife and child, the happiest man on God’s earth.”

It might have worked, too; happy domesticity has put in tune natures far wilder and worse than that of poor little Lochinvar of those days.

But neither with Esmeralda nor anyone else was this idyl

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realised. When next we met, in the self-same place, after a lapse of several years, it was no longer a lady free to wed that was the jewel of his heart, but a matron, alas! This was one Sapphira, faithfulness to whom, I was gravely given to understand, had required his heroic return to Dominia, which he had left on his previous release. He was now no longer a “ pretty boy,” though he was incurably “ romantic” as ever, and still had, he wrote, “ the most wonderful imagination you ever heard of, but no brains.” Perhaps his brains were blinded by conceit, his worst defect. However, in other ways he had certainly changed, and for the worse. Like that of poor little “banana-Beryl”—encountered again at the same period, in another of “ these places”—Lochinvar’s charm and sweetness had faded with youth. Experience had taught him the distasteful truth that one cannot eat one’s cake and have it too. So it happened that the Romantic now posed as the Rebel.

“We are simply fated,” he cries. “The road to Easygilt eventually leads to Mug’s Inn—there is nothing in it. The trouble is we don’t see far enough. We choose the butterfly but we don’t see it broken or distressed —we are too taken up with the fun of the chase and the catch.”

I must have told him of my meeting with Beryl, for he goes on: “ Neither Beryl nor we boys (chasing) are responsible for butterflies or for desire for them. These are psychological and offer conditions that we can only alter years after, when understanding comes, and then it is too late. That is the tragedy of life and the cause of disbelief in a God. Why should some have to suffer to have things or to learn, while others are born moral or good or rich?— Why do some understand so young and Beryl not even yet? It would be nicer to be the Princess Elizabeth than Beryl’s daughter. The daughter of Beryl would be a fair game for a pitiless world. The Princess would be its protected idol —ls Beryl allowed to come to her senses? She is the soul of generosity and can’t say ‘ no’ to anyone. She has been and always will be a victim of adverse circumstances, and until she can be induced to cut herself adrift from those

YOUNG LOCHINVAR

environments that awaken the smouldering fires of generosity, passion and devilment, the poor kid will forever pay.”

“ Money rules the world. Give Beryl enough money and somebody from the self-seeking ranks of Society would marry her. Soon she would be “ respectable,” and looking down upon other brother butterflies—lf B’s mouth is twisted and bitter, it is because she has had punishment without forgiveness, and feels she couldn’t see the ending. It is because the world does not forgive that we are rebels against the world.”

Yet, “ though I have no time for men who betray women, I think you are sometimes a bit hard, —these ‘ battered butterflies’ went in with their eyes open and knew what to expect. They play with a bee till it stings them, then they want the bee killed. Once I ill-used a Chinaman because he dared accost a white woman . . . and now she is married to one. Funny cattle, women. A good woman is the most beautiful thing in the world, while a bad one is more deadly than arsenic.”

Then, characteristically: “ I am vain enough to imagine that my influence will work wonders with our little girl. Just tell her that although others and perhaps she herself may think it useless for her to attempt reformation, I know differently. Tell her I want to know if memories of the past will not induce her to try hard because I wish it. If I know little Beryl, you will see the most subdued little bundle of mischief ever. Outside the walls of a prison I have never seen her. Remember, B. was born foolish, trained foolish, and is only fulfilling the destiny of a pretty girl under such conditions.”

In justice to Dominia, it ought perhaps to be explained that she really does not “ permit” men and women prisoners to meet: in justice to Young Lochinvar, that he must not be blamed for the downfall of Beryl—that poor bedraggled “butterfly” stigmatised in Dominia press reports as a “ notorious harpy’’; and, in justice to Beryl, that much which Young Lochinvar says about her was true —except his magic influence over her, which was a myth. She appeared to have forgotten his existence.

“ The fact of the matter is,” he sums up, “ Society, while

PEOPLE IN PRISON

responsible for all the sin, hates it in the poor and helpless, and never loses a chance of hounding the caught or foundout class—and if Society tolerates a bad environment, it must put up with bad citizens, just as long sentences and harsh judges make criminals more violent. If it is true that whatever a man sows he shall reap, it is not less true that Society must expect the same result.” Yet, in the very same letter, this: “ As a matter of fact, you are what you are because you want to be that—everybody becomes what they are inclined to be.”

The intelligent reader may be left to do his own sifting of young Lochinvar’s present conclusions—which are, perhaps, not so conflicting as they seem. It may be permitted to observe, in the first place, that the baby undoubtedly does succumb to conditions that do not harm the grown man. In the second place, if you only “ lift” the desires one step up, you “ lift” the personality. In the third place, a touch of “iron entering the soul” may strengthen it. Certainly young Lochinvar, the rebel, is a long way ahead of Young Lochinvar the troubadour. He has begun to think; he feels more deeply. His next advance? I don’t know—yet.

RODERICK DHU

It was a girl prisoner, who had known him “ outside,” that introduced me to Rod. “Do get hold of him,” said she, “ for he’s got such a lot of good in him. But everybody’s down on him and he’s always in trouble.” This was only a woman’s judgment and I soon found out what the “ whole round world” thought. “ What, him ? Don’t touch him, he’s a rascal, he’s a young wretch, he’s hopeless!” cried one friendly and experienced official after another; and I daresay they w r ould claim to this day, if any of them survive, that events proved them right. For my part, I can never be thankful enough that I did ‘ touch him.’ There are worse things in life than pain, and there are few things we can so ill afford to forget as the memory of a stout, a loyal and a generous spirit.

The girl pal had evidently managed to give me the right ‘ password,’ for my very first letter—Rod was imprisoned in a distant town—showed that confidence had been established. The reply was immediate, in a blotted boyish scrawl written in a large round hand. The whole thing reminded me of nothing so much as the tempestuous onset of a puppy called by name, after being lost, and starved, and badly bruised. And very like a pup, in lots of ways the writer of that letter proved—a really good pup, too, with plenty of points. Wild and reckless he was, all growls and teeth at the merest glimpse of “ the boot,” and abominably mis-trained from birth. But withal, spirited, strong, very intelligent, and deeply affectionate.

“ I’m glad to say,’’ he cried, in that first reply of his, “ that I have never had a letter like yours before in my life —it hadn’t a word of religion in it.” He had been deluged, it appeared with “ religious letters” and Testaments; now he turned eagerly towards the hope of “ a real friend.” “My idea of a friend,” he wrote when asked for a definition, “ is a person whose society is congenial to me at all times, one who understands one’s mind and disposition at all times, one that would not desert you at a crisis, in short, who would stick through thick and thin. This is my idea of a friend. I have only had one friend

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like this. When we were apprentices on the same ship together his trouble would be mine and mine his. It was our first trip to sea. He died, poor chap, off East Africa. I thought I should have died, too. I wish I had, it would have saved myself and other people lots of trouble.”

His “ history” was rather unusual. His family, in Old England, was quite well-to-do and he had had a Grammar School education till he was 14. Then, on his own demand, he went to sea. From a worldly point of view he had had “ every advantage,” but behind the good school was a bad home. Asked once concerning his mother—“ She hated me,” he blurted out—“ she drank, that’s why I never touch the stuff.” His father, moreover idolising his only son, gave him too much freedom and far too much money. So it came that a sensitive and difficult boy was left without the most “ socialising” of all influences—mother love

—and was thrown back upon a father who sought to restore the balance without discretion or discipline. The mature age of fifteen found Rod ashore by himself in a foreign land, with plenty of cash and “ friends’”—of a sort. Soon, without cash or friends, he was at sea again, drifting hither and thither, until at the age of eighteen he arrived in Dominia. Deserting his ship, he found himself, within three months, for the first time in his life, in a Court and charged with stealing. “ And I had stolen, too,” he admitted. “ I couldn’t find work, I didn’t know anyone, and I couldn’t beg.”

Now, most unfortunately, on this, the threshold of his career of crime, Rod was the victim of a grave blunder on the part of the administration of justice. He was mistaken for a certain “ crook’’ who was “ wanted” at the time; and he was clapped into gaol for three years with the brand “ incorrigible.” He was, you will remember, only eighteen years of age, and his own offence merely the petty theft of a lad driven to desperation. It has been stated that the mistake was discovered, but could not be put right. Neither at this stage, however, nor at the first hearing, was legal advice available. The sailor lad knew nothing of the “ rights of accused persons,” and it was nobody’s business to inform him. He was, as so many are

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under such circumstances, utterly confused, and so was left to certain conviction and committal to one of those clean and tidy “ schools of crime” which in Dominia are called Prisons.

Rod was an apt pupil and he quickly graduated. He went in an “ accidental” offender. He came out a determined criminal, a criminal by conviction —in more senses than one.

Smarting from disgrace, maddened by injustice, he threw himself, while in prison, whole-heartedly upon the side of those “ enemies of society” to whom society had so carelessly introduced him. He learned how to steal better, so that he might the better “ get his own back” or “ get evens” as these men say. To these “ comrades” he transferred all his abundant stock of loyalty. “If you will call me a pig, then you can be sure I’ll act like one,’’ I once heard a schoolboy of just Rod’s stamp say to his sister; and for nine years this lad did, in fact, live the life of a criminal and outlaw. “It doesn’t matter how I succeed in the future,” he explained to me, “ I shall always have the prison stigma. This is why I have not thought it worth while to straighten up. It is all very well for some to say ‘ what rot,’ people who say this kind of thing should be made to go through the experience and see.”

“ If, when I got out,” he wrote later, “ anything began to be missed, what sort of a chance do you think I should have? Guilty or not, it would be ‘ Good night, Nurse,’ for about five or six years.” (Oh, tragic prophecy!) “ The sneak and the liar I see more of here in one day than I suppose YOU do in a year, but still they are only human beings. I sometimes despise myself for despising them. If I had had the nerve to cadge off someone when I first came to this country I shouldn’t have been in here to-day. Anyway, I’d sooner do what I did than be a cadger.”

• ~~ “ —— ‘O • Christmas drew near, and he wrote—“ I wonder if you could get permission for me to take up a collection among the boys here—to give a good time to some poor unfortunates at Christmas time. Christmas is a very awkward time for people who have no friends or money or home to go to. First time I was released I was in a similar position,

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and I should know.” He had alas! discovered how sketchy are Dominia’s ideas of after-care for the released convict.

Our friendship prospered. He seemed a manly fellow, a regular rollicking Jack Tar, such a schoolboy and so independent, that by and by another characteristic came upon me with something of a shock. I was later than usual with my letter, and he was heart-broken. “ You haven’t written!” he wrote, and then humbly, “ Have I said anything to hurt your feelings? I would not hurt your feelings for the world.” The same sensitive heart is shown in another letter. Old Mrs D. “and her sport of a daughter” had visited Rod as well as William. “ Miss D.,” he says, “ tells me she hasn’t heard from you for a long time, so I told her I would ask you to write to her. You will, won’t you, even if you have to miss me.” . . . “ She has a bad cold and she didn’t look at all like herself,” he added compassionately.

By this time the leaven of “ being understood” was working strongly. “ I woke up this morning and said to myself—Rod, old chap, many happy returns of the day! lam twenty-eight, getting on, eh? And just as silly as ever. . . . This is the ninth birthday in here, and the last . . . What a great deal has happened to me in this one short year. I remember that first letter of yours, the surprise I felt. . . .It is just wonderful what knowing that somebody really does care what becomes of one will do for one.”

I learned from other sources that his conduct was changing rapidly. He had dropped swearing and “ looking for trouble.” In due course this reacted on the prison treatment. “ I have been moved,” he writes, “ from the strong-rooms to a first-class cell —It makes one feel that he can be trusted and I can see the need of discipline, too. I could see that a year ago but couldn’t stand it at any price. Now I don’t know half my time there is such a thing.” Then proudly, “ I have not had a bad mark for twelve months.”

Loyalty to his mates, bred of common suffering, remained, however, unshaken. Three men in that prison were in correspondence with me at the time, and a fourth,

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Cornelius, had announced to them that he was going to do the same, and “ work” me, on release, for his own ends. The reactions of the three to this were characteristic. All felt that I should be warned, but they were all hampered by the Prison censorship of letters. William gave me a cautious—“ Be very careful with C.” Flamboyant “Young Lochinvar,” only suppressing the man’s name, laid bare the whole “ vile plot” with a flourish, vastly enjoying his role of “ Hero protecting a friend.” It was Rod who produced the following, “ I want your advice on a matter that has been worrying me . . . Supposing you had a friend and you esteemed him very much, one who did what he could for all unfortunates. Suppose we call him F.— and suppose there’s another, C—an acquaintance, who, to your knowledge makes plans to abuse F’s—friendship. Would you think it your duty as a friend to make the facts known to F? I happen to find myself in this position and, you see, I rather shrink from the idea of doing it—l don’t think I could do a fellow-prisoner a bad turn if I tried.”

No, he couldn’t, as he proved afterwards. At the time he was mightily relieved to be told that “F— knew enough to be safe from victimisation.”

At last came the jubilant cry. “ I can go out on parole! You cannot imagine how I feel about this, and how grateful I am to you and Mr A.— (the governor). At first I felt like crying and then laughing. Oh, I can’t explain how I felt properly—Mr. A—said, ‘ H’m, I told you you could work out your own salvation’—lt just goes to show how sympathy and understanding will bring the best to the surface in most of us, doesn’t it? I hope I never get like I was a year ago again. It was just terrible. I used to think everybody was my enemy. I was just embittered, but know better now.’’

In one letter, referring to the foolish act of another, he does a necessary bit of discriminating about “ sympathy.” “ I did the same thing once, I only did it out of sympathy, but I found it wasn’t the right kind of sympathy, either for myself or the other person.” It was a lesson much needed by his hot heart. If only he had lived to learn it more thoroughly!

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Well, out he came, went straight, and went forward by leaps and bounds. He found a job, earned the liking and respect of his work-mates, and after only a few months, won the love of a good girl. But the shadow of those nine wasted years was over him. You, who live without molestation under the protection of the “ law,” what do you know of “ being hounded” by it? You, who look upon prisoners merely as enemies of Society, being “ justly punished” for their crimes, how can you know the social stunting which may come of those years of prison-training? You, whose loyalty is with the hunter, how can you understand the loyalty which binds together the hunted?

It is not possible to develop any human being normally in prisons, places, however clean and “ healthy,” which keep the victim away from the opposite sex, from children, from the sick, and from all the tenderer, socializing emotions, places which shelter him too, from all responsibility and initiative. He is not called upon to face emergencies and choose lines of conduct, and so to develop judgment, resource and social understanding. You may keep him in the very best cold storage—and in Dominia we pride ourselves that we do —but he cannot grow socially, and very often he doesn’t really “ keep.” He simply goes bad.

My friend Rod, when he came “ out,” was, mercifully, sound at heart; but he was also still exactly at the same crude boyish stage of social development at twenty-eight as he was when he went “ in” at eighteen. He was still boyishly “ cheeky,” boyishly reckless, keen on brilliant socks and ties, totally ignorant of the value of both time and money. He was wanting in that social wisdom which was especially demanded by his social handicap. After a year came a slack season with no work and much discouragement. Then came an old prison-mate; and the shadow fell.

A crime was attempted in the neighbourhood. Nothing was actually stolen, but the police had, of course, a watchful eye on Rod and a piece of circumstantial evidence enabled them to fasten upon him as the probable culprit. He protested his innocence, but was arrested and at his trial his old “ record” was produced, and made to bear

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witness against him. Society once more condemned him. “ I’ve always been guilty before, but now they’re going to bring me in guilty when I’m innocent!” was his horrified whisper in Court after the Judge’s summing up, a summingup which, clearly based upon past convictions, left no hope. The Jury brought in a verdict of “ Guilty,” and the Judge responded with a savage sentence of many years.

We said Goodbye at the Courthouse. “ You didn’t do it, Rod?” I asked in a moment of privacy. Eye to eye he answered instantly, “ Of course I didn’t!” with a deep full look of indignation that is burned upon my heart. I can at least be thankful that he knew that I believed him.

He hanged himself in his cell next morning. Beside the body lay a pencilled note written on bits of paper and addressed to me. “By the time you get this,” it said, “ I shall be no more on earth. I know you will say I have no right to take my life, but I am going to see what is beyond. You have some idea of the life I have led the last twelve months. I do not want you to go to any more trouble or expense in trying to find N.M.— (the actual culprit) let him have his liberty, for though I am innocent of the charge brought against me, I do not see why two should suffer. Tell Judge B—although he is a Judge he is liable to make mistakes and he did so in my case . . . Give Sally the watch-chain and tell her to keep it in memory of one who thought more of her than life. Well—thank all the friends that have helped you in my case and I shall be thinking of you and S —to the last, so goodby both of you, let us hope we shall meet in the next world. Do not think I am mad, I am quite sane.”

What a hardened villain he sounds, doesn’t he?—this lad who, robbed of all that makes life worth living, has yet no rancour for his robbers, only a heart full of love for his friends, and, to the bitter end, loyalty to a disloyal prisonmate.

Years later, while serving another sentence, that prisonmate confessed, partly to the Chaplain and to another, how he had managed to incriminate Rod.

“ Since his arrest,” wrote one who knew him, “ men who have lived and worked with him have come and told

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me what a decent chap he was, no sneak, clean minded and clean-mouthed about women, absolutely sober, and very anxious to get work—which was not easy, for he had never had a thorough training at anything. The straight, good and loyal girl to whom he had given his heart wrote. “He was the best boy I ever went with.” For my own part, and I have had him freely at my house, I have known hundreds of men who have never been in prison that were not half as decent as Rod. But he had been branded

“ criminal” and nobody would hear, at the end, of his being anything else.”

Read again from those early letters. Exactly what he had anticipated had come true.

In sober reality, none of his crimes against Society had been very great. They were never vile or indecent—never directed against the person. Nor did they cost us in hard cash, taken all together, what some “ respectable,” but profiteering, business firms cost the community in a month. “ I’m not even a good thief,” he once told me with a rueful grin. “ I’ve never scored, in all, so much as the price of one decent suit.”

What, on the other hand had Society done against him?

It had sent him to prison for his first venial offence. It had provided him, for his sole companions, other and worse law breakers, among them, eventually, the one who wrought his final ruin. Of a wild, reckless, impetuous boy —nothing worse—it had thus sedulously manufactured a wild, reckless, and impetuous criminal. For all that energy, spirit, pluck, loyalty, capacity for affection and deep feeling, it found no use at all. During all the time, nine whole years, that Dominia’s penal system had held him in its grip, during, in fact, the whole of his young manhood, it had never taught him thoroughly one useful, socially-accepted trade, while it had, on the contrary, supplied him with an expert’s knowledge of illicit ways of gaining a living. The penal system, whatever its pretence, had never attempted to “ reform” him. It had noted only what was bad in him—it had never inquired into what was good or what might be developed into something better. It had crippled his growth as a human being. It created the handicap—the

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last hurdle which brought him down —when the punishment for his first real offences was over.

Was that punishment, indeed, ever over? Was the shadow ever allowed to lift? In the closing scene, at the first breath of suspicion, Society condemned him at once, clapping him in gaol on remand, and publishing matter well calculated to poison any jury’s mind, long before trial. At that trial, it would allow no weight to any of the good proved, in his year of liberty, to be in him, and to be growing. I have often thought how, if the Judge had treated Rod as you or I would treat any lad of ours who had appeared to lapse in process of overcoming a bad habit —-if he had said, “ Well, you seem to have been trying, and that is certainly something, I’ll give you a chance,” if this had been done—how all his generosity would have leaped to the occasion and how safe for evermore would Society have been from any danger at his hands!

Well, Society chose a very different way of safety for itself. For the second time, it made about him so terrible a mistake that it brought upon him despair of human justice, despair of human good-will. It proved to him that he could never hope to win any place in this world except as the criminal it had trained him so well to be. It took from him every chance of doing better; it removed every motive for striving by showing him that he would never be given any chance to live and love like others; it killed in him the very will to live. Was it only Rod’s own hand that took his life? Are Society’s quite clean?

Rod outgrew his enmity and ill-will to Society. Has it, as yet outgrown its enmity and ill-will towards such as he?

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Those who, for one reason or another find themselves engaged in prison work suffer disillusion if they expect always to be dealing w ; th first-class material. Minds and hearts with some grip in them can be dealt with, sometimes, effectively. Those of a more degenerate type, however, must be encountered, nor is it possible to pass them by. Their problems are real problems, and, to those interested in their fellows, an understanding of them is perhaps part of a liberal education.

Against Cornelius, it may be remembered, more than one of my prison friends attempted to warn me. “ I haven’t really ever known any other chap quite so bad as he,” one of them told me, but I have had experience of other men of the same genus. One hopes against hope that it is not against human nature for the skunk of the species eventually to change his scent.

“ My parents are old, very old,’’ whined Corney, “ and my greatest hope is that I will see them again ... If for one moment I thought that another year in this place would make a better man of me, I would say—keep me here. But they will tell you that there is no good in me, and I am sick of trying to make them understand me.”

His home was across the seas, and there, he said, he would have a better chance. “So would you please fix up the boat ticket?” he pleaded. “ And I couldn’t possibly go home till I have got myself some new clothes, which would take all my earning.” When told I could in no wise afford this, he was greatly aggrieved and let a little cat out of the bag. “ A man told me,” he said, “ that you were able to earn a lot of money and have a nice little house,” and I learned later that his plan had been to procure from me not only his passage but also introductions to my friends in his native land, whereafter he pictured himself on a chain of visits, sponging at his pleasure. Very nice!

But when his little scheme fell through, I am sure he merely blamed his luck for it. “ What is life but one big

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gamble?” he inquired, and his life was, indeed, a very consistent effort to live up to that conviction. The real God of all crooks is “ Luck,” and great is their trust in him! It seldom strikes them, unfortunately, that, since all effects spring from causes, a certain control of this so elusive Deity may be, at least, possible. Even the cleverest of them are stupid in this respect. In justice to Corney, however, it may be said that he did once attempt to corner “ fate” and, no doubt in order to prove his argument, he placed the fact upon record. “ When I committed those offences I am here for,’’ he wrote, “ I planned it in such a way that it was impossible for anyone to find me out before fourteen days had expired. But on the day that I committed the offence, a man goes and loses his money who is staying at the same hotel as I am staying at, and I am arrested for that crime just a few hours before my boat sails. I am remanded twice and proved innocent of taking the man’s money but by that time the cat is out of the bag. Now do you call that luck or what do you call it?”

Yes, “ Luck was against him!” One day, working beside Rod in his “ gang,” “ I’m sick of this!” he exclaimed, “ Think I’d like a spell in Hospital.” “ Easy enough!” said Rod the reckless, “ swallow a stone or two! And would you believe it,” chuckled Rod, long after, “He did. But his luck was out! He must have been brass inside as well as out, for nothing happened!”

Notwithstanding such rebuffs however Corney continued faithful to luck, with occasional resource to cunning. Perhaps in an effort to “contribute causes” making for parole, he pretended a complete change of heart. But in vain, “ Never mind,” he wrote piously, “ some day we will all be understood, not misunderstood, and until that time comes, I am going to try to do to others what I would like them to do to me.”

And cunning, allied to luck, did, once, avail him. It is well known that a bad man is often a good prisoner, but even an experienced officer may make a mistake. Corney was at last taken at his word, everything done by one Governor to encourage him, purring like a pussy the while he responded like a—well, like a Corney! When after months

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of meek decorum he was promoted to the post of “ trusty” he was promptly “ found missing” at the first chance of escape. The friendly Governor was well laughed at, but, after all Dominia scored, for her hospitable shores knew Corney no more. With our friend’s native land, however, it was different. In a very little while her prison walls reclaimed him for their own, and, without doubt, Corney found himself going over the course again, quite slowly, to find out how it happened that cunning was circumvented, by the great untrustworthy God, “ Luck.”

I discovered nothing about his early “ history.” He did not belong to our country, and nothing he told us could be believed without corroboration. He did not seem to possess even the rudiments of a moral sense but, to do him justice, we all thought there was something wrong with his mentality. I could never find that he had a single friend —except perhaps, the official whose trust he had betrayed. He was, I imagine, a job for the psychiatrist, but as our adolescent country “ doesn’t believe in cranks,” no science enters into her dealings with such delinquents. Corney was so unhappy as well as so mean, a creature, that one wishes that some really competent psychologist could have studied his case.

Hengist reminds me too much of Cornelius to be altogether a welcome thought, though probably he regarded me simply as “ fair game.” Our prisoners earn a little money while doing their “ bit,” and, when they “ come out” it is no uncommon thing for their prison “ friends” to waylay them near the gates, and guide their joyful footsteps to the nearest “ pub.” Something goes in “ treating” and then they lose the rest —“ unconsciously”—to their welcomes. Meeting Hengist on one occasion shortly before his release I warned him against such “ con-men.” He looked at me with a funny little smile, and said, as if unable to resist the boast —“ No need to tell me that —done it myself.” So when, very handsomely, he volunteered “to keep in touch with me when he came out,” I, very naturall,y considered that a little caution was indicated, and was not in the least surprised after months of sedulous correspondence, to receive a telegram from him asking an

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immediate “loan” of £5. Brief investigations revealed the fact that Hengist was staying at a City Hotel, which would demand the sum of £5 at the least for one week’s lodging. I judged it better that the money should come from his pocket rather than from mine, and I wrote him something to that effect. He was disappointed in me and he has not “ kept in touch with me” since.

Horsa was “ in” for robbing some of his own friends—- “ a thing,” he wrote, with unction but rather forgetfully, “ that of course I would never do.” Alas! How often had he cheated, or tried to cheat, those who had sought to befriend him! On one occasion after release, knowing how little money he really possessed, a friend harkened to his plea for something “to pay board with,” only to find out later that, quite unwittingly, he had provided friend Horsa the most beautiful pair of patent leather boots. On another occasion a job was found for him, not to mention the necessary outfit. At the end of three weeks our Horsa was missing, leaving behind a legacy of debts—and an unsweet savour. In this last case his friend was a woman, who was not willing easily to admit defeat. She ran the little wretch to earth in the nearest city, and, when he turned to flee, she caught him by the collar with the crook of her walking stick. Thereupon he quailed before her, confessed all his deceptions and actually admitted that this time he had, in very deed, cheated his friends. Mrs Y—a woman of character as well as of decision, retained the “ grip” she had thus acquired, during two or three of his subsequent terms within the walls. On one of his “ outings,” however, he married a girl who later cheated him—and vanished.

I do not know the effect this “ being cheated” had upon Horsa. Sometimes the experience sets a man against cheating, but not invariably. There may come a stage at which it is found that “ you can’t win” at law-breaking, and perhaps Horsa is at the beginning of such a period. I wish, however, that we ourselves were even at the begining of finding out how to quicken the social understanding in such as he.

Ethelwun, too. was of the kind sent into the world, by

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some inscrutable decree, for its tribulation. Even his repentances had much of the spurious about them. He was really accomplished as a cadger, never at a loss for a plausible tale, and his income, derived solely from his own particular blend of luck and cunning, and consistently disposed of in drink, rarely fell below four pounds a week. He had no inclination for honest toil, and when work was found for him turned sadly away. Friend after friend was meanly cheated. A sister who tried her hand on him was, like the rest, badly “ let down.” Incidentally this sister threw some light upon Ethelwyn. He had been a child “ spoiled” by his parents, and that often explains a great deal in a wasted life.

We had lost trace of him for some time, when one day came a letter which tells its own story. It began with a confession of some particularly “ skunkish” conduct, and ended with the story of his “ conversion” —“ Now we get down to bedrock,” he concluded. “ I went to Quidquid and got, O so drunk ... I fell face downwards into brambles, woke in the morning nearly dead, and my face was a sight,

oody and torn, with hundreds of thorns in it. My hands were cut with a broken bottle and I had no drink. That was the worst. I thought I would go mad, and it w T as Sunday and I had no money. I looked at myself in the water, a sight I never want to see again. I walked on praying for work but hoping to God I would not get it . . . got a job but couldn’t look at it for three days, being in the dingbats. I left the job and walked on, drinking all the time but sort of praying to God to help me. I got four shillings from Miss T—and I drank it. Then this thought' came into my mind ‘ Though your sins be as scarlet yet shall they be as wool’—l was back in the city where I had been sentenced to two years. I could see the Gaol and all its miseries. I could see poor Rod swinging on the end of a rope in his cell, and the tears streamed from my eyes. I then accepted God—l met a Christian who prayed with me. Since then God has forgiven all my sins and I’m washed as white as snow—l’m so ashamed now to think of the past. Someday I hope to repay you ... I can’t yet.”

I have waited without hope for that promised restitution

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and it has not yet arrived. But neither, so far as I know, has Ethelwyn gone back to gaol. That is certainly some gain. Moreover, for once he really was ashamed and that, even if it did not last, was a good healthy experience, which may pave the way for others. Some of us climb with very slow f steps, and in dealing with such “ anti-socials” one learns to welcome with a cheer any advance at all. I w r rote for more details about the Christian and the conversion, but in vain; Ethelwyn the converted vanished from my sight. I can, however, remember concerning him this—that his last letter contained no cadging and no w r hining.

Some there are w ho rise only after they have sunk very low indeed. But, in any case, it seems well that someone should consider the human being w T ho has been spoiled in the making, if only to learn how much spoiling should not be done. Cornelius, Hengist, Horsa, Ethelwyn; you and your kind are certainly no sweet crew. But, if all your own frustrations could be known, I will w r ager that no true worker would ever complain of a few frustrated efforts on your behalf, or at the consciousness even of complete failure. “To work ye have the right—but not the fruits thereof,” says the noble old Bhagavad Gits. Besides, who ever knows all the “ fruits?”

ROBIN HOOD

Quite a determined outlaw was Robin Hood, proud of his profession, and anxious that “ brainy crooks” like himself should not be taken for the lesser fry. “ You people,” he wrote with contempt, “ always get hold of the worst cases, and so judge us all. The loafer, boozer, cadgers and wife-beaters are always being held up to the public as what an abandoned lot of ruffians we are—but they are not Brainy Criminals, who have intelligence, but are not of the temperament that meekly knuckle under to bosses and unemployment and a bare existence. Blessed are the poor and meek is no good to the man with red blood in his veins—There are a lot of fellows here that are clever enough to get money without robbing the poor— Can you wonder that the better class of crook, who supports himself somehow”—(ls not that delicately put)? “and is generous with his own money or other peoples, who keeps his mother or sisters and lives in a clean house, resents being forced down, in public estimation, to the lower level of the other class?”

This was not, one had to confess, a point of view often put forward; but there is reason to believe that it is in prison quite widely held. Such “ brainy crooks” as Robin regard their exploits as acts which can be justified, and even ought to be admired. All these “ Rebels” seem to have commenced their careers very young; and indeed, can we not remember in our own lives, the time when the free and lawless life of the noble outlaw under the greenwood tree made a mighty appeal? Most youngsters, “with red blood in their veins,” probably go through such a period, and some of us go on questioning the accepted verdicts of Society—as to property and other matters—till considerably later in life. If this w r ere not so, would those same verdicts ever become wiser? Some Rebels have even ended as—Reformers!

How Robin Hood & Co. love to tell one that! Quite early in their teens they have “ seen through” the prevailing views on property, and have tried, in as “ brainy” a way as possible, to change Tuum into Meum. The Law

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has severely stepped in, “ downed” their instinct for this kind of conversion, and downed it hard. Nevertheless, they continue in their efforts to “ down” the Law, for with all its expensive pains, it fails to alter their desires and their ideas. Of course they are a selfish lot, but so, after all, are many other youngsters. I must confess a real interest in their criticisms of Society, though a much greater interest in their sturdy selves.

My acquaintance with Robin began with a request from him that I should pay for his defence, on one of these occasions when the Law had the upper hand. He used his old acquaintance with Rod to make his appeal to me. His need, it appeared, was greater than mine, and I doubtless had the wherewithal. This was good “ human” reasoning, but the facts were wrong and I had to disclose the faulty premise. We remained friendly over it, however, and, a “ sentence” or two later, Robin became candid, and gave me his point of view as I have already stated it. Then he proceeded to carry my education a point or two further, though frankly doubtful whether it might not prove what he called, “ a valuable waste of paper.”

“ The young criminal,” he explained, “is seldom to blame, since he inherits a temperament due to bad parents, bad homes, and bad companions, poverty, etc., and then, w'hen he gets old enough and looks out on the world and sees that justice, like kissing, goes by favour, what does he become?—A Rebel. Robin Hood, when he lived, the lords and earls called him a robber, because he robbed only the rich, but when I went to school they taught me he was a hero. Perhaps I shall be, when the world is wiser and I am gone.”

I thought this unlikely, unless his actions became somewhat less self-regarding; and maybe I said so, for he addressed himself to the point. “If you could hear some of the stories of the men here, you would soon change your views that selfishness is any greater among crooks than among the rich. —As to marrying and settling down, what security of steady employment has any man got, so why drag a woman into the slums and bring up a lot of miserable children? Why, the man who is single and

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spends his all upon himself is a King compared with the other fellow. If he smokes and wears good clothes, he is doing the country good. Isn’t he? And why shouldn’t he have these things? It is self, of course, but it is human nature and not only crook nature. Everybody’s doing it, and many on a bigger scale.”

I have often wished that some good debaters could be sent by Society into our prisons, so that these matters might be fully and freely discussed with the inmates. It would do the latter a power of good, for they see a point even if they won’t admit it; and it might be equally good for the defenders of Society. I sometimes wonder how the Respectables would meet certain arguments of the Robins. Listen to this:

“ If we men who get caught and put in prison for our wrong doing are madmen, what about all the big men of the world who break the law and don’t get caught? I was sentenced to five years hard labour and declared to be incorrigible for defrauding the biggest drapery firm here of £2. Now since I have been in here, that firm has been before the Court three times for defrauding the public, and they got let off with a fine. What’s the difference between that firm and myself?’’

“ Why is it,” asks Robin also, “ that Dominia is producing now more than ever it did, but the working people are nearly starving?”

“ The ruling class,” he cries, “ has always stood in the way of rights, taken everything and given nothing, and the class they love are like the early slaves who said, ‘ He is very humble and loves his master.’ The dice with which we have to play have been loaded. If we expose them, we are called agitators. If we make some crooked dice of our own, we have a better chance, or think we have. It may be only a gambler’s delusion, but is not life one big gamble? And the clever gamblers often win. The clever crooks don’t get caught. It’s only the failures who fall.”

In reply to my wondering why, since he hated and despised “ the rich,” so much, he should wish to ape them, he replies:

“ As to wishing to ape the rich, certainly, they seem to

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enjoy life, and anyhow the schools teach children to save their money and become rich. We were always taught to look up to the rich. So there is the criminal’s view— Honest money is best, but anything sooner than none.”

“ If riches,” he demands again, “ don’t bring happiness, why do rich people try to get richer? Anyhow, I would sooner meet death in a motor-car than in a workhouse. Why do so few rich people commit suicide, go mad, or get into gaols? Didn’t the great writer, Ben Jonson, say, ‘ Get money, young man, get it fairly if possible, but get it?’ Quite right, gold is the key that unlocks all doors and speaks all languages. Please excuse me,” he adds sweetly, “ if I have been straighten than usual, but I think I am right, don’t you?”

Well, I didn’t. But Society, in Dominia and elsewhere, seems to; is it not so?

Although Robin had a good trade, and could earn good money in modest degree, he wanted more. “ So,” he continues, “ I thought I would get rich quickly. I must admit we are mugs who get into gaol, but of course every apprentice gets rapped over the knuckles when learning a trade. —But, of course, the wronged are always wrong, the wronger never. Don’t you think it is a strange thing how people have always got their eye on the monster who steals a loaf of bread when hungry, and are blind to the gentleman who steals a kingdom because he is greedy?”

“ You cannot wrong Society and Succeed? Why, every rich man and millionaire proves otherwise. . . . What of the big brewers that have been Knighted, and the successful bookmakers who have left a fortune, the moneylenders who demanded 100 per cent, and lived a full life and died rich and happy.”

“ At Christmas we approach the season of peace and goodwill (for some). Have you ever noticed how many sermons are preached at the poor and miserable, and how few to the rich and successful? It seems to me that religion is nothing but a good scheme to tell people that, if they are meek and humble, they will get nothing on earth, but riches in Heaven; and so Bishops live in palaces and the poor in slums —why?”

66)

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“ The fact is, people want to see a little more heaven on earth—why make myself miserable, slaving after something I don’t believe in? If I choose the path of life and pleasure, it is because I believe it to be the only sensible one.”

“ Try dropping £lOO outside the Post Office and then advertising for same. You will know then Society is essentially crook.”

“ We have a vote, and if we don’t like conditions, we alter them! Can we? To alter conditions we must have an intelligent public opinion, and most of our ideas and opinions come from the newspapers. Who controls the newspapers—Money-power.”

It is probable that I questioned his notions of happiness, for “What makes a man or woman happy?” he asks—- “ Freedom to do what they like and no two of us wish to do the same.—My idea is, to get all I can, and to give all I can after having all I want myself. ... I will discover the laws that will have the effect of making me happy and healthy, although I may have to forego the pleasure of reading tracts and becoming a shining member of the local Band o). Hope,—The point is,” he labours on, “ to what end am 1 entitled to use knowledge? I say, for the realisation of happiness according to my nature.—-A lot of people say I am wrong, I would be happier if I did this, that or the other, and it all sounds to me like a dog telling a sheep to eat meat, and the sheep retorting—You ought to eat grass.”

Well! Have you never met any “ respectable” person whose idea of true happiness and power was precisely that of this candid crook? And don’t we all “ only want to do what we want to do?” as a small boy I once knew urged on me as a good reason for not learning to read!

Perhaps the one true education for all of us is that which results in making us want to do what we ought to do. The only way to convert a crook into a decent citizen is—to change his “ wants.” I was, accordingly, interested to find Robin, after all this, writing, rather wistfully it seemed to me, —“ I would turn honest to-morrow, and pay back every penny I have stolen, if Society would only forgive and

ROBIN HOOD

forget, and I think the majority here would say the same.”

I was still more interested when, some time after finishing his last sentence, Robin (“ unrepentant” to the end of it), wrote me a letter to which he had, very considerately, appended neither signature nor address.

“ No doubt you will think me a waster,” he said, “ and I am begining to believe that I am For seven months I went straight, and had a half-share in a business. I was just starting to live dowm the past when a detective from Quidquid” (where he was well-known) “ haunted me both night and day. I got a good billet in the City, and worked a week, then was told to go, that I had been in gaol.—So in a fit of madness I thought I would play their game and I did. But now lam sorry because lam engaged to a nice girl, and I don’t know what to do. I have paid back just on £70.”

“ Now I wonder what you would do. Maybe say give myself up, but I dread the thought. I want to pay the rest back and then save up and make a home, also I don’t want to tell the girl—l can imagine you sitting here—l think I will come to Z and see you. I am making good money here.”

You see the dilemma? The rebel has now discovered for himself some reasons for wanting to stop being a rebel. He would like now to come into the fold with the rest of us. He would like to assume the responsibilities, that once he scoffed at, of that home-making which is so manmaking. And it would, too, be far better for the rest of us, if he did —yet the rest of us won’t let him. Does Society, as a matter of fact, ever really forgive and forget such “ outlawry” as Robin’s, even when it has been outgrown? Even a fortnight’s imprisonment, even two days, brands for life!

Supposing for a moment that Robin were to make the confession and the reparation he would like to, which would, from his point of view—and mine also —square him with his world, would that world call it square? Not in Dominia! Dominia would, metaphorically but promptly, lift up its hands in horror —but in rejoicing—and demand its pound of flesh. It would send the would-be candidate

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for respectability back to gaol, so robbing him of all his reasons for wanting to become a good citizen, and, incidentally, robbing itself too. Christian? Just? Commonsense?

The end of the story? Ido not yet know it. But, whatever it may be, do you notice that it was ordinary, normal, life—not the unnatural gaol travesty of it —that gave Robin his reason for wanting to reform? He had left prison without the smallest intention of changing, though we had lavished prison “ treatment” upon him good and plenty for years. Some day the taxpayer will count the cost!

CHERRY AND CO

Now we approach my second group—the non-normal. “ Cherry would like to be a good boy, if he could!” a colleague once observed to me, and it was true. But was Cherry good? Mercy—no! By his record he was incorrigible, and his latest crime had been the rape of a child! Why wasn’t he good? Why couldn’t he be? The answer is that he was a friendless half-wit.

“ What is this?” the intelligent reader will object. “Surely Dominia does not treat mentally deficient offenders as though they were responsible ones? Surely she does not send them to gaol when their offences are caused by infirmity! Surely when the sentence is served these infirm are not again let loose without steps taken to protect Society—and themselves—from the repetition that is otherwise sure to follow?”

It is not pleasant to place the fact on record against one’s own State, but such is the senseless, uneconomical, cruel fact. She has no Homes for her grown-up feebleminded. She lets them marry, too, and only recently has begun to take any thought about their children. The idea of dealing with such a matter at its source has not yet occurred to her. The half-wit with friends does not fare so badly, but the poor and friendless drift in and out of gaol, a sorry flock and sad. Irresponsible as the “ bananababes,” homeless, and at the mercy of their impulses, they are mostly as affectionate and docile as the pauper-spirits. While “ in,” they are the butts and cats’ paws and victims of those much worse than themselves. “ Out,” they are nobody’s business, more hopeless, more helpless and more dangerous, a most miserable burden on the community of whose foolish ignorance they are the victims.

Take Cherry, for example. Nothing is known of his early history, except that his father deserted him and that he is not a native of Dominia. When we first met he must have been in the early twenties, a poor little shrimp of a boy who had, however, already been able to serve the community by stopping a bullet with his body in the Great War. He was not at all the wild beast his “ list” had

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1(!(1 rne to expect; but, “ under custodial care,’’ very meek and biddable, and easily taught that smattering of trade, which, even at their best, is all our prisons can teach. But alas, he had been put, of course, with the “ rank and file,” and by them was also taught worse things. Once you knew Cherry you could very readily understand his offences, and see that they could and should all have been prevented. He was, like so many of the feeble minded, not at all feeble-hearted, but very affectionate. With strong sex instincts he had only a child’s control over them, and Society had allowed them at first scant, then sudden, opportunities. Little girls are always apt to be the victims of sub-humans such as Cherry and such ignorance as Dominia’s. Properly trained and treated, the Cherries could be made quite useful, and such revolting and preventable crimes removed from the list of our communal responsibilities.

Herded with men much worse than himself. Cherry, so manifestly a “ Softy,” for a time suffered the fate which nature seems to hold in store for the maimed; he suffered, physically, emotionally and morally. But help was at hand. There came into that gang a prisoner, one Marcus, esteemed incorrigible, “ in” for robbery with violence; and Marcus saw and understood! Then was the capacity for “ violence” vindicated, for Marcus, all unexpectedly, stood up for Cherry, and Cherry, in his turn, revealed another side of his nature, by his intense gratitude. It was years afterwards, when Cherry was “ out” and Marcus still “ in,” that I heard the story from Cherry, with whom there was no forgetting, and whose main anxiety now was to help his benefactor. With the Tims and Ninas, sound of wit but immature of heart, one does not find this faithfulness and gratitude—with them it’s easy-come and easy-go, lose-one-friend-find-another, what’s-the-odds! The angels, I think, are far nearer to Cherry & Co.; though how I -wish they would guard them better, for these poor things are so dreadfully undiscriminating! Any hand, if only it is held out, will they gladly cling to, whether it be clean or dirty, whether it lead up or down. “Do anything you told him, he would,” his own father says about Berry, another poor

CHERRY AND CO

feeble-minded lad, who so far, has not come to gaol, only because he has a family to guard him. At the time we met he had just damaged some property with the utmost readiness, at the naughty behest of a boy-pal—strong-minded enough himself to “ stand-from-under.”

In the same way, even in prison, Cherry was employed to nefarious ends by one Clarence. Cherry, of course, did not see the game, or the true nature of his doings, still less that he was, in fact, cheating thereby, friends much more true. Clarence, who will be displaying himself in these pages a little further on, was a very clever young man,

“ in” for “ false pretences,” but genuinely interested in motor-cars. Finding that Cherry was in touch with some nice kind folk who had resources which might haply be “ touched” through the “ softy,” Clarence persuaded his dupe to be “ interested in Motor-cars” also, and “ please could he have some books on them? A mate had told him such and such was a good one.” Delighted at having hit upon so “ constructive” a taste, and knowing nothing at the time of Cherry’s real capacities, one friend did, accordingly, from time to time, supply some motor literature which was quite expensive. Clarence enjoyed it greatly—while upon “ Cherry” its effect was magical!

“It is wonderful how his letters have improved!” remarked my innocent friend, not knowing that Clarence was kindly dictating them, for the spelling and writing were still poor Cherry’s very own contribution. I believe that hopes had even begun to be entertained of “ genius allied to feeble-mindedness” in our poor lad, when, as usual, Clarence carelessly “ gave the show away.” It happened that, at the time I was given the letters of Cherry to my friend, I was corresponding with Clarence myself. A certain mannerism of style, peculiar to my correspondent, reappeared so often in those “ Cherry” letters that one would have been a fool not to make inquiry; and this drew the truth from the defaulter. Clarence, who, by this device, was not only getting together quite a useful little library but was also keeping his hand in at his usual crime, was greatly disgusted at the exposure. Poor bewildered Cherry, who had not intended the least harm but only wanted to

PEOPLE IN PRISON

oblige a “ friend,” was very unhappy at learning that he had done something unkind to his better friends. Very miserable, he wrote: " I wish I did not have to be with these mans—they tell me what to do and I do it and its wrong.”

And that kind of thing, of course, is even more likely to happen when “ they” meet their easy dupe on release. Apple’s story is even sadder, because Apple is a girl; and a more good-hearted girl, Miss M. tells me, she has rarely met. She was “ adopted” as a baby and has a wretched tale to tell of cruelty at the hands of foster-parents, who, to do them justice, probably did not know that they had to do with a feeble mind, set, as it was, in a very gooft strong body. At the age of sixteen she ran away from “ home” to the nearest city, and there became a waitress at a night restaurant. In the case of a “ soft,” friendless, well-grown girl, the rest can readily be imagined. In wiser countries her status would have been ascertained in childhood, she would have been sheltered and trained, and happiness could have come to her. Dominia neither protected her, nor the public health through her, and presently something queer happened. The men who had been so eager for her company, particularly as she never had the wit to charge for it, “ wouldn’t have her any longer,” and they told the Police. So she had to go to prison, and Hospital—and finally to a Mental Hospital. The men themselves, responsible though they were for this poor child’s infection and ruin, were, of course, never brought to book. Such is Justice in Dominia (and elsewhere), and such our odd way of “ protecting the public.” Half Dominia’s women prisoners, Miss M. tells me, are touched with the same mental defect.

Snowy is rather nearer to the normal than Cherry and Apple; though possibly the principal evidence of that fact is to be found in the childish cunning which is so often the pitiful weapon of the “ mentally inferior” aware of his handicap. In the absence of any scientific help, Dominia, of course, persists in regarding him as quite normal, and he was serving a long term for “ a little stealing,” when he began to write to me. Snowy loves to write letters, and

CHERRY AND CO

“ I can assure you,” he says, “ that when I do get out I shan’t be ashamed to write to you at any time.” He generally begins, “News in Haste,” and goes on to say that there isn’t any news. From the general muddle he makes of his affairs while in durance, it is not difficult to assess the state of his judgment, and his ability to compete on equal terms “ with his fellows.” He will begin a letter to a kinswoman “ Dear Sister,” and sign it “ Your affectionate uncle,” in defiance of human relationship. He will besiege one firm after another for work years before he has the least chance of release; and he openly cadges from anyone likely to take the least interest in him. Egotism is far more marked in Snowy than in such as Cherry and Apple, and so is ability, for he has a good manual training, and, with a guardian to direct his morals, he could easily earn his living. He would gladly accept a guardian, too, if Dominia only had the wit to give him one. “ I should be glad,” he writes, “ if at any time you would humbly send me a few words, and correct me about anything wrong, as it would be the means of showing and learning and giving me some good advice, and remember by so doing you are not offending in the least.”

Like Cherry, Snowy > too, would “be a good boy if he could;” but he has learned how to render the aspiration in the true prison whine, with variations, thus: —

“ After all is said and done, I have come to the conclusion that this going on in life is not worth the candle.”

Again: “ I am pleased to say that my enforced stay here in this institution ’as been the means of awakening within me all those better parts of my nature that I had allowed to become dormant, they at last predominate—after all I realise that this wrong-doing is not worth the candle.”

Again: another typical effort which this time concerns my letters. “ These,” he sayg, “ ’as been the means of uplifting me during my enforced stay in this institution. By the way, you asked me in your last letter to let you know where I am getting my big words from, reason is as follows: I find when I caroose certain passages in a book that appeals to me I try to conserstrate the same to my memory, because these passages help to uplift me and give

PEOPLE IN PRISON

me strength and hope to assist and cultivate all those good parts of my nature that I had for some time past allow to become dormant but which have now been awakened and thank God was now predominating.”

If Snowy spends much more time in prison, I have no doubt he will be able to copy still more long words out of a book, and spread the same sentiment over an entire page. Words seem to have a wonderful charm for him and his like. Witness Pearly! But Pearly deserves a chapter to himself.

Fools? Of course these are fools. But is not that community still more fond and foolish, and incalculably more criminal, which, giving no help to their pitiful helplessness, permits them first to drift into crime, and then, hy forcing them to consort with criminals, degrades and ruins them still more? But, of course, these unfortunates are only somebody else’s children.

PEARLY

“ What is your opinion on writing books and journalism, in which I am deeply interested?” asks Pearly in one of his earliest letters. “ Now you know my intended profession,” he proceeds in large round childish writing. “ I have read many, very many, books from which I have built up for myself a large store of knowledge. ... Do you think I would make a fairly good author?”

Pearly Button was at this time perhaps twenty years old, but he had already spent a good many of them in penal institutions of one kind and another. His family’s mental status was low. Beyond these details I knew nothing at all, so I asked for a specimen of his literary effort. The result was a surprise, an essay on “ Memory,” in language nothing less than beautiful! “ Memory,” it began, “is the lamp of life’s evening,” and in similarly poetic style it developed its theme with a serene lucidity, and finish, which somehow suggested a bit of French writing. The suggestion was reinforced by a turn of phrase here and there. I wrote back that there was something about it that puzzled me rather. What, for example, did he mean by “ Memory is the lamp of Life’s evening?”

“ I am sorry,” he replied with alacrity, “ to know that it puzzles you and it is up to me to explain, although some things are unexplainable—known only to the mind and not able to be expressed fully by mere words. If one cannot follow another’s line of reasoning, by all means let him seek enlightenment by asking for explanation; but if that explanation is unobtainable, he shall have to keep on seeking. Let me ask you one question: Have you ever read literature written by able writers and not understood some of it? Some works of authors are very deep, aren’t they? Let me try to explain to you in other words,”’ he went on kindly, —“ ‘ Memory is the lamp of Life’s evening.’ This is the explanation. ‘At night I lie down and think of all the good time I have had.’ ”

Poor Pearly! he had “ explained” rather more than he supposed. The essay, it appeared later, was the kind of thing to be met with in Prison libraries. A more genuine specimen of Pearly’s own talents was supplied by an

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article on “ How I would like to have been brought up.” It ran as follows:—“ I conjure up a beautiful and intoxicating vision of myself and loving friend riding slowly homewards after a hard day’s toil—met at the door by a wise kind loving mother who has waited anxiously for my home-com-ing that she may lavish her motherly love and comforts on me, that she may teach me correct behaviour, speak words of wisdom and guide me as does the light of a lighthouse, as a ship sails over the darkened waters of night. . . . .As we gather around the tea-table to eat our plain, wholesome, nourishing food, the love and sympathy that is given me makes me repeat to myself the sixth verse of Bracken’s poem ‘ Not Understood,’ as I think of other poor souls in need of that love and sympathy. As the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the weeks glide slowly by, I see myself being fostered along the path of clean, strong, virile manhood, sternly but persuasively rebuked for any misdemeanour Again I repeat the last verse of Bracken’s poem. And thus I have told you of how I would like to have been brought up, and I hope you will be satisfied with this. I have not the space to do it full justice. However, suffice it to say that a short article is better than none at all.”

“ Writing books; stories, articles and poetry,” he observes in another letter, “ tends to draw from the mind all that which is hidden away. It calls for much deep thinking and logical reasoning. It makes one observant of detail, imaginative .thoughtful, a thinker. I have noticed the truth of these last few lines, for I have commenced writing a book, entitled “ The Boxing Ring,” which I may have to lay aside as someone wants me to learn Spanish, of which I know a little. . . . For myself, I thought my last two essays to be works of art—Greater efforts in the end brings forth genius.”

Alas! unluckily his real intellectual status was instead, I suspect, that of a “ high-grade mental defective,” which stage of development—so often a love of fine words rather than fine deeds—is one of the most difficult with which to deal. Presently Pearly professed with the greatest fervour his intention of running straight on release. “ I know that

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stealing will never again be done by me,” he writes with his usual shadowless self-confidence; “ I know it in my own mind, and have the will and the power to enforce what I think.” In short, “ I’se a good boy now,” and this he strove to impress on the Parole Committee when next it “ considered” him. To his great disgust, his words were not believed: to his very great disgust; his boasted reformation was immediately forgotten. “ Appreciation from the desired direction was nil,” he apprised me with wounded dignity—“ reflecting over which, with all consideration, I have decided to reciprocate in like measure.”

From this lamentable decline, however, he was presently induced to rise and was soon, once more, professedly perched upon the very peaks of virtue. A question as to his earlier years produced the following:—

“ A child learns readily from example—parents are the makers and shapers of a child’s life—my life has been like a haze, but there is one thing I shall never forget, and that is when I was plucked away from my home at the age of eight. I was sent to a “ Home,” where I was always impressed by the visits of the other children’s mothers. Speaking plainly, I was always hungering for a sight of my own dear mother, whom I love very tenderly, with the result that I ran away several times in order to see her but was severely punished and (1 was) unable to see her till I was a little over fourteen. But when I did see her, it was the result of an escape. That was the beginning of my troublesome life, for I was continually prevented from seeing her. But from this,” he adds with characteristic brightness, “ I have emerged with a real knowledge of human nature and of life. —1 may be young in age, but yet I know! It is alright now, though, I know myself thoroughly.”

I was never able to see those members of Pearly’s family who were not in prison. As far as I could find out his mother was never “ in,” though his father was a wellknown inmate. But I was once shown the mother’s photograph, and a sadder sight than that picture I have seldom seen. Devoid of intelligence, marked with suffering, filled to the brim with hopelessness was that poor woman’s face.

7 Hi

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Mated With a drunkard, all her sons in prison, and her only daughfcr in a ' home”- what wonder?

(’< >irly, nevertheless, was able to gaze on that face with pride, find satisfaction. He, at least, loved his mother, and, feeling now so very good and clean himself, he prepared to take the rest of the family in hand and reform the lot. Beginning with " Father,” he faithfully pointed out to that old chap his errors, and “ advised him to give up alcohol,” " I received a reply,” he says, “ and it seems to me that he was In a jocular mood when he wrote it. He even went so far as to wind up with a ditty, and a very appropriate one, too. He wrote, ‘ When I am dead, don’t bury me at all, but pickle my bones in alcohol, put a bottle of beer at rny head and my feet, and then I know that my bones will keep!’ Now I had to smile to myself when I read that. I just couldn’t help it. He is so stubborn.—He began his reply with— ‘ I received your w r elcome letter on Saturday and it was a beautiful letter—My word you should have been a lawyer. You have the go and vim in you. It is a pity I did not have the money to give you a thorough education, so as to make you a Barrister and Solicitor at the Bar.” To which I replied—“ Thanks for saying that, but don’t you think the money you expended on alcohol could have been saved for providing me with that thorough education of which you speak, eh? Approximately,’ I continued, ‘ You have been drinking for 30 years, and taking sixpence as the price of a pint and four pints a day as the average consumed by you, although you have exceeded that on very many occasions, you get £1,095. Surely sufficient to provide me with that education.”

Having thus smartly set right his father, Pearly turned his reforming fervour upon his brethren, some of whom happened to be “ out” for a brief spell. “ I think you will be interested to know,” he writes, “ that my brothers are following my advice concerning several things. . . . They have purchased a good-sized fishing boat. . . . They each had a hazy idea that a small fishing concern would bring in quite a tidy sum of money, but they didn’t really and truly enlarge upon that until I began each week to foster it. It is wonderful how easily the machinery of an-

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other person’s make-up can be set revolving to action by a few well-thought-out words of advice and encouragment, isn’t it?”

This fishing project failed, of course. The childish mental development of the brothers ensured failure. The mentality of Barney, the eldest, may be gauged from the information that “ at the age of thirty he was given a bag of ‘ sore-throat candy,’ and, finding it to his taste, quickly swallowed the lot. He was only just saved from poisoning.” Pearly, who claimed credit as above for setting “ the machinery of Barney’s make-up revolving in action,” later considered that trouble might have been avoided had that bag of candy been allowed to complete its deadly work.

Not long after this gallant effort to reclaim his family, he sent me the news of his “ parole.” “ Believe me,” he wrote, “ your trust and confidence could not be in better hands. ... I know myself well enough for that. I shall require no assistance when I am free, for I can fend for myself quite easily. It is not my intention to impinge on anyone. It is not my nature.” In the shelter of the prisonworld, where words and intention have not to be translated into deeds, this probably sounded real to him. The outer world is a different matter and I was beginning to know my Pearly. It was not with any sense of shock, therefore, that the very day after release, I received a note asking my “ ever ready assistance in the way of asking if you will kindly send along £5 immediately—And remember the loan will be refunded.” It seemed wiser to send, instead, an introduction to a friend in Pearly’s town. This resulted in a job; that was not welcomed overmuch. “ There is a prospect,” he moaned, “ of having to face the week without anything to eat, or just a small meal now and then. But, however, I am prepared to do this hard indoor work with hardly anything to eat.” He did not starve quite to death, however, and for a few weeks worked well, winning favour with my friend. Then alas! succumbing to his unlucky love for his family, he cheated his benefactor and travelled, with Barney, over a good deal of Dominia, on no angelic errands. Very soon he was safe back “ in.”

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My sorrowful remonstrances, his next letter informed me, were “ rather critical—l shall reserve them as subjects for debate when I feel comfortably settled —I really think that, between the two of us we shall have warm and lively, but interesting and instructive debates —Nothing will make me budge from what I know to be the truth. You will find lam not a practised liar. Home, my home, has been the seat of all my trouble—Barney deserted my home-folk, aged father, mother and sister, and left them to starve — to starve, mind you! They looked after me when I was young; wasn’t it my duty to look after them in their old age? By the proper way, first, but by any other way, if need be. Even though I had to go through hell itself, I’d go rather than let them starve! And through hell I went, now suffering its tortures. Crime was my last resort. . . lam an out-and-out atheist just now. All hopes have been blasted to smithereens—l am utterly changed in soul and mind.” A postscript rather marred his Despair-effect. “ Of course,” it says kindly, “ don’t take the last part of this letter too seriously.”

My constant remonstrance was of no avail —now snugly back in his word-world, Pearly beamed benignly out upon me, a fair white flower of innocence, abjuring blame, and shedding rays of reasonable and kindly light upon my ignorance. Everything was due to Barney, Barney of the hore-hound candy. “ The Judge,” wrote Pearly proudly, “ said that Barney was an impudent as well as a hardened criminal, that he cringed and crawled against his own flesh and blood —his own brother, who ‘lied manfully.’” This latter was evidently considered a remarkable compliment from an admitted authority. The Judge really had said it, too. Had he but known something of the criminals he was dealing with, instead of only knowing a good deal about their crime, he would scarcely have permitted himself such an indiscretion.

As to my injured friend, Pearly actually wanted to know why “He has shunned me, where he should help me. I played the straight game with him ‘till poverty came along,’ when I didn’t even impinge on him. He is a real gentleman, and I respect and admire him very much.” Pearly having

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only run up a bill on my friend’s account, the respect and admiration were naturally not reciprocated. When I pointed out that restitution should be made, Pearly demurred. He would think about it. He is still thinking—unable to translate noble sentiments into hard cash—and our correspondence is in abeyance. Here are two more extracts which throw some light on his mental processes:—

“ Many people talk and write about things, but neglect, either wilfully or unconsciously, to act them—they don’t practice what they preach. But all the same, they do a certain amount of good by teaching others to act rightly when they will not, or cannot, do so themselves.”

“In your last letter you stated that those who talk piously about the beauty of good behaviour seem to finish admiring it at the same time as they finish their remarks, as though the words were a suitable substitute for the deeds —Let me take the case of a person who wants to lead a better life. He sets out manfully. As time goes on, the spirit of conquest becomes damped—perhaps because he expects greater results at the start—he begins to realise the tremendous struggle he must undergo before finally achieving his destined goal and there comes a temporary check to his endeavours, caused perhaps by the knowledge that too much of a fight must be made. He then singles out some patient, sympathetic, understanding friend, and w r rites pages of thoughts on character, mind, soul, etc., thus fortifying himself against backsliding, etc. If you say the words often enough”—so runs his argument—“ deeds will follow.”

Given a Pearly’s defective brain, can they? Perhaps. But the friendly guardian must be ever at hand, and the “ deeds” safeguarded at every turn from evaporation into mere air.

CLARA, CLARENCE AND CO

When I first met them, Clara was a mature woman with convictions as many as her years. Clarence a young man with what promised to grow into an equal “ record.” In actual life they had no dealings with one another, but their dealings with other people were so similar that each one illumines the other. So they are taken together.

Ladies first! Enter Clara. It is at a prison entertainment. Slowly, with stately tread she advances, in the role she loved, that of a great dignitary. Unaided and untaught, she sustains her exalted part as to the manner bom. Can this chieftainess really be our Clara? Trained as an actress, then, might she not have satisfied her romantic imagination, and forestalled her many less innocuous impersonations in actual life? At the time she comes into this story it had unfortunately become second nature to assume certain of her roles, which she had come herself to believe were actualities. But let Miss M. tell the story.

“ I’ve always had a weakness for Clara,” she admits; “In perception, and in conduct too, she really is miles above most of our poor inmates, barring, of course, her little specialty. She’s not immoral, for one thing, with men; she’s affectionate, reasonable, and refined in her ways. It gave me rather a shock once when she wrote to complain that the magistrate had “ charged her with rouge!” till I understood that he had spelt that last word “rogue,” and added “ vagabond,” into the bargain. Her pride was hurt. Well, we became quite friendly, and on her release I found a lady in the country to try her as a maid, and I took her down myself. On the way she told me mysteriously that she wanted a great kindness done. On my asking what it was—“ Get me a divorce!” said she, in a stage whisper. ‘Divorce?’ said I. ‘Why, Clara dear, I didn’t know you’d ever been married.’ ‘Yes!’ she said, sitting very upright and looking very sad, ‘ And all my troubles began from that day, though we parted at the Church door. Now, if only I could get a divorce, I might marry somebody, a good man, in the country, and be set for

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life! ‘ Well, we’ll see,’ said I, resolving to consult the Registrar of Marriages first; ‘ Where were you married and when, and what’s the man’s name. Tell me all about it!’ And she did. A very interesting story it was, and it brought us to our station in no time. Did I tell you the ceremony took place near the station just beyond the one we were going to? Mrs. Mills met us, and I handed over my change. Then I wrote to Registrar and Rector.

“ Before I heard from either of them, came a letter from Mrs Mills. She was delighted with our friend, who was most humble and contrite and ‘ hadn’t a lazy bone in her body!’ ‘So far, so good,’ thought I, but alas, it wasn’t any distance! The letter came from the Registrar and a message from the rector; no such marriage as Clara’s appeared on the records of either. Then came a second letter from Mrs Mills. Here it is:— ‘ Our dear Clara has departed, and I am sorry to say that she got away by telling and acting shocking falsehoods, which we have since discovered. In the first place she sat at our dining table and asked us to help her write a letter to her Uncle at Umford, and cried fully half an hour before doing so, saying that we had no idea what it was costing her to ask forgiveness of him, as it was her uncle and aunt who had driven her to drink. We find now there is no such person at Umford. Further, she said she must go at once to them, and if we’d advance her the extra money she would wire it back at once. We gave her £5, £2 of which was all but due to her. She would wire from Q.Q. on the way up, and would return in ten days. We have not heard a word from her. If she is sane, then she is the worst type of liar we have ever met. She is a danger to the community. The first few days she was quite humble, but the last week her conceit was colossal. I think when she was fabricating she believed it herself! In fact, it was quite hard for anyone else to disbelieve her—most of it seemed quite feasible. I find that her own property of Quipo Quipo Ranch does not exist.”

“ I should think it didn’t,” pursued Miss M., with a wry smile, “ though it mostly figures in her Upper Court Cases. It did, also, soon after this, in a Lower Court charge—of buying three motor-cars without any cash at all, which

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was the next thing we heard of her. She had had a gorgeous time, being kowtowed to by the sellers as the owner of that useful ‘ Quipo property’; and she was “ given” only a month for each car, so probably she thinks her fun cheap at the price. But I think Mrs. Mills is really quite right. She does believe her own fabrications. She certainly believed she had been married when she spoke to me about it. But when I put the Doctor up to asking her—O dear me, no! she was the most correct of all Old Maids!”

Now it happened that my own dealings with Master Clarence were taking place at much the same time, and Clarence, too, was “ in” for an impersonation, one that was really particularly neat. His fancy was not for landed estates, but for professional status, and so well had he taken the part of a well-known dignitary that he had managed to “ rook” a leading firm for quite a respectable amount. He must have had immense sport in doing it, and it was only a scrap of sheer carelessness which gave him away. He it was, you may remember, who made a catspaw of poor Cherry. Clarence loved to spread himself in the sun of other folk’s attention; which is the reason, no one else being available at the time, why he presented me with this pretty puzzle and self-portrait:—

“The problem is—we have a sensible, thinking businessman” (namely himself!) “who has a known and proved ability along a great many lines, a certain personality that endears him to his friends; further, having been detained in durance vile for some time, this man comes to the only logical conclusion possible—that acts that lead one to gaol are the acts of a fool. Yet we find this man, still believing this conclusion, committing an act that returns him to a place that offends every angle of his nature. Through what mental process did that man go—to justify to himself his committal of the particular act?”

Well, I felt that I should really like to know, all the more because the “ mental process” in Clara seemed very similar. So I returned the ball to Clarence as adroitly as I could, and obtained the following:—

“ He knows he should have decided it the other way, but he icanted to decide it the way he did, so now he hunts up

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good points to reinforce his decision. That is why a man will never give up a vice that he likes; his reason tells him its wrong and people despise him for it, but if he secretly, in his heart, loves the particular vice, he will never give it up—he trots out all its desirable points in a species of selfhypnotism—The slogan of the salesman is—Sell to your self first.”

On its being suggested to him that in “ false pretending” it is really valuable imagination wrongly used, that does the actual trick, he responded with eagerness—“ The imagination is certainly a most valuable component of our make-up. I have allowed it to run ahead of me, and that, I think, is where quite a lot of us run off the rails —If we imagine ourselves on the tenth rung of the ladder while in reality we are on the fourth, something is bound to happen.”

Now this jumped so well with my own idea of Clara that, next, I was bold enough to present him with the problem of explaining that lady. Here is the result:

“ Your friend did not buy the three cars for the sake of their utility to her. What was behind it then? She has simply tried to give some of her castles in the air a solid foundation, and even that is quite a laudable ambition, providing the means of bringing it about are right. It’s just this bringing-about business,” he adds ruefully, “ that causes the trouble. To her the fulfilment of her dreams must have seemed impossible under the social conditions she was tied down to, so I suppose her imagination said, ‘ But why be tied down? If you only had £lOOO, look what you could do!’ Old Man Imagination, having once made his victim pause on the path of rectitude, quickly sketches in the scheme for acquiring that £lOOO. She may reject the scheme in its entirety, but, once arrived at the point where she can view such schemes with equanimity, the fell business as almost a “ fait accompli.”

Clarence really was a “ brainy crook!” I was more than inclined to accept his diagnosis. But the more important problem was to find some clue to the cure of these errant imaginations. Remembering his own undoubted interest in motor-cars, I respectfully enquired whether he did not

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think that perhaps we could get an illustration from them, which would help to adjust the faulty functioning of such a mentality as Clara’s. I did not, of course, dare to mention his own. “ Certainly!” wrote my bright boy, quite tickled at the idea. “ The lady’s horse power may be good and strong, but Clara has a slipping clutch, and she’s not getting anywhere on account of it. Show her that this slipping is burning up her life—a little bit more is burnt up every time she comes to one of these places. She needs an overhaul, and don’t forget that an overhaul costs something. . . . in her case it may mean the renunciation of her castles in the air. Try and save a little castle for her, maybe you can prune it down to a bungalow.” The italics are mine.

There came a time, happily, when Clarence took hold of his own excellent metaphor, and applied it firmly to his own case! He must have been ripe for a change, but he had a priceless asset, one faithful friend. This friend stuck to him through thick and thin, sent him abroad, and has had the satisfaction of seeing Clarence’s bungalow rise on good foundations. The bungalow in this case, was appropriately, an estate agency, a form of business tolerated by Society, and yet capable of giving scope to his peculiar talent and considerable imaginative gift. Before leaving him to his “ options” and his “ equities,” let us take what more we can of the wisdom drawn from his prison experience:

“ I think,” he writes, “ one of the most urgent things we have to fight is this thought in ninety per cent of the prisoners’ minds, ‘ I’ve got to make up for this (sentence) somehow’ —and the ‘ somehow’ is mostly crooked. I ‘ fell’ my second time on just this one idea of ‘ making it up’ (i.e., getting even with Society). This is really the gambler’s reasoning, and seeing that even then I was quite satisfied that money could not be made that way, yet apparently I was quite satisfied that it would be different in juggling with pieces cf my life, for that is what sentences are. How easily, our perception is blinded when we want it to be so!”

Again, listen to this. “It is no good letting a man go

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when he is still, while in prison, devising future criminal schemes. But specialists are wanted. Dumped together without treatment wounded men become worse and infect each other.” We know that this is true of bodies. When shall we realise that it is even more true of personalities?

And Clara? Nothing so cheerful, alas! can be told of Clara. Infinitely finer as a human being, she had nothing of Clarence’s training; there was no such niche in the community for her. Both Miss M. and I believed that her “ right way out” was through the Stage, but she was too old when we came across her, to serve her apprenticeship at that profession. All she can do now, maybe, is to point the path for some other. Her disease — ‘‘Imagining” —is not at all rare, though its diagnosis is seldom spotted. Probably every budding artist has spells of it—periods when the ideal and the actual worlds become confused. Every child has day-dreams, otherwise its life would be less bright and its experience less rich. Phantasy becomes a menace only when “ used as a refuge from reality too much, or w'holly confused with it.” Grown-ups who know nothing of it commonly lack insight, and many of us turn for a touch of its magic to writers of fiction. Everyone of these might be called a “ false pretender,” if he did not duly label his goods. Our Puritan forefathers, indeed, branded the label as spurious, and condemned them wholesaleroot and branch.

Once upon a time I had a colleague who, escaping the criminal road, became a “ Clerk in Holy Orders.” He told me how all the strands of his rich and sensitive mind had become co-ordinated:

“ When I was about seventeen years old” ran his story, “ I really was living three lives under one skin. First, my ordinary life, that of a schoolboy and the only son of my mother, who was a widow. Second, a romance life, wherein I was a boy in France, the country of my adoption. Though I had never lived there in fact, in imagination I lived there intensely, really lived there, I mean,” he said earnestly, “ imagined myself at school there, having meals there, meeting French people—all that sort of thing. And then there was a third, really pretty disreputable, that led to my

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mixing with shady people in shady pubs., pretending that I had money I hadn’t, drinking too much and so on.”

“Well, what happened? What saved you?” I asked, all agog.

“My Mother,” he said. “ She found out, because of that third strand in my rope, which naturally led to a yellow streak that showed —lying. And she wouldn’t forgive me unless I promised to give up my whole dreamworld.”

“ Your own Mother? She wouldn’t forgive you?

“ No,” he said. “ She loved me too well. I loved her, too, deeply, and the love between us pulled me straight. But you wouldn’t believe the struggle I had—how desperately difficult it was to give up my dreaming. And the queer thing about it was, too, that not even that third phase had ever seemed to me wrong. All the time I was in the thick of it, I was saying my prayers every night, and teaching in Sunday School every Sunday. The dream-life and my religion never touched. And the dream-life and the daily life hadn’t the same laws at all!”

Brave mother! “If there were more such mothers there would be fewer” Clarences. There in her son was the “ slipping clutch” or—better still—the “ winged bit” so apt for the spirit to fly with, so ready to detach itself and float off unconcerned with morals and human relations. Her love was strong enough, and her insight true enough, to enable her to say No! and stop it. His own was strong and true enough to respond, and so those “ wings,” the imaginative gift, were reined in, and gave their distinctive quality to a spirit’s progress in high and orderly development. He became not only a teacher of “ religion,” but also of that spiritual life of which our generation stands sorely in need.

In Clarence that due, socially-acceptable development was provided by Salesmanship. Clara, had she found the right friend at the right time, might well have been “ saved” by dramatic art. Must the path of human progress be strewn with individual failures for ever? May not insight and enlightenment save a Mucklemouth from perishing through the misery of wantoning Phantasies, if a Oiglamps

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can be rescued from equal toils? Are we tired of these angerous mummers? Perhaps, but they are round about next 7 WC Can! and 80 consid er these two

GIGLAMPS

Giglamps had a horrible record. He seemed to have committed nearly all the major crimes, short of actual murder. But “false pretences” was his specialty. “He deceives others,” one worker wrote, “ because he first deceives himself, and his moral instability is extremely marked. It is Jekyll and Hyde with a vengeance, and Hyde is a real artist in his hideous way.” To make things worse, Giglamps was a master at a skilled trade, and had quite an attractive exterior.

Yes, he was a real “bad egg.” Yet, like the renowned Curate’s, one that was “ excellent in parts.”

“The duality of my life!” he wrote. “I know what heights I can reach, and I also know what depths I can plumb. What a bundle of contradictions we humans can be. Do you know that, in spite of my evil life, I am at heart a religious man? There have been episodes in my life that would never be believed by those who know the worst of me, and there are people even now who believe that lam an innocent man. They have told others that they have known me too intimately to believe me capable of real evil. How can we account for this? Must I deem myself a self-deluded hypocrite? What I have yet to learn is, how to make for the heights only and always. There can be no neutral territory for me. I must either climb or slide—Up to the present I have received no letter from anyone willing to act the part of adviser and helper.” And it proved extremely difficult to get anyone to attempt the post.

“ I have had only three people,” he said, “ to see me during the whole four years of this sentence, and all three gave me the impression of having come from a sense of duty rather than Inclination. One reaps no profit from such visits.” In another letter he begged for some ghostly adviser, some clergyman. “ There are times when I wish I were a Roman Catholic, the confessional rather appeals to me.” He did not, however, wish to leave the Anglican Church, and the Anglican Clergy in or near Quidquid seemed to know of none among them capable of tackling

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such a penitent—at all events for any length of time. His letters, consequently, continued to come my way

“I was brought up,” he wrote, “ to believe in literal hellfire, and a God who was continually on the look-out for faults, so that He might punish. But I never was taught to think of the effects of wrong-doing as they affected my own personal or moral progress. No doubt my parents meant me to, but they over-emphasised the future-life punishment, and only superficially touched on the immediate and cumulative effects of evil as it reacts on the present life.”

“ It seems to me that I have always recognised I could be only a clog in the machinery of life. Being one of a family of seventeen I was continually being brought face to face with what my father called team-work. And this only makes a blacker case against myself. I am inclined to believe that I did understand, but was too selfish to restrain myself.” He Recognised, in short, but he had not Realised.

“ Life seems to me to work on strictly business lines. We can get anything we want—at a price. But quite a lot of us do not know the name of what we want—l thought I was buying—well, watercress, and it turned out to be hemlock.”

“ I read recently that some great church man had said that Man always had been and always will be actuated by self-interest, which is perfectly true, but how many of us know where our self-interest lies? This is where the tragedy of life comes in.”

“ The peril comes in a hundred forms to the Unsuspecting soul,

And it isn’t the fierce mid-ocean storms that take the greatest toll.

It’s the passive drift on some understream.

That no compass marks, till athwart the beam,

The angry breakers foam and gleam,

And then —the treacherous shoal.”

Whether this was his own composition I know not, but it may well have been. He wrote reams of fluent verse

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after the style of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who, for some reason, possibly “ compensation,” is the favourite poet of many prisoners. If verse really is a “ confessional,” as some one has said, then the inner self of many a law-breaker must be moral to excess!

“Praying,” Giglamps went on, “ never did any good without striving—l came to the knowledge three years ago”this would be his last conviction—“ that it was my own thoughts that made my life what it was, and it has been my one aim since to see that they were suitably occupied.”

To fill these wayward thoughts he had taken up the study of Esperanto. “ While my brain was busy building Esperanto sentences before sleeping at night, there was no chance of other matters obtruding themselves.”

He had taken also to copious versifying—“ Which,” he wrote, “ afforded me food for thought, and also led me to a new outlook on life. Then came self-examination, which led me to see that I had no anchor—and had become my own slave —This was a dark time for me. I had nobody to turn to for help. Why is it that, with all the presentday talk of prison being more of a reformative than a punishment, there is not more provision made for the spiritual side of the question? A Big Brother on release? But why wait for the release? Six months of encouragement and guidance before release would be of inestimable benefit to some of us who are trying to get back.”

Of course it would. A prison Chaplain is not nearly help enough. “It certainly is bad policy to let a leaking ship go to sea.” He continues; “ Put the ship into dock and thoroughly overhaul it, not merely build a roof over it so that it shan’t get the paint blistered. Find where the leak is and do your best, plug it before it goes back into the water. Only the water will test it, but the main repairs can be done in dry dock. Besides, once the weak spot has been found, it is far easier to go about the work again if it should show slight signs of leaking again, once it is put back into the water. But a dry dock presupposes skilled workmen to carry out the examination and repairs. We get the dry dock all right, but nothing more.”

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Which is perfectly true and a very just criticism of our “ excellent” prisons.

At last there appeared on the scene the desired clergyman. “ I like Mr. G —immensely” wrote Giglamps. “ I feel that I could make something of myself yet if I had him for a friend and a guide.” The position was accordingly laid before Mr. G—but, being a very busy man, he first tried to find some brother parson to tackle the job. Failing at that, he made the sacrifice of time himself, and “ took Giglamps on” when release came. Nothing could have been better. For over five years now, “ Hyde” has disappeared from the scene. The “ sky pilot” is one of the strong, self-confident, rather “ bossy” type, keen on details, which was needed. He has made his penitent confess every week, will allow no dubious influences, encourages the verses, “ stands no nonsence,” and can’t be gulled. He has, in short, exactly “ filled the bill.” Even should “ Hyde” at some future time take a hand, Dominia for the past five years owes Mr. G —a very deep debt of gratitude.

MUCKLEMOUTH

For twenty years and more Dominia has suffered from the defects of Master Mucklemouth. He does not belong to her or to the British Empire, and why she has not long since shipped him back to his own country is a mystery. It is also a calamity, for there is evidence that his own country treats crime less drastically, and criminals more rationally.

Had Dominia, for example, years ago, called in a psychological specialist to examine this notorious “ false pretender,” he could have told her some pretty useful things. Such an expert would have discovered, for one thing, a moral “ astigmatism,” so marked and so extensive that its possessor is genuinely puzzled by the queer way everybody else looks at things! He would have found, for another thing, Imaginitis rampant, egotism colossal. To such a degree is this true that, unless I miss the mark, our specialist might have pronounced our friend, on some points, definitely insane. “ Mucklemouth is a pathological liar” declared one official. “He sounds like a paranoic,” says a friend with fuller knowledge.

He had scraped acquaintance with me by a very unnecessary trick, and in so doing had unconsciously given himself away. “ You have a great power of twisting things,” I expostulated at that stage—“ But is it worth while?” Well educated and clever though he is, his answer illustrates my point, for he replied, at once and with eagerness:—

“Your words struck me as a meteor in my whole retrospective life. First you began your letter with—“ You have a great power for thinking things, is it worth while?” No, it is not worth while, the less we think the better unless the thinking can bring the Golden Calf nothing else is worth, and one does not want much brains for that. The world’s system is in a very typsy state. The usual thing is to make ignorance one’s excuse, I must reverse and plead (humble as it is), intellect as an excuse. If I could have given my thirty years of idle thoughts to useful commerce, as my father and his father before him have done, I would

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never have known prison, poverty, sorrow and misery. For my ‘ thinking things’ has brought it on. Would to God you could teach me how to stop thinking except as how to buy someone’s labour for a sixpence and sell it for ten shillings. I know I can do it once I stop thinking things, and the law says— ‘ Quite right,’ and when you have made money you get all the honour and praise.”

There he is, safely on his high horse, his “ compensation urge;” galloping gaily—even nobly— along, in the role of Social Saviour. He longed to befriend and uplift all the suffering, the downtrodden and the poor, all the very people from whom he was ever stealing! He wanted, and keenly wanted, to reform the world, especially in the sphere of economics, yet somehow he was quite artless in his continual efforts to pay, for goods received, with valueless cheques. He certainly believed in “ paper money.” He yearned to be Providence, and often tried the role. He would begin by being quite a wise and kindly Deity, and then, of a sudden and usually quite soon, the cloven hoof would appear from out the divine robes and land his protegee (I use the feminine advisedly) in the ditch. But Mucklemouth’s version of the affair would always differ greatly from that offered—often in Court —by the lady. Here is an example, which happened to a friend of my own, an honest, brave, hardworking woman, handicapped by a drunken husband who, at the time, was in hospital. Enjoying a spell of liberty our friend was just then exploiting humble landladies in the guise of a penniless “ Searcher after Truth,” and up he comes to the rescue. What could he do to help? Why, he, Mucklemouth, was a doctor! He knew all about such troubles! And later when the husband died in hospital, he “ would arrange everything for the poor widow!” “ And he really was very good about getting the body home,” she admitted. “He seemed to know exactly how all that kind of thing is done. I think he really must have had to do with Hospitals in some way, though of course he wasn’t a doctor. But, as we went home, he said to me, ‘ Now, you will want to buy mourning, you will need money. If you will give me your husband’s insurance papers, I will arrange that for you!’ Well, fortunately,

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I was too grieved and troubled to attend to such an idea though he kept on bothering me till I said I really couldn’t and wouldn’t —And a mercy too, for if he’d once got them, he’d have gone off with them, and I’d never have had a penny. So then he left that, but when we got to my house, he said, ‘ Now, lam a Doctor. You will need more money. I will take your two front rooms, I will put up my doorplate and practice, I will have the telephone put in at once,” and so he went on, and went on, and was all for settling in that very day, and I couldn’t stop him and I couldn’t stand it, and at last I had to turn him out of the house. It wasn’t long after that, that he was taken up for practising as a Doctor when he wasn’t one; so I was lucky that way too.”

Mucklemouth’s written version of this affair was of a divine simplicity. It ran, “ You do not know perhaps the unfortunate woman. What I have done for her in her days of misfortune, I will not stoop so low as to repeat.” When told that I did know the lady, and esteemed her greatly, he responded with dignity that the nature of my acquaintance was a constant amazement to him. Sometimes when I think of the Giglamps and the Mucklemouths, I share his amazement. And sometimes when this queer world is at its queerest, I find some real comfort in considering that, after all, it might be worse, that Mucklemouth might really be in place as the “ Heavenly” Head of things, and then how much more incomprehensible and earthquakish it all would be! Ye Gods, what topsyturvydom!

I have often wished I knew his early history, what it was that had spoilt his really good powers of head and heart, what it had been that baulked his whole being and made him flee fast and far into phantasy, so far, that he seemed never able to get back to life as it is. Had he himself confided the story of his life however, one would never have done guessing as to what was real and what imaginary. “ In my next I will dichten something for you,” he wrote when we were still on friendly terms, “ I cannot get the exact equivalent in English, it is not rhyming, or singing, or composing.” No, but perhaps it is “ Romancing?”

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At the beginning of our acquaintance, he was very gracious and friendly. He himself was, of course, “ only in for political reasons.” The other unfortunates, however, needed reforming badly and he rejoiced to see that some who had come in contact with me were so far improved that he would now enjoy coming to my assistance. For only those who had been in prison themselves, naturally, could know anything of prisoners’ psychology. Moreover, he, Mucklemouth, had some special mental equipment denied to such as I. Only listen to him—

“ I am just arranging (mentally) a splendid idea in the psychological field which, if I am right, ( and I am vain enough to think I am) it will prove of the greatest value to psycho-analysis. I have ample data and ample proof for my hypothesis. It is of such great importance that it will settle the bitter controversy between Freud and McDougall concerning the Freudian view of Sex.”

While averring that his “chief aim and view in psychology is more from a biological view-point—l have two great faults” he suddenly confides —“ One is an egoistic proclivity, the second a very sensitive nature which is my psychic faculty. You see, I know exactly in what mood you are and what feeling you have towards me the moment you set pen to paper. And because I value your friendship so much is the reason I cannot have you misjudging me.” This last was in gentle reproach, for he was answering a letter in which I had expressed some of the misgivings concerning him which I had begun to feel. About this time he wrote a paper for another friend of mine—“ outside”— who had chosen as the subject—“ Truth.” A sadder screed I never read! Quite unable to come to grips with his subject, he wandered hither and thither. Sometimes he would take a long and refreshing spell at detailing his own superiorities and sufferings, sometimes a congenial gallop at “ Social Betterment.” But “ Truth” he did not deal with. “ How could he?” said my friend gently. “ The poor fellow has no idea what Truth is.” It was that paper which first gave me the idea that Mucklemouth’s behaviour, so far astray, was simply following his wits.

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He continued to send me advice. “If you want good results from your cases, first get their confidence and keep it. Do so by avoiding jealousy, then get to work at what they are, and then make them what they ought to be, and if there is no way adopt the latin maxim ‘Aut inveniam aut faciam’ and you will succeed.”

What could possibly be simpler? But stay, here is a postscript—“ Then there is a motive why one tells a falsehood or hides a truth. Take the motive as your guide.”

Excellent advice! If only it were as easy to follow! What motive, I wondered, was my mentor’s?

“ If you see the errors,” runs another grave dictum, “You must know the remedy.” And “Post hoc is not always proctor (sic) hoc” —a kind of blunder quite characteristic of him. A “ congenital” disease would be called “ congenial” and his spelling of names—even his own—was erratic.

Then we begin to get—“ It would be a pity if I see you being misled or in error and not draw your attention to the fact,” and the warning, “ I know from experience that there is not a harder thing to clear up than a falsehood with a little truth in it. . .If we look at the telescope from the wrong end, and at the wrong time what is the result?” It transpired of course, that this was exactly what I was doing—to his grave concern. Why could I not take his advice about what he (not I) called my “ cases?” “ I can see your errors, and I pray to God that you, for the love of suffering humanity, would let me correct or clear it. The question is, will you let me?” William, Tim, Rod & Co. being then among them, I thought my “ cases” had better not suffer from his errors added to my own. They, one and all, abominated “ Mucklemouth” whom they knew as a prison mischief-maker, a mischief-maker adroit enough to step piously aside —to “stand from under”— when the trouble started. He was pained at my obstinacy, and a little later came to stern rebukes mingled with complaints and warnings.

“It seems so puzzling to me that after nearly two years of correspondence you know me so little and understand me less—while I on the other hand, know you so well.

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even in some instances better than you know yourself— You believe in suffering”—this because I had upheld discipline—“ and therefore to cause to suffer must be your ideal. Let me tell you that my soul is infinitely more at liberty than yours. But how can you know what liberty is, when you do not know the world, its pain and sufferings—You know your letters are invariably so contradictory one contradicting another, 1 wonder if you remember what you write, it is amazing if not puzzling—When you stab me in the back, I can forgive you, but it is not human to forget and you cannot expect me to love my enemies.”

“Since you have been awakened by such truth in Carpenter’s noble essay, I sincerely hope that you will in future not contradict it by words and deeds and so far as possible live up to it—You see, dear friend, Hermes was not a onefaced god, and so he could be no use to his followers” — and Mucklemouth went on at length with earnest warnings to avoid conscious co-operation with the forces of evil—warnings that I did not understand at the time, and that did not prepare me for this outcry, that arrived soon after. “ You have caused me pain, sorrow and misery unheard of since the 14th century of the Spanish Inquisition” and later, “ Believe me, my friend, I would willingly cut my legs and arms off and perish in gaol, if I could only make you feel as well as think. You voice a prayer to heaven with your pen, to stock Hell with your deeds.” The explanation of all this came to me later. Master Mucklemouth had been found out in some attempted misleading of his fellows, and punished for it. He thought I was responsible, why, I never ascertained. It was the fact, however, and I became a kind of “ world’s whipping boy” to him. This accounted for the most frightful verbal drubbings, which, at last, for his own sake, I was obliged to stop.

Eventually, however, came parole, and, immediately, to my address, a document truly chastening. It was written with obvious sincerity. Its subject was my own sins, ignorances, negligences, errors, failures. There was so much truth in the indictment, and such burning conviction in the writer, that, as I read, I quailed in spirit and

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groaned in heart. Everything was, of course, twisted to suit his view of me; but it was deadly because, in all he said, I knew, myself, there was some grain of truth, some foundation of fact! I have made mistakes about my “ cases,” and fear that lam certain to make more. I am an imperfect member of an imperfect civilisation, and, as such, I am myself, in part, responsible for some part of the sufferings of such as Rod, some of the depredations of such as Robin, some of the miseries of Mucklemouth. It all struck home, there was such a vigour about it. Had he witnessed the effect, the writer would have been delighted. It flattened me right out, till, the effect wearing off a little, I found myself murmuring faintly something about “ The lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,” and my benumbed soul gradually warming to the grateful recollection that the Recording Angel is not at all likely to be Mucklemouth. And there and then it dawned on me that his skill in those “ false pretences” for which he had so often been punished, lay precisely in this firmness with which he held his distorted view of real facts to be the true view. This was what enabled him always to act as if on principle, and so to become inspired by that moral backing which gives such strength to good (and bad) causes! He began, every time, by manipulating the facts so as to bring them nearer to his heart’s desire; and ended by believing that “Dichtung” to be Reality. He could “ put it over” on others so well — for a little while —because he had first “ put it over” on himself so well, that to him there really was no “ false pretence” about it at all. He convinced others, in brief, because he had first convinced himself, and never shall I forget those catastrophic moments when he proved upon me his hypnotic skill.

Suppose now that the spell had lasted long enough to make me write “ Peccavi” to him, and ask his pardon, begging his aid withal in righting blunders? Well, I feel sure that he would have been graciousness itself, bestowing absolution at once, and devising endless fair schemes for the penitent. For Mucklemouth was ever benevolent!

Up to a point, as a sequel showed! Coming one day to Z—, my home town, he called, not upon me but on a friend

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of mine, Scotch and astute, who yet before long had parted with the sum of one guinea, a contribution towards that passage homeward for which his sympathisers must have paid over and over again. Continuing his progress, he called upon (again) a humble landlady interested in some small religious gathering, and under the guise, and in the name, once more, of a foreign doctor of medicine, “ Searching after Truth.” Missing her purse after the visit, however, she took a man friend, and followed “Dr Creighton” to his lodging. He was all sympathy—“ Poor lady, and she a working woman! No, he had seen nothing of her purse, but would regard it as a privilege to make her loss good. Two pounds, was it? Well, here was a cheque for three!” O benign doctor! O Providence!

That cheque, unhappily, was drawn upon a Bank at which the “ Doctor” had no account, and this inadvertence led to a charge of purse-stealing. A lawyer-acquaintance offered to defend him gratis, but Mucklemouth “ knew all about lawyers, and would defend himself.” He called as witness for the defence the witness for the prosecution. Not unnaturally the facts which he sought to put into their mouths were not elicited, and the defence merely reiterated the attack. Mucklemouth thereupon stated that he could not proceed, as his “ witness would not tell the truth.” And lam certain that he believed it too. But the Magistrate —well—at any rate, Mucklemouth went “ back.” And unless some patriotic well-wisher actually contrives to ship him to his native country, there seems every likelihood of Dominia’s continuing to play this silly game of battledore and shuttlecock with him, until the day of his death.

TANNHAUSER AND OTHERS

“ The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it,” wrote Ruskin in his “ Stones of Venice.” “ The wild grass grows well and strongly one year with another, but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to bitterer blight. —We are to take care how we check, by severe requirements or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellences because they are mingled with rough faults.”

The “rough faults” are there, certainly, but so, too, are the “ great excellences” in some that I have met within the walls. Of these Tannhauser was certainly one. “ 1 love religion and hate crime; and yet lam a criminal. Can you explain it?” he asked me once. The answer was for someone wiser than myself, but at least I could see that what he said was true. “A most gentlemanly young fellow!” reported another puzzled onlooker, who had known him when first he came from his far home-land, “ and yet he went and stole knives and forks or something. Kleptomania, would you call it?”

Not exactly, I think. At all events the queer outbreaks of stealing were always associated with a previous outbreak of something else, namely a passion for a member of the other sex. He was born of a Latin mother, who died at his birth, and a staunchly built Presbyterian Scotch father. Romantic, imaginative, sensitive, loving and beauty-loving, he seems to have been imperfectly understood by that strict father. He had moreover, a stepmother who was “ a fiend in human shape.” When he made his first slip, somewhere in adolescence, he was sternly told that he had disgraced an honourable name, and he was sent into exile. Then it was one “ fall” after another, and when I first met him, in ripe manhood, he was accounted “ hopeless.” Psychiatry might have proved him far otherwise, but “ justice” in Dominia as already explained knows nothing of that Science. So Tannhauser,

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slave of Venus, was numbered merely among the “ incorrigible thieves.”

Well though he knew the real nature of his weakness, he seemed helpless to withstand it. “It is quite a simple matter,” he writes from prison, “ to behave myself here — quite easy to form high ideals in the quiet of my cell, and to create a desire to put them into practice—But it is a totally different proposition to be able to carry out all these good resolutions —Here I am free from temptation, never think of it. But when the temptation comes, and through a certain kind of person, then Goodbye—Whether for good or evil, a woman holds a tremendous influence over me—l think there are moments when the mind is rendered inert by some greater force operating it; and it is in those moments of aberration that foul deeds are made possible—The first time I was out on parole I was out twelve months, earning on an average £1 a day. I came to Arundel for a holiday, and the day I was going back, I met a girl—spent all my money, and ended in prison. I neither drink, smoke, nor swear, and I have always worked, always hated a loafer.” He was in fact, a most excellent tradesman, thorough, consientious and artistic. His religious fervour too was great. “ When a boy, I used to go up often to an old Church-tower to meditate, because there I would be nearer God —But I looked too low for Beauty. I looked down, not up—l have looked for beauty where there was no beauty, for beauty cannot live on rot —I want someone who will help me to kill that which is the rootcause of the evil.”

It seemed likely that a good strong woman friend could do more for Tannhauser than any man, and first one, then another, was sought for and found. To the first he wrote, later; “ The words you uttered, six and a half years ago, ‘ Tannhauser, you are not a criminal,’ revealed to me the fact that you saw not the deed but the circumstance, and for those comforting words I have felt a debt and wealth of gratitude which in life I will never be able to repay. You then sowed the seed of retrieval —”

This lady supplied him some reading, on applied psychology from the definitely Christian point of view; and that

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he found illuminating. But the second woman friend was able to nourish also the devotional side of his nature, which was much stronger than the intellectual. Very happily married herself, she afforded no temptation to Romance. At the same time there was a baleful witch-fire beckoning from Venus-berg in the shape of an old “ flame,” who was very far indeed from that “ beauty which cannot live on rot.” When I last heard of him Tannhauser had definitely turned his back upon her proposals, and taken strongly to religion of the Salvation Army type. I should feel much happier about him, however, if, like William and Miles, he had found some good, true and loving wife, to hear his confidences, requite his love, and share his piety.

A “ good prisoner” himself, Tannhauser utterly despised our prisons, and our “ justice,” and speaks of the “ deleterious Influences of prison-life.” “ Surely,” he writes, “ they can see that years of it have no deterrent effect on me. Prison will never reform—Reformation comes from the heart, it is a desire in the individual heart to do right. Go to any of our hospitals, and you will find them equipped with the latest and most up to date appliances, etc., able surgeons, angels of mercy tending the sick. Broken-dowm human beings go there to be made whole. Prisons should give equal treatment. There is a boy of seventeen sent here among us incorrigibles. Oye Gods! Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn, but man’s ignorance of man peoples the criminal world—l might have gone out as I came in, with an anti-social spirit seeking for someone to “ pay” for my self-inflicted punishment, but for the friendship of outsiders.”

“ When the Judge sentenced me he said I had chosen to live by crime. This -was the cruellest cut of all—l had gotten for myself a good name throughout the whole district where I worked, and for anyone to tell me I was living by crime was enough to put the iron in me-—A boy may have lived an honest upright life till one day in a moment of weakness he succumbs to temptation, then comes the stigma of prison life. Will people think of him for ever afterwards as Jack-the-honest-lad, or Jack-the-thief? Ninety per cent, will glory in calling him Jack-the-Thief,

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and if possible keep the memory of it evergreen. I robbed a man of £4l, for which I received over six years hard labour. I made restitution, but can Society repay me the years they have robbed me of?”

Tannhauser was quite a good influence in prison. His mates spoke of him as “ always cheerful,” and I found he made a habit of this for their sakes. His judgment, to be sure, was pretty poor; but so was that of his mates. Judgment is one of the faculties that always seems to suffer in gaol, and it has generally been faulty to begin with. He was, however, convinced that “ there is something in us that never deteriorates, never becomes demoralised, that is always true and clean”—a conviction by the way, necessary to every competent social worker, for it is the magic lever that will rouse the basest nature, if firmly enough held and constantly applied, even in the face of disappointment. “No positive trait is built until it is practised,” is another truth discovered by this correspondent. “ I profit more,” he writes, “ by trying to help others along the same lines that lam being helped.” Thus, before long, we find him ranged alongside Sam i a poor wretch whose disgusting sex-crime caused him to be despised even in prison. Tannhauser’s mates protested, but he stood firm, and showed that the Christianity he professed was more than lip-service. He made friends with the sinner without condoning the sin—for that sin must have been particularly heinous to his own romantic heart. So it happened that, later, when he was free of the walls, Sam was able to write; “He was Christ’s Ambassador to me. He found me pretty dirty, I’ll admit, but thank him and God he has left me a clean heart.” And Tannhauser in his turn had written, “lam as happy as anyone could possibly be. I have Christ in my heart, and the best pal in the world”— the despised Sam.

Sam was an epileptic, whose inherited weakness was probably the major cause of his crime. Many sex offences are, of course, due to drinking, but there are many of which this cannot be said. “ Wheat suffers bitterer blight than the wild grass;” and I have found among sex-offenders slaves of lust who have yet natures above the average.

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Take Lemuel. He is a middle-aged man, who does not drink. His intelligence and education are both excellent. His aesthetic tastes are cultivated and his religious feelings strong. Yet, averse to matrimony, he has been guilty of abominable behaviour, more than once, to little girls. He admits his guilt fully. He deplores it, and yet—! Dominia has progressed far enough to surmise that he—and others like him may be a job for a surgeon rather than a gaoler; but would not wiser communities refer him to a psychiatrist?

“ The eternal conflict,” he writes, “ between our lower and our higher desires is a subject of deepest interest to us all, for who is there among us but at some time or other has had to cry out with St. Paul, ‘ I would do good, but evil is present with me?’ It is a cry from the heart, and no one knows better than myself how bitter that cry can be.”

“ You ask if I have read Francis Thompson’s ‘ Hound of Heaven,’ Ay, that I have, and I know nothing that ever made a deeeper impression on me, for can I not see my own life’s story in every line of it?—l am still, here and now, lost in a book, and am devoted to all kinds of allegorical matter, the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Holy War, etc. . . Perchance I (first) loved them because of the great fight that was to be mine for life, between the forces of evil, God and the devil—and the contest still goes on.”

“ As I write there are two great bouncing blow-flies buzzing round my head. Very easily did they slip in at the little opening atop my window, but they haven’t the faintest idea how to get out again, and concentrate all their efforts in hurling themselves against the frosted glass while all the time the open way to freedom lives just above, and, did they but aim their flight just a little higher, they would be out at once. Methinks there is a moral in this that will fit others as well as blow-flies.”

It was suggested that the best way to the upward track might be found in a firm and consistent putting-into-prac-tice the tenets of his religion, instead of just “ buzzing about them” and toying more or less sensuously with their outer and visible symbols. (He was a ritualist in all things, and adored, he said, “ the symbolic usages of all

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religions.”) “ But that is just where the rub comes—they are so much easier to talk about!” was the naive rejoinder. As a matter of fact such sexual offenders very often do set great store by religion, and, as far as outward observance goes, are exceedingly devout. This leads many to call them hypocrites, for they are sometimes leading vicious lives beneath this cloak of piety; but, for myself, I am not so sure. I think that there is a real division in some such natures —a “ watertight division”—and the whole personality finds a definite help and relief when it can get away from the dirty compartment into the clean one. For this reason it values the clean one extremely, and would not give it up for anything, even though it “ goes down to the little devils” for some periods of its experience. The truer teaching of Christianity, as a “ way of life,” rather than a “ belief,” seems to help such souls. Lemuel, at all events, referring to “ the Cross,” wrote, later on—“ From what does that sacrificial death save me when I trust in it? Am I thereby delivered from any several and particular sins? If not, from what am I saved, and wherein have I experienced the transforming love of Christ? . . .

Little over two years ago, I was master of my own movements, and could go where I would —and yet at the same time I was the pitiable bond-slave of sin that held me in helpless captivity. Sin has now met his master, and I now live in the full confidence that He Who has begun this great work in me will yet complete it.”

Let us earnestly hope so, for everybody's sake. For such as Lemuel, outwardly obedient to his Church, outwardly so self-indulgent, regular weekly confession to a firm but sympathetic shepherd of souls would, conceivably, be the best practical antidote to the wiles of the sniggering little devils of Lust? No penal deterrent ever seems to deter from them. Flogging does not. Years and years of prison do not. Even the death penalty is impotent. A few years back the victim of a “ sex invert” killed his seducer, yet within a few weeks there were other sentences for the same offence, and so there have been ever since. The trouble clearly lies somewhere in the sub-conscious, far too deep for any external punishment to work a cure.

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As regards the “ inverts” generally, such men—l know nothing in this respect of women—are generally perfectly honest, unless, of course, as in the case of Miles, the inversion is prison-induced. Not only are they often markedly “ religious” but frequently the artistic tastes, sometimes the intellectual, too, are extremely well-cul-tivated. Psychologists, I understand, generally regard all homo-sexuality as “ regression” to the twelve-year old preference for the company of one’s own sex, and they seem to regard normal relations with the opposite sex, as the right “way out.” But is this always so? In some cases that I have known, it has seemed to me that in this “ intermediate sex” there is a “ displacement” rather than a “ regression” of our unitive trend, and that for its members the proper “ sublimation” is through art, religion, music or other supra-personal devotion —not through sex at all. Many such men, it is true, are kind even to flabbiness, both as regards themselves and others, which may account for a great deal. The love nature may have been given its earliest outlet too early in life, and the habit been persisted in. In some cases too, the whole nature is so feminine, that it seems to seek its partner in the male as a matter of course. Simo’s mother, for instance, was told by him that he had “ got the crochetcotton, hook and patterns safely and is now making a camisole-top.” But in many others it looks as though the really fine artistic, intellectual, or spiritual equipment has inhibited the desire to reproduce “ after the flesh,” but has not yet been able to sublimate the desire for sensepleasure; and homo-sexuality is then subconsciously preferred as the “ safer” course. Glaucon, on having this suggestion put before him, exclaimed that with him that had certainly been the case. He was very musical, very “ religious” too, and cared nothing for women until they were autumnal —when he liked them very much! Like every other invert, I think, that I have known, he had no real feeling that his sex-actions had been at all unnatural or wrong, although he was fully aware of Society’s attitude in the matter. He found quite useful the suggestion that the right way out for him was up, not back and

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“ down,” as he would have regarded the step of marriage: up to that spiritual development for which in his heart of hearts he yearned, while he still allowed his desires to lounge on the “ landing-stage” of homo-sexual practice. The spiritual life, he found, demands certain definite renunciations in favour of chastity, and its urge was already strong enough to make him admit the claim. The spiritual life, moreover, is in its own way, creative too, and does not turn back towards reproduction on the physical plane the personality already sterile on that plane by instinct. Glaucon, I understand, has now lived for years since his release, without a relapse. Such perplexing lives incline one to ponder the wisdom of the East, with its teachings about re-incarnation, renunciation, and the due evolution of a soul from the householder’s career at one stage, to that of the ascetic at another. In any case, it certainly is true that to-day we have a glorification of sex-function which is merely rubbish. From the dawn of history men —and women, too—have definitely renounced “ sex” at the call of that which seemed a finer service, and been not only happy beyond the dreams of the sensualist, but richly fruitful too, in forms unseen, for the rest of their fellows. Perhaps some later generation will stop preaching sex-indulgence, avoid the pitfalls of sex-repression, and devote itself to the re-discovery of sex-sublimation. Then we shall have far less sex crime.

Gratinus, who had endured a flogging as part-reprisal for his “ invert” propensity, was bitter in his complaints. “ You might say,” he wrote, “ that people in Hospital cannot be blamed for their misfortune, and I say, neither can we! A person suffering from a physical disease is given every facility to get better in our Hospitals, and given the most tender care; while we are given no facilities to improve and every possible enjoyment is taken from us.” Then, of course, comes self-abuse, that symptom of emotional starvation! “O, if they only knew,” cried one poor lad who had been punished for this, though not in prison, “that it was the only touch of affection I ever got!” Lance, on release, confessing to much excess added; “ But when one night I thought—suppose Miss M. (who had

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befriended him) could see you now, the very thought of her stopped me at once.” She had, he said, “ been very good to him.” Martin, said by his prison-mates to be for no other reason the nervous wreck he then certainly was, stopped me in the street years later, happy, married and at work. “ I’ll never go wrong again,” he said, “ because of my own little boys.” His love-nature had won home and was fain no longer of the husks which once had been its only chance of survival. The same was true, of course, of Miles, and is true of many another like him. “ I know of no item in the Home-Office Estimates,” writes Dr. Hugh Creighton Miller, “ which deals with the factor of human love for those who have always wanted it, and are making Society pay dearly because they are unloved.” And this last is true, not only of sex-perversions!

Let us return to Cratinus. “ I try,” he wrote, “to lead the narrow way, and find it no easy walk, especially in a place like this, where bristles continually crop up, to jag and worry—l do not mean that kindness should mean indulgence by any means. But cannot people be kind to drunkards, thieves, sensualists, etc., without making them worse? I should think that the way to reform them was to bring the best and most beautiful things into their lives, to give them a helping hand. My idea is that all Judges, prison officials, etc., should undergo six months’ imprisonment as part of their training,” added this man, a sensitive whom flogging and prison-repressions had only made more obstinate and perverse. As in the case of nervepatients, a prisoner’s own suggestions towards his cure are always worth studying. And it was a “ beautiful thing brought into his life” that did, as a matter of fact, succeed where all punishment had failed —the friendship and the “ helping-hand” of one Mrs V. This was a fine gentle, spiritually-minded member of a certain healing sect, and of her he could never say enough in relief and gratitude. Recognising the goodness of his real inner self, she had addressed herself to that, and so encouraged it as to soothe and socialise him greatly. Women “ char-acter-nurses,” in fact, I believe can do far more with this class of social offender than men, if only because they

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don’t seem to feel anything like the disgust against them that one finds so marked in the normal male, a disgust which seems to drive these “ abnormals” to defiance and further perversity.

“If men are too wicked to mingle with the outside world,” Cratinus wrote, before the advent of Mrs. V., “ surely the fairest way would be to give them the option of living (or rather existing) in prison, or experiencing a quick and painless death. I certainly know which I would choose. Much better to be put to death than be segregated in similar institutions to this” —one of Dominia’s cleanest, pleasantest, most peaceful-looking institutions. “ Here,” he goes on, “ w r e are deprived of all that is best in life. . . If we could realise that our sentences were just, we would willingly bear our punishment, but in very many cases of our kind no thought is taken by our Judges of the good—great good in many cases—we have done in our lives in other ways. . . .”

No. For Dominia’s Judges do not yet aim at reforming the criminal, only at properly punishing the crime. That last remark of Cratinus was especially true of the hapless Eteocles, who had fought for years against his passions, enlisting all the medical aid then available, and had been kind to every fellow-creature he met, because of the real pleasure he took in giving help. He had filled various useful posts with conspicuous success but, through “ inversion,” he had finally to meet exposure, disgrace and prison. “ Übi lapsus? Quid feci?” he wrote, in bewilderment and despair. “ I ask myself these questions night and day, and can find no answer to them.” Once he was taken, on transfer, not in prison garb, I am glad to say, through the very district that once he had faithfully served: many prisoners would have welcomed the journey as a “ change,” but to one of his sensitiveness it was the worst of possible tortures. I often had occasion to fear for Eteocles’ brain. There were, lam glad to say, some moments of relief.

“ Many years ago in Robinsville,” he wrote, “ an organgrinder came to me. He was a veteran of the American Civil War, and did not know how to draw his pension in

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Dominia. I did what was necessary for him and he went his way. I had been (in prison) at Quidquid about six months when I got a letter from him to say that he was again in Dominia, that he hadn’t forgotten me, and that the first fine evening he would be on the street outside the gaol to serenade me. Sure enough, a few nights later, I heard an old barrel-organ breaking into the opening bars of the “ Blue Danube,” and realised that my old friend was doing the Blondel act outside my cell. I can assure you I felt more at peace than I had for long enough, both with myself and human nature.”

No amount of prison life did this man the least good —far from it. He deteriorated visibly, and I have reason to fear that his practices were not less perverse on release. Death has claimed him now. He has gone beyond the reach of our ignorances whether of heart or head, and who can mourn?

Age may have had a good deal to do with the recovery of Lycon, who had pronounced artistic gifts, and was extremely responsive to kindness. He was genuinely devoted to his ancient Church and to one of its “ Homes,” to which he eventually went on parole. Here for years he has done quite well and his cheerful letters tell the tale. “ I am intensely happy,” he writes, “ and continue to cultivate cleaner and nobler thoughts in accord with my surroundings.” Religion was evidently the right way out for Lycon; for even in prison he had been able to write: “ My penalty, or, as I prefer to call it, penance, was just and salutary,” though he had to add, a little later, “ I am losing strength both physically and mentally—and the desire to do all things well, and better if possible, has gone from me.” The Home with its gracious loving atmosphere, took him over from the prison just in time. That Home, by the way, is “manned” entirely by women!

There are, of course, some civilised countries where the sex-practices of such men are considered no more antisocial than the more “ natural” sex incontinence not unknown among ourselves; and the law does not break them for it. Do we ourselves ostracise or punish the profligate? However this may be, it is at least certain that imprison-

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ment does the homo-sexual less than no good; and largely because it consigns them to daily contact with their own sex alone. Nor does flogging deter. For this class of prisoner our treatment, whether considered in its punitive or in its remedial aspects, must be written down a complete and costly failure.

COPPERTOP

“ My Aunt,” wrote Coppertop indignantly, at an early stage in our acquaintance, “ wrote me a sarcastic letter —saying that she hopes I never get out of prison again. That’s a nice thing to say to a person, is it not? Imagine that you received my Aunt’s letter. How would you feel about it? You would do as I did. I think it would be quite in order for me to say that if there were seven Satans in this world, she is the whole seven of them. . . . My letter must have impressed her a little, for she never contradicted the statement I made, w T hen I said she was a sneak-faced, slab-sided, ring-boned, saddle-galled, twofaced cat, and her social position was mangy, and if she had any friends, which I hoped she had not, they had better cut themselves adrift from her so as to be free from contamination.”

His wrath lasted long enough, on this occasion, for some expostulation on my part to reach him, before it evaporated; for a later letter says: “ If I’d been in her house when she remarked that it was a pity I never got sentenced for life, I would just of spat in her eye and walked out without saying a word.”

A little later yet, and he is calming down. “ I don’t think,” he explains, “ it does me any good to be writing about her, as I may be committing a sin by doing so, and I don’t want to commit sins, for when I made my resolution ... .1 renounced the Devil with all his works and pomps. But first of all I’m not two-faced, and if anyone or anything says or does anything that seems unfair or hurts my feelings, LOOK OUT for about five minutes—they are sure to get it straight from the shoulder. I let ’em have it good and strong in plain English—l have known myself to swear for five minutes without using the same swear-word twice when in some half-drunken fight,” and he is not very much ashamed about that. “ However,” he adds, “ If I find I have been going off pop for little or no cause, I apologise at once.”

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Then, still a little later:—“ I wrote to my Aunt, and told her I was sorry.”

That’s Coppertop! Would you yourself like to have such a nephew? Or, indeed, such an Aunt? with her pride so much stronger than her affection! It never does to “go straight from the shoulder” at any prisoner and tell him “ just what you think of him,” though I admit the temptation, and also having yielded to it, much too often. It does no good, only harm. The prisoner feels that you are kicking him while down, and he at once gets so busy rejecting that offence on your part that he overlooks or ignores his own, and so gets no good from your best-aimed blows and grows sore in quite the wrong places. Whereas “ Mother never even went off bang at me for getting into trouble this time. She only said: ‘ Don't you think you have caused me enough worry?’ Well, you know, that hurt me more than if she had went off bang at me.”

“ Enough worry” Coppertop certainly must have cost that unfortunate woman, for he had been “in trouble” ever since his childhood. He had grown up to the age of 25 or so—-(mostly in institutions supposed to “ reform”) when he wrote to me for “ help to behave better.” I say “ grown-up,” but Coppertop never had really grown up, so far as common-sense and self-control are concerned. He always “ felt” to me about fifteen. His development, however, was not explained solely by his “ education.” His father was a drunkard —separated from his mother. His mother, in her turn, was fond, but feckless; while Coppertop had always been a very live wire indeed, with the need of careful handling, from the very start; so it was not to be wondered at that “ Conflagrations” marked the course of “ his young life,” as he plaintively called it. It will not surprise—though it will sadden —me, if there are more to come. His unstable nervous system reacts hostilely to the restraining hand, yet will not allow him to govern himself. He has a hundred good points. He is most lovable; his psychic energy is great; he wants to behave better, that is to say, the conscious part of him does. There is a troublesome “ sub-conscious,” however,

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and when drink, or temper, gives it the upper hand, a sad mess he makes of things!

“ I was just starting to be pleased with myself” he confesses, soon after our acquaintance began, “ and there I git fooling and putting myself into trouble. I have made a mess of the good start I made—l never meant any harm, I was just acting the fool.”

“ Drink has been my weakness. I don’t care who the person is, if they place themselves under the influence of liquor, they lose their power of self-respect for the time” —and then, with characteristic excuses for himself—“ I often think that a man is more or less excusable for the petty thefts that he commits through drink. But the person I have not time for is the man who holds a good position and commits some of the w r orst offences when children are victimised.” ... “I have as much power of self-control as anybody else, only when drinking rotten booze I steal, gamble and fight.”

He defends his “ kind of temper.” In fact, he is rather proud of it! “ There is a difference between being quicktempered and violent-tempered. What Idoas a rule when a person offends me is, just give ’em a good talking to, and if they persist in offending me, I end up by telling them to go where they won’t be troubled with the cold, and then I walk away. ... A chap in the same boardinghouse had been annoying a girl. I just called him aside and told him what I thought of him. I gets a punch on the jaw. My mate grabs him and throws him on the floor. I felt like playing football with him on the landing, but instead I told him to come to the back yard and we would have it out. However, he wouldn’t come dowm so when I had used up all my swear-words at him, I just spat in his eye and walked away and left him. . My idea of telling about this incident is, to make my point understood —it does not matter how a person puts me out I won’t punch ’em without giving ’em a fair go.” Possibly, too, his infantile “ sub-conscious” demanded a little bit of showing-off?

“ Regarding that letter to my Aunt, perhaps it teas vulgar. Yet her letter to me was vulgar also and I fail

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to see why I should allow her to abuse me—l don’t want you to believe that I liked writing such a letter, because I did not. Her letter hurt me very much, and I guess my letter hurt her when she got it, which is just as well perhaps for it may be a lesson to her. However, I may have little or no time for some people, but I couldn’t be bothered wasting my time hating them. If I tried to hate a person I would feel very unhappy, but I could shake ’em up and have a row with them and forget it five minutes later.”

“ I wrote to my Mother to-day and said one or two things that lam sorry for now. I guess I didn’t have much to bark about when all is said and done.”

Like so many quick-tempered people, he was swift also to sympathise. An accident once happened to me, and put letters from me out of the question. “I was informed,” writes Coppertop, “ this morning by one of the inmates that you are very ill. lam very sorry to hear this—now whatever you do don’t bother about writing letters—l’ll write a few lines to you from time to time—l won’t make this letter a long one. However, in conclusion, I must say again that I’m very sorry to learn that you are ill.” “If I was out,” he adds a little later, “ I’d write all your letters for you.”

Long after the death of Roderick Dim, whom he had known in gaol, he wrote. “ Just fancy, it is seven years after Rod’s death. He was a good fellow, but it seemed as if Fate was against him—he had a pretty rough spin in his time—his body has returned to the earth from whence it came, but his Spirit, his real self, the real Rod, has passed to a higher realm. . . . There is one thing I am sure of—God understands. He knows, you and I know, too, that Rod was more sinned against than sinning, so perhaps some day we will meet him in another atmosphere, in a world of no more sorrow and no more pain.”

With his lightning changes of mood Coppertop possessed a characteristic that I have noticed in others of his type within the walls—he was distinctly “ psychic.” This characteristic found expression in the usual ways, generally associated with fortune-telling. Martin, that erstwhile “ nervous wreck” of whom I have spoken, had a

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most “ uncanny” knack “ with the cards.” He even presented outside friends of my own with prophecies of the future that came to pass with dreadful accuracy. “ I cannot read the cards,” reported Coppertop. “ but I am very good at reading the palm and face. ... I have never read any person’s hand yet that has not told me afterwards that I told them all their past as if it had been taken from a book. In my opinion, fortune-telling is a gift. Very seldom a real fortune-teller will accept coin—it does not seem right to sell that which is a gift for use, not abuse. Fortune-telling has never got me into trouble,” he responded, when advised against practising it. “ A girl I know very well once asked me to read her palm. I read it and told her a good deal of her past and she wanted to know about her future but I said I might make mistakes. . . . What I saw was true, but I did not want to tell her. That night I wrote on a piece of paper the girl’s future. Six weeks later I opened it, for the girl had died. Everything I had written came true, even the poor girl’s death.”

“ This is how I look at clairvoyant powers—l say a man or woman who has such a gift is inspired,” he modestly adds! Some clairvoyant power I had to confess to myself he really did possess, for onoe after a talk he ventured upon some startling allusions, very true ones, too, to matters in my own earlier life, known only to myself. “It can be read in your face,” he asserted. He had certainly tapped my own sub-conscious in some way. I did not myself on that account, however, number Coppertop among “ the Inspired.”

Presently, however, it so happened that he became “converted,” and felt himself inspired indeed! “Please don’t be offended at what I say now,” he wrote. “ You have an immortal soul which never dies. Now I want you to open your Testament at Revelation, Chapter 20, and read verses 12, 13, 14 and 15.” The reader may not have his Bible handy, so I may remind him that those verses deal with the Day of Judgment, when the Seer “ saw the dead judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works ” It came as

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something of a surprise after that to be instructed by my new and ardent teacher that “ After reading it you may find there is no other way of escape than to use our Lord as a fire-escape if we wish to be written in the Book of Life.” I have come to dread the effect upon prisoners of that “ Fire-escape” travesty of Christ’s teaching as to the development of spiritual consciousness through love to God and man. To the ordinary offender that travesty means this: “ The way we behave does not matter! For Jesus has paid for your sins if you just take him at His Word, so you won’t get punished when you die.” I therefore followed up Coppertop’s new lead, and we had some straight speech about it—straight on both sides.

“ You make a statement,” wrote Goppertop, much hurt, “ to the effect that it would be a good thing to show my faith in God by conquering my lower nature. Well, you evidently forget my resolution to lead a different life in the future. You also make another statement to the effect that you so often come across people who seem to see no contradiction between what they call having faith in God and breaking His law, that it makes you anxious about me when I write in this vague way as if I thought faith in God was only belief, and did not have to be proved by my life and conduct. lam sure when I get out I won’t place myself in a position to come back again.”

“ I notice you say that you are keeping my last letter in the hope that some day you will be able to read it over and say, ‘ Well, Goppertop has proved that his faith in God was not a mere belief, but a living acting force within him.’ . . . You also say, ‘ Why should I think God has the power to forgive me my sins and yet not see that He calls on me to use the powers that he has given me, so as not to commit them?’ Now I don’t want you to think that I don’t use the powers He has given me not to commit sins, for I do. Another thing you say is: ‘When a man lives all wrong and tells me he has faith in God, you say to yourself what kind of a God can he really believe in?’ Well, the old saying is, —‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ ” Then we have pages against my doctrine of “ self-conquest for the true convert.” This I was

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assured, almost with tears, meant “ Works, not Faith.” a most deadly doctrine that would ruin me if I persisted in it! However, as the impassioned pages accumulated, it began to dawn on me that he was confusing the word “ self-conquest” with the word “ self-confidence”; and this he admitted to be so! One of the difficulties in dealing with these men and women, whose ordinary vocabulary is very limited, lies, in fact, in such verbal misconceptions.

But Coppertop was delighted with the gift of Masefield’s “ Everlasting Mercy” which I thought might prove an acceptable bridge over the gulf between “ faith” and “ works.” “ I have read it three times, and the more I read it the better I like it—l know that I myself, for one, have in a sense lived the life of Saul Kane, and I hope to live it down and win through, the same as he did.”

Well, late one month he came out on parole; and early in the next I had a letter: “ I have met the most wonderful little girl in all the world, and we both love each other very much. I told her all about myself and also about being in prison, though it hurt me very much to do so, it hurt her too, however seeing that we have no secrets we love one another all the more—God has been good to me in giving me this little girl to love, and I thank the Master that she is a Christian and believe me she is a dear. It would break my heart if I got into trouble and I would die sooner than upset her—l will always do the right thing by her—Nothing will come between us. I praise the Lord for the day I was converted.”

Alas! Before three months were out, here was my Coppertop “ in” again! Very shamefaced, but not really much ashamed. “ Drink done it,” as usual, though this time through not liking to be “ awkward” when the girl’s friends prescribed a glass of hot rum for a very bad cold. They did not know his “ hair-trigger” makeup, nor understand that such as he may not transgress by one glass—nay, even by one drop—the rule of complete abstinence, or all is lost. The dose, so kindly

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meant and given, cured the cold, but started our friend on a “ spree” that lasted for days. His subsequent “ works” were scarcely Christian, and seemed to have involved somebody else’s money and another maid. As for the “ most wonderful little girl in all the world,” “ I never heard from her, and I consider it’s just as well,” he wrote sulkily, warming up presently to—“ I’m going to write to her soon though and give her a shake-up—l don’t want her, wouldn’t marry her with a thousand pound chucked in. I did think a lot of her once, but that is all over.”

Presently it bid fair to be “all over” with me, too! I blame myself a good deal for this, because I should have known that he was in a state of conflict, not only with the Law and the lady, but also with himself—and left him alone awhile. A heated letter arrived accusing me of “ untruth” in characterising some of his actions. The way to an apology from him had to be long and carefully prepared. It came at last, so shadowy as scarcely to be seen. “ Though I can’t forget, I willingly forgive. God bless you! I. John, 3rd. Chapter; 2 Corinthians, 7, 8, 9.” Later he hazarded the opinion that “ our little shake-up has done us both good,” and I understood yet once more the relief given by an explosion, to seething nerves seething in prison. Our correspondence continued.

So did Coppertop’s interest in texts and Evangelical theology. So did a certain hauteur —as of a vessel chosen. Thus, possibly, to compensate himself somehow for his fall:—

“ I was thinking of taking a course of Bible study, but found it would be a waste of money for out of 26 subjects I find I know the lot. In fact, in one of the subjects I find I know 205 references to it.”

“ I hope the next time you write you will refute anything I have said that can be refuted, but I don’t think I have left anything much to refute.”

“ * Judge not that ye be not judged,’ the words of Christ himself. Ah! if we were less prone to judge we would be near the Master.”

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“ I find it much better to study the Bible from non-sec-tarian lines. That is why I don’t get my friend to tell many in the meeting,” (of the sect he had joined on conversion) “ about me, for they would all be writing on sectarian lines to me—l will take the Bible as it is and God at His Word —that will do me. I would like you to read Chapter 19 of the Acts.” He also refers to himself as “ a prisoner of the Lord.”

“ If you happen to meet my mother,” he descends once to beg, “ Please don’t let her know I’m here —in fact it would be wise not to mention me if you meet her. If she mentioned me it would be wiser still to change the subject.”

Then once more he flung away from me. “To avoid any more thrusts I have made up my mind it would be better for our correspondence to cease. In several of your letters lately I have noticed some very personal remarks —now, my dear friend, Good-bye and God bless you!” This is in rather large and sprawling writing. There follows, in a much smaller hand, like a little whisper, the words: “ Don’t think bad of me for I am trying to do me best and will come out on the right side in the end. Psalm 103, 8 to 12.”

On that, he was left alone for awhile. He had a perfect right to find himself, and there are times when nobody should butt in, for nobody is wanted. But Coppertop and I are friends once more. We met one day in prison and actual presence, not just the memory of it, did the trick. I take care, in these days, to avoid his religious corns, and he does not ask me to look up so many texts. I owe him, too, some really priceless lessons in the art of keeping my own temper!

LARRY

Larry has the same unstable kind of nervous fibre as Coppertop, possibly for the same cause, since his father also was a drunkard. “He was begun when his father was drunk and I wild with disgust, and it’s he that’s paid the price,” said his mother, poor soul, with the tears running down her sorrow-worn face. “He was all right till he was about twelve,” his sister said, “ but then he began to steal, with other boys. Father would be very cruel to him, with no reason, especially when he was drunk. Larry has always been dlean-minded, but he can’t pass a thing without trying to take it.” At fifteen he was given a sentence of twelve months “ hard,” and this had upon him just the effect one might have expected. Later on, between sentences, “he would sometimes have about twelve hours liberty, then he would steal again and be caught again. Prison has never stopped him in the least.” Once, while “ out” a little longer than usual, he married. The girl, beautiful but untruthful, was unable to cook or make a real home for him and the children. Finally she vanishes from the story, the children go to his people, and Larry, now a man of middle-age, is lodged at his country’s expense.

So much for his “ history.” As for himself. “ I am a sentimental lout,” he explains, with his usual amiability, “ have coursed through the whole gamut of the emotions, seeking to find surcease. Physical contacts fail, the essential spiritual element lacking, but by some strange stroke of Providence I am of a buoyant nature —I may not be credited in certain quarters with having high ideals and a strict notion of the proprieties, but, believe you me, I have an inherent dislike to outrages in intimate personal affairs What a field here exists—in prison—for observing the stark reality of men’s tragedies, and the ephemeral romance of the free-booter. The gems of O. Henry were conceived in the penitentiary, but I have a shrewd suspicion that his best work was performed surrounded by the amenities of life, and the immense inspiriational influence of the great out-of-doors. I find the chief

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loss to such as lis the lack of social intercourse. It often happens that we here are intensely human people who miss the affairs of the Great World a great deal.”

However, Larry consoled himself with literature, and his taste was good, too. If I did not know in myself how often admiration stops short of emulation I should be enormously encouraged by his love, in especial, of great literary moralists.

“ The wisdom of St. Bernard,” he says, “ makes a mark with me. Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.” He was particularly fond of the “ good grand-motherly pages of the English “ Spectator,” and he quotes Carlyle; “ The most that matters is what a man practically lays to heart in this mysterious universe and his duty and destiny here.” He reports himself, in fact, as “ greatly enraptured with Carlyle,” and as marching “ very guardedly along the Parnassian Highway.” “ A fellow saw me the other day,” he continues, “mumbling Keat’s ‘ Ode to a Nightingale’ (incomparable) to myself. ‘ Larry,’ says he, ‘ you will finish up at a lunatic asylum if you go on with that stuff.’ Retort (discourteous) —‘ Well, I had better go there with something in my brain-box than nothing.”

“I am reading ‘ Heroes and Hero Worship.’ If lam capable of one thing more than another, ’tis keen admiration for those who hold the lamp for the weary wayfarer.” As for Shakespeare—” My days are enlightened by contemplation of THE POET, as well as many more of lesser worth.” Prom one of the latter—Margaret Schofield—he quotes a verse that springs so fresh and sprightly forth from the dismal prison atmosphere that I really must quote it here for my own refreshment. “No room to set it out properly,” he writes, and it is writ very small upon (he single sheet allowed:—

“ My little yellow daffodils,

(And who so wise as they?)

Are taunting me and teasing me,

And begging me to play.

LARRY

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And the mad wind is calling me

Across the deep blue sky,

While I’m writing, writing, writing,

0, the more fool I!”

It is later in this same letter that he adds; “ This note is written as the thin dawn peers through my frosted pane. I learned in Church that the sun-risings lately have been particularly fine.” This reminds me of Lance’s longing “ to see again, some night, the stars!”

“Here is a programme of one of my nights: A chapter of Terry’s “Overland Australia,” the lessons for the day, Emerson’s “ Spiritual Laws,” Cowley’s “ In Solitude,” preface to Gautier’s “ Morning Romance,” then to co-relate the verse learnt during the day.”

“ Do you know where I could get a job as Secretary to literary people? Of course I would have to polish up the old periods.”

“ If I were free, with only £5 in pocket, what would I do? I’d buy a thick blanket and ground-sheet, and go diligently seeking someone like Ford, who would be as likely to employ a likely-looking convict as a likely-looking college man. But it wouldn’t matter, for I’d have two books in my pocket, one to read in and one to write in, and there are plenty of small-town gazettes who might pay for a column, till one could doff the motley and make a home by the way-side.”

How nice, and how innocent it sounds! And alas! How impracticable it is! Small-town Gazettes of this generous kind are as plentiful in Dominia as mushrooms in her winters, and there are some musty old laws, too, about vagrancy, very precious to her Police. Even more airy were the plans of another Will-o-the-Wisp inmate, whom we may call Reginald. “What do you plan to do on release, Reggie?” Sharp as a shot came the confident reply, evidently nourished by months of longing:—“ I shall obtain a position and buy a piano!” In these years of unemployment, for a man with worse than no character, how sanguine—and how sad! For Larry is well justified in writing doubtfully: “ I do not intend this as a conun-

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drum, Is it easier for an honest man to become a crook, or a crook to become an honest man?—A recent preacher here said that we do not come here by chance but by choice This is of course the premise on which Dominia’s whole penal system is based. But—is it valid? Get to know a few of her prisoners, and you begin to wonder! “ I have been tempted to try and solve the reason of my so many predatory acts,” he continues. “ Is some malign forefather solely responsible for what seems so often stupid, unaccountable folly? I believe our unconscious selves play a large part in our waking moments.”

“ There is here a biologist, linguist, a man of law, a theologian, not to mention sundry tradesmen. Talented—why not? We are drawn from every grade, and are not a race apart—A direful waste, as you say.” And he goes on with real perception pointing out “ the moral tiredness, the need of moral leaning-posts, that seems to affect so many of us.” Well, is not all weakness very apt to weary its owner? “ Carry me,” we find a very natural plea in those whose infantility is physical.

“ What a fool one is,” he cries, like so many of his mates, “ not to keep the law of the land! Most lives are affairs of opposites, conflicting duties and pleasures, but my present lines are cast in what seems to me interminable duties, and tasks without end.” Just so did Coppertop once write:

“ I can spell dishonest person in four letters— FOOL.” And yet both he and Larry served sentence after sentence for dishonesty.

“ I was expelled from my school at ten years old, from then I went on unaided by any learning—Only a small corner of me has been devoted to plundering, my other activities have been many. Why was I expelled from school? Predatory notions! The children had a bank! I led in games, and shall I confess it? In forays to find the needful I raided the Headmaster’s stronghold—But after all, I have had a colourful existence, and I am prepared to make the future as colourful in the opposite way, without losing any of the headlights,” he adds piously.

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He recalls “ the School Bush, where I trounced my way to many a fistic victory—What callow young savages boys are!” . . .

“ I remember how we helped to conceal (in that Bush) a runaway man-o-war’s man, how we surreptitiously fed him with our lunches. On visiting the ship I looked with fear and trembling on the place where delinquents were held. It was little thought then that the perversity of my life would culminate in the most degraded title.”

“ Imagination cannot be dispensed with and there are many branches of it; but a man goes a fairly long way to redemption who controls his imagination rightly and for good ends.” Could it be better put? “ This having too vivid imagination is apt to be something of a twoedged sword. The chaplain pulpitises us on the danger of becoming hard, bitter and cynical; what is offered as alternative? We do not have occasion for dancing merry minuets or singing happy madrigals, must we therefore wear long faces and not look forward to the fleshpots? Pliable human nature, immured behind walls, without finer influences, certainly loses much sense of rectitude—For egotists, who go a long way in the material world, confinement plays havoc, self-communings of a baser sort are uppermost, to the detriment of the finer feelings—Where may they exercise these”? A question never, unfortunately, occurring to those who framed our penal system

Larry’s family feelings were quite true and deep. He refers constantly to his children with pride, affection and paternal anxiety and “ I am proud that I shall retain the regard of my sister. Isabella and Claudio are the classic examples; other ties may break, but that seems to me the most permanent,” though he was also very tenderly attached to his mother—“l had letters from my children—they are respectively in Girl Guides and Scouts movements, movements that I think invaluable to impart a sense of obligations to others.” Let me add that I was very thankful to hear that the children were thus enrolled; for no Dominia Girl Guide or Boy Scout, so far as I know, has ever qualified later on for a cell.

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Larry loved nature, too. “ I’ve been engaged in helping to shift, during these years, if not a mountain, then a quite considerable hill. Since it is nearly done, I have seen, on a neighbouring hill, a single flame-coloured bush in surrounding green. Though you will readily see that the strata on which we work is not very fertile soil, before the advent of spring I planted a few slips of things (sub rosa), a small cactus which to my infinite delight sent forth a spray of delicate waxen pink flowers. Thinking these would spread I built up a crude kind of rockery, but they withered. A kind of daisy has flowered into quite a small tree.”

“ Having watched the moving pageant of ‘ tinker, tailor soldier, sailor, saint and sinner,’ of all ages and climes, from my niche, I am impressed,” he wrote shortly before his release, “ how small things alter the destinies of natures and individuals —A thoughtless word or deed pursues us relentlessly, a sudden crack on the chin, and our world tumbles about our ears.”

His volatile temperament, however, evidently forgot very soon the importance of “ small things.” His first communication on his release was a pleasant note of thanks, for his manners were ever agreeable. His second was not so agreeable, it was that “ sure draw” for the “ soft”— a “ collect” telegram, accepted, by the way, unwarily, for such missives I have found invariably to contain the same message, best met by a hard rule and a closed door. Larry’s variant of their usual appeal ran as follows; “ Am in dire financial straits. Can you send assistance.” I responded with a brief note more in tune with his needs than his wants, and indicated the closed door. Then came, not a letter, but a telegram, actually paid for, setting forth, at leisurely length, some previous advice of mine about asking for advice before starting to steal and adding that he was now “ quite easy.”

I expect my Larry back, any day!

HALF-A-STAR

We have, in Dominia, a small one-sided white flower, about which a child friend says: “I call them half-a-stars, because they shine so in shady places that they would be just like whole stars there, if only some naughty Puck hadn’t bitten a mouthful out of each’s side.” I shall give her name to the last of my bunch of blighted blossoms, because, though imperfect, he still can and does “ shine so in a place” extremely “ shady;” and because, too, one can discern, pretty plainly, by his own light, at least one “naughty Puck” whose nibbles have had much to do with that imperfection that he himself admits, and deplores very sorrowfully.

“My trouble is,” he writes, “ I have very little real character; not character enough to follow courageously the higher paths of duty. On the other hand, my thinking has really been more wrong than evil—Looking back to my affrighted childhood, I see the devious paths I never should have trodden.”

“ A man said to me recently: ‘ The only law I believe in is, the survival of the fittest.’ ‘So do I ,’ I agreed. ‘Of course you mean the morally fittest?’ ” Half-a-Star had been scornfully dubbed by the Police at the time of his last offence, a—“ political agitator”— and he throws back the accusation with scorn: “ I have a very clear idea that injustice does not justify retaliation, without improvement, and I agree that liberty is not license. But I also hold that a silent toleration of wrong, merely for reasons of personal safety or expedience, is moral cowardice. And so long as there is one poor street walker or miserable hungry man, one victim of drink or unemployment, I will fight—And as long as the world is governed by money-power, enslaving by dictation of war and economic exploitation, I shall never be ashamed if they shoot me as a political agitator.” In spite of all his ethical pronouncements, however, the Police of Dominia hold him as one of her “ hopeless incorrigibles.”

He is a hypocrite, then?

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By no means! Listen to his story before you condemn him!

Half-a-Star seems to have come of a very decent family, and to have been, in many ways, unusually bright. Nevertheless, he says of himself, “ I was the most miserable, nervy little wretched specimen of humanity you can imagine.” So, whether at the bidding of the “ inferiority complex” so developed, or at the bidding of his star-like gift for shining, too crudely translated into action, he tried, at the tender age of fifteen, to bring illumination to his home-town by setting fire to an empty shed and a rub-bish-heap or two. This was, of course, quite wrong. Dominia, indeed, called it “ Arson,” and dealt with it in her very best manner, consigning the malefactor to “ Hard Labour for seven years,” and sending him for the purpose among her worst criminals in her most severe prisons. The learned, yet ignorant, old Judge who inflicted that sentence has long since gone to a sphere where one may hope that eyes are opened, and there is no doubt he acted with good intentions, but there is no doubt either, that he acted with very bad results to the country his sentence was designed to protect. For what he actually did was to turn a clever weakling into a clever “ crook.” The apt pupil received in crime-college such a careful education that, on release, he put it well into practice again and again, and for many years was regarded in Dominia as a pest. For, having, during that first long sentence, learned no honest trade, he was naturally, in his first liberty, hard put to it to live; until he fell back upon the prison-taught methods—and stole. Caught after a time, “ back” he went to the same ready teachers, furnished with refreshed reasons for agreeing with their hate towards Society. Then, when, after a time, he was released again, again Society bludgeoned him. He had just settled down to work he liked, and his native ablities were earning him a legitimate place in the sun, when a “skunk”

—I am sorry to say it was a policeman, and also that another policeman subsequently defended sucjh an action to me on the ground of “ duty to the public”—exposed him in his presence as an “ ex-convict,” and he discovered

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at once that legitimate places in the sun were not reserved for the likes of him! This proved'another very expensive fact for the community that so ordained; it turned Half-a-Star into an out-and-out rebel against it, and an “ agitator” all the more annoying because of his undoubted abilities, keen energies, and terrific gift of the gab. “ My vocabulary, obtrusive, confusive, delusive, enthusive, profusive, diffusive—and so seldom conclusive!” as he calls it. “It has been a mingled curse and blessing since first it made the welkin—whatever that is—ring under the family roof.” It would have been a fine asset, though, for the political shining light he could have been, but for that naughty Puck. Politics and economics were his passion and he had real political insight—his political prophecies were always worth eliciting because of their shrewdness and penetration, and their uncanny knack of hitting the mark.

Well, the Worst War came. Half-a-Star, still young, though already branded a “ hopeless criminal,” was deemed fit for cannon-fodder and allowed to enlist. He went to France with the Dominion Forces, and was duly wounded; lay for hours under shell-fire, but was brought out, and invalided to “ Blighty.” In Hospital there, he found, for the first time, a socially-acceptable outlet for his ardent sympathy with the weak and helpless. He was valued in Hospital, really valued, valued at last, as a cheery helper and an unselfish comrade —valued perhaps at his true worth. And this did him great good, despite his injuries. Moreover, while there, a gleam of yet sweeter radiance shone into the very depths of his heart, for he met, wooed, won and married a fine English girl. Whether he told her of the past, I do not know; I should doubt it. At that stage of his development he would feel that he had just been made free of his birthright of happiness; that the past was past; that he could “ just forget it all;” for that is the way so many of these “ cripples above the shoulders,” as he himself calls them, do reason. At any rate, there was to be no test of her love, poor girl; for but a few weeks after marriage a fever carried her off, her husband’s little bit of brightness was quenched almost at

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itH birth, and all his hopps were dashed to the ground once more. “ Poor Half!” William’s wife says regretfully, “If only she had lived! I always think he would have been all right then.” Like William and myself, Mrs William had “ all the time in the world” for Half-a-Star.

More miserable, more nervy, more desperate than ever, he was returned soon after to Dominia, where, though he had so well proved his social acceptability, he found he was still listed as a criminal, merely on parole. Weakened still further after another spell in Hospital, he took to drink, that treacherous “ comforter” of so many returned soldiers; and so was soon back “ in” where he was now oflidally regarded as incorrigible indeed. He has often made me wonder what the rest of us ought to be called!

Half-a-Star suffered at that time rather badly from what he himself called “ Ego Superbus,” and the authorities — Vanity. It is a malady that much attacks the prisoner of gifted parts whose development is lop-sided. In his case it was merely the defence raised by a sensitive, badly-hurt nature against an insensitive, badly hurting world, and thus always susceptible of course at the least touch of true understanding. But how could I wonder, knowing something of his story, at outbursts such as this; —

“ We of little faith see no glory in a sublimated complex bom of a crucified and emasculated self. Thus we are rebels, and loudly ask, not for the moon, but for a place in the sun, with those who have achieved by ancient laws of birth and right.”

But he went on thinking, and feeling for others, too. “ A crook dies,” he wrote after the death of one in prison, “ but, looking back, one sees the crooked laws and crooked hands that hedged him round. Is it any wonder that his path was crooked?” And he quotes Ruskin as saying: “ The great mistake of very good men in all times is that they wished to help the needy by giving alms, preaching—but not giving to them what only God commanded, namely justice.” “ I am sorry for Concertina Rosa,” he adds, “ but I am more concerned about her genesis and the little Concertinas growing up. Why patch effects? Let us find causes. If drink, unemployment, slums, vanity, lack of

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Christian teaching or parental control, lust, inefficiency, moral or physical degeneracy, we must concentrate on these as causes.”

Our friend had a firm faith in legislative measures towards this end: “ Truly, all things are solved by better character; but better laws make for a better national character. Above all,” he cries, “ We need a new Magna Charta for children, delinquent or otherwise. As Shaw says, the only poverty that matters is the poverty of the child.” “ My compassion,” he writes one Christmas time, “ is for your Magdalenes. I detest the sin and love the sinner, with a clear conception of their pitiful starved lives. Christmas is essentially a festival of perfect motherhood.” This was quite genuine. Alone of all men, official or interned, that I have met in prisons, he had a genuine pity for, and longing to help, the prostitute—“the most abused part of the community,” as he once said.

Again: “ My Heaven is within me,” wrote this “ incorrigible”—“ and that is why I want a transformation of crude realities, here and now, that men may be free, and develop their talents without fear or strite, to accord with a spirit of love, and the ideal of beauty.” I certainly could not feel that it was a mere “ Ego Superbus,” who wrote this. I had, in fact, discovered that, unlike Master Mucklemouth, this man, Half-a-Star, during his spells of liberty, had always worked hard and faithfully—never sparing himself-—for the social betterment which he demanded. It was during one such spell, indeed, that I had myself first come across him; and marked his eager enthusiasm, his over-engined make-up, his fretful nerves. How was it the authorities remained so blandly stupid about him? His capacities for good were given no chance, and self-reform became impossible in the madness of defiance. No Judge that he encountered ever enquired, or was concerned to enquire, into the reasons for his conduct although the idea did enter the head of one

of them —for he added to his judgment these words: “The man is evidently at war with society, but why I do not know.” Apparently! But it might well have been more

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just to say, “ Society is at war with this man” since noth-

ing of his previous history was ever taken into account in sentencing him, still less anything of his nature. Wrongly treated at his first offence, he was, it seemed to me, wrongly treated at every turn afterwards; both by Society and the Law. And every misunderstanding, every injustice, every blow was, naturally, meat and drink to Ego Superbus, and so an added injury to Half-a-Star himself, as well as to his prospects—and Society’s. “ Theft,” he suggests about his usual crime, “is really a retaliation against some form of injustice, or its effect—The youth who steals a motor cycle is not impelled by starvation, but by the spirit of adventure over-riding a tramelling environment—Your real habitual criminal is a publichouse loafer and cadger, besotted, unclean, improvident. The better class (if not suffering from dementia) are only spasmodically criminal, when some concatenation of restrictive circumstances, such as unemployment, injustice, or lack of facilities for pleasure, progress and ambition, intensify a spirit of revolt to the point of action. It is then that the possessing class gaol him and pillory him when he returns to civil life.”

“ The world condemns the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common.

But lets the greater felon loose

Who steals the common from the goose.”

Again he says: “ I have no wish to lift earth up to Heaven, I want to bring Heaven down to earth, for I believe that to be the destiny of the race, until men shall have lost all taint of their evolutionary slime in their amazing likeness to a perfect Christ.”

The prisoner is ever prone to attribute all power to circumstances. But, by degrees, Half-a-Star came to admit the extreme importance of the inner life as the rebuilder of the outer. By and by he could write: “ There may have been a time in my life when I polished my halfpenny, dreaming that, though only a ha’ penny, it might some day pass for a sovereign. It never has; it never will. I know I cannot (shine). I also know it doesn’t matter.

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It is only in life’s crises we learn that pitiful fact; and sense the futility of earthly aims.”

“ So much of my life has been played on a darkened stage, that it is difficult to judge my performance. I am learning my part between the acts —Here—this gaol—is only a jungle for the doomed and the damned, between the high road of service and the low road of Self. Meanwhile,

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air;

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care.”

That, of course, is Whittier. But he would often send poems of his own, nearly all very sad, with a deep sense of human woe, not merely of his own.

“ Though splendid-winged, the golden day

But lifts my dungeon soul to see

Where heart-sad mothers weep and pray,

And children cry, ‘ O pity me!’ ”

Then, as like as not, he would seek to disguise his tenderness with a jest. “ And so,” he writes concerning one Christmas Day, “ with the passing of that anomalous season in which fowl-murder promotes goodwill among men, we stand on the threshold of a New Year.” This may not be Half’s own, but it is exactly of his own brand.

The religious sentiment apparently revealed in the quotation from Whittier, surprised me. Although Half-a-Star was by this time quite a middle-aged man and mellowing considerably in other directions, nothing in my previous experience of him had suggested piety of Whittier’s kind. Perhaps this quotation explains:

“ Mrs. A—wrote to me the other day, and asked me to take lessons through the Bible Institute. A very devout soul, and simple in her faith. She knows not what she asks, my one strong virtue is my sincerity. I am not an orthodox Christian, I never shall be—l dare not waste my remaining years in the moral and social straight-jacket of an institution that preaches without practising, prays

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without preparing, and lacks a courageous initiative in national and world causes. Years ago, a Chinese scholar, asked to name the most remarkable feature of Christ’s character, answered, —His Courage.” He adds: “ I do value Christ’s ideals. Jesus Christ was the ideal man, nay, he was more, the ideal of all idealism. And I do value the inspiring attribute of true Christian fellowship: its altruism for suffering humanity.”

It is not possible to read through these old letters without a consciousness of deep sincerity, without feeling that there is behind all the words a consistent and a constant personality.

Just a few more extracts before we leave him.

“A fellow-collegian recently asked me to define the thing most essential to a desirable mode of life—l said—Character. He selected —Happiness, quite failing to realise that the former is the basis of the latter.”

“ I am pursuing a course in economics” (for which he was paying himself. No Dominia prison offers its inmates free instruction of that kind, handsomely though it would repay the cost) “ but the more I learn of scientific and economic teachings, the more I perceive the danger and inutility for the loftier construction of the civilised world, without the cementing altruism of social service as a universal ideal.” But even so, social betterment, he reflects, can react on ethics by setting free the higher human powers in the individual and this was the ceaseless cry of his thwarted heart. “ Was Christ, in feeding the five thousand, acting the fakir ? Why did the Salvation Army discover that a necessary preliminary to spiritual conversion was the relief of social want? What of Ford, triumphing over characterless workmen by a scientific organisation of industry?”

“ A friend of mine said the other day, with that intolerance that is the curse of Society and of the Labour movement— ‘ Parsons are parasites and tools of the capitalist. There are only two classes, Capital and Labour. He who is not with us is against us.’ After thinking it over, I discovered a third, namely the selfless intellectuals devoted to Science, every self-sacrificing mother, every' nurse and

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comforter, every self-consecrated Crusader, striving for a social and moral regeneration of the world. Here is a class, absolved from the mere grubbiness of economic materialism. I myself,” adds Half-a-Star naively, “ have often planned to build in this way, but sometimes through my own inefficiency, through faulty planning, experiments in jerry-building, poor assistance or lack of the right kind of cement, the incomplete edifice has always crashed. Still, my directive and creative faculties are not moribund, and I will keep on building until the day’s work is done, even if,” says this ‘ incorrigible’ fighter against odds, “even if the castle of my dreams never becomes anything nobler than an unroofed hut.”

A friend to whom these stories had been told, thinking them over, one by one, thought Rod’s the saddest case of all. But I do not know. That of Half-a-Star, recrippled again and again by Society in the name of Justice, sometimes seems to me sadder still. He could, and, given the chance, he would, have paid back every penny of the material loss occasioned by his own wrong-doing; but we, could we, if we would, pay back? We have exacted from him, in requital for the money he took, practically his every chance in life.

Not long since, Half-a-Star “ oame out” onote more. Is it too late, for him and for us?

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If one is to discover the whole truth concerning an Institution, the evidence of its inmates cannot be neglected. Individual witnesses may be biased and untruthful, and the value of their testimony may depend greatly upon our own powers of extraction, interpretation, and understanding, but we cannot do without it. The only ones who know the inner life of any association of men are those who have had actual experience of it. Let us therefore see what those most intimately concerned think of the treatment which we, as a Society, accord our law-breakers.

“ I have learnt a bit since I came here,” writes a girl from a girl’s prison, “ and I will get my own back when I get out. The doctor just treats you as if you were something contaminating . . . It’s not fair, and it’s not right, and I will make up for it when I get out. Someone will have to pay when I get out of this living hell. I’m not frightened of dying—no hell could be worse than what I am suffering now.” Visitors to that prison used to exclaim at its outer beauty. It was regarded as a priceless model.

“ At X,” wrote an man out of another of Dominia’s penal prides, “ I was mentally and morally starved.” Another, from an excellent prison “ camp,” writes that he scarcely knows how to contain himself at the change normal life affords from its “ depression and deadly monotony.”

“ They don’t treat your body so badly nowadays, but they kill your mind,” is the verdict of another.

William said: “One gets plenty of exercise physically but mentally he is dormant.”

“ This place,” says Tannhauser, “ is anything but conducive to mental health, and one has to be forever on guard.”

“We do not live here, we merely exist. It is the same thing over and over again. ... It will send a man crazy,” wrote a highly-strung lad who has since proved his worth by years of honest living. He had a pretty tough row, too, and he hoed it well.

Here are three more dicta which tell the same tale—- “ One is just like a dead man when one is in prison.” “ I

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hope you will excuse this bitterness, but sometimes I find it hard to be a slave, with no rights whatever.” “ Once you get into these places they think they own your body and soul, and you do get selfish, you have your own troubles and it seems you cannot be bothered with anyone else’s."

“ What do I find worst about prisons? O! the inmates!” said a little girl in her teens, with a gesture of horror. And: “ It’s a wonder,” wrote Forth, a returned soldier, well used to camps, “ that most of us don’t go raving mad on a Sunday or a holiday. One can’t find anyone to speak to on any sensible subject. We only hear the same Old Story in the same old way. Then one finds so many that one takes a violent dislike to, for no apparent reason whatever. Just to see and be near them seems to upset all one’s self-control.” “ I never met a meaner and more selfish lot of men,” says B, “ you would think that prisoners would stick together and help one another to make things brighter. Not so—They are always finding fault with one another and causing trouble between themselves.” “In the shelter-sheds to-day,” the returned soldier wrote again, “ How trivial and stupid most of their talk is, not to mention immoral. They in general seem to have no ambition, no thought of self-control or self-denial, proud of any dark deeds. Never for a moment do any of them think it is their fault, oh dear no, it is that they have been unfortunate.”

“ There are times,” wrote Aurelius (that hapless spoilt boy who gave himself up because he could not help drinking and then stealing to get more money to drink with), “ when I feel what is the good of trying to build a decent character in these places, where our very surroundings and company make it so hard.” . . . “ When one looks back from day to day to the same ceaseless monotony, sometimes it seems impossible to go on. . . . Reminds me of the rooster which exhibited an ostrich egg in the chicken run, and told them what could be done by earnest effort on the part of birds imbued with a spirit of loyalty and ceaseless devotion to duty.”

It will be noted that it occurs to none of these men and

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women that they have been subjected to “ reformative treatment!”

“ It was the company I happened to meet that got me back here,” is a frequent and just explanation, “ the company” having been first “ met” in prison! “ The incorrigible poses as a hero” says old Lycon, after release, “ and his one aim is to gain an international reputation. I remember an instance during Saturday afternoon. A group of habituees was discussing business done and perhaps to be done in the future. Among the listeners was a youth who finding himself somewhat out in the cold, forced notice on himself—he had been convicted of breaking and entering—by declaring— ‘l’m a burgular, too!’ ”

“ You might expect,” Larry wrote, “ to find in the incorrigible a torrid state of mind —well, do you know the most frequent allusion (that is, on the surface, for who can look deep into the soul of man?) is to horse-racing. ‘ ’Ere yer are, Sir, all the winners,” as the Newsboy in “Punch” says to the old gent. ‘ What, is that all the news?’ ‘ No, Sir, all the winners for to-morrer’ —that about sums up the ruling passion of many.” He is right. The Dominian convict, after his kind, is nearly always a gambler.

“ I am convinced,” writes the soldier, “ that ninety per cent are ignorant of the result of their actions.”

“ I feel sorry for most of the men; from what I see of them, it seems that prison is the only home they have ever had,” writes one of the gentler spirits. “ The community must be protected, but should the community need prisons like they have them? Instead of uplifting a man they do their best to keep him down because he has fallen.”

“ Is starving a dog really the best way to keep him from biting?” asks another. And in fact, “ I have often heard men say, ‘ I’ll make someone pay for this.’ The pity of it is, that the ‘ someone’ is generally an innocent person,” remarks Tannhauser.

“ It seems to me there is something more wanted for the men who constantly return to such places. The most important agent in keeping out those who have had more than one experience in here is the realisation of what fools they have been to themselves,” writes one J., an “ incorrig-

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ible” who had not taken his own medicine with any success. Perhaps Tim explains a bit why, when he says, “ I can’t remember any crooks 1 have known- —still to live the old life and be successful. We know there are some that have a longer fling than most of us, but of course we hear of them coming a crash in the end. A Master-crook who handled thousands in his time . . . states that his average was only £2 10s. a week, so what must we mugs average? Not much, says you. All the same, we know we can’t win, yet we are that cranky we still carry on. Remedy this weakness in a big majority of us, and then there will be that number less returning to these places. Of course there are many that think if they play cunning they are sure to win, but a few more of us, who have had a fair share of wits-to-wits business know otherwise.”

“ His talk was all in terms of £lOOO a year,” somebody remarked of Hengist when he came out. And “ one of the most fatal things about prison life,” I was told, “ is that the men have no money to handle. When they come out they imagine that £6”—apparently what the prison-wage had come to, “ will keep them in the necessaries of life and leave plenty over for tobacco and picture-shows and joy-rides, for an indefinite period.”

“ I have always said, and still say, Prison does not reform a man,” writes Coppertop, “ and that can be proved by the number of people who go out of prisons and live on the proceeds of crime till they are caught again. . .

The very few I have known who have gone out of prison and started to earn their living in an honest way does not owe anything to reformatory institutions . . . it is not that fear of prison life stops one from doing anything dishonest, but that he realises to do things dishonest is mean and selfish.” “ That way of reforming is the surest and soundest, that teaches the truth of life’s rewards for our actions,” wrote Bertie, the weakling, “ the pay we collect in heart, soul and mind for our evil deeds, compared with what we collect for our right and honourable deeds.”

“If the regime and penology were efficacious” (thus Warren), “ it would mean that, after a subject had once been imprisoned, the odds against a further fall from grace

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would be substantially greater than before “ taking the

medicine.” But, instead of that, we find that chances of him keeping “ out” are very much less, and the chances of recidivism are in the ascendant.”

“ The offences I have committed have all been done while I was unemployed,” wrote Bittersweet, a nerveracked “incorrigible”:” and this has set me wondering how many more were in this respect like myself. So, quite unknown to anyone I went through 116 men. . . .

Not one had the slightest idea what I was after, and in each case there was no need for telling lies to me as they might and generally do when questioned by officials, so I take it that the results can be regarded as near truth as it is possible to get. . . But of those 116 men, 98 were unemployed at the time they committed their offences, breaking and entering, and other classs of theft. Out of the remaining 18 there are 10 Sexual offenders.

. . . It is quite obvious that idle hands do mischief make. As far as I am concerned, while I am working there is no thought of any wrong, and I feel pretty sure that a large number of others are like myself in this respect.”

While Bittersweet’s conclusions are undoubtedly true in their application to men already in some sort accustomed to dishonest practice, it is clear that we should be rash in inferring that unemployment always leads to crime. The criminal statistics of these past few years of serious unemployment, do not bear that out, for they have not in Dominia risen much. What one may justly infer is that work, and especially congenial work is a great defence against recidivism in the man who had already fallen.

“ I didn’t know much about thieving before coming in,” wrote one whose trouble was like Ethetwyn’s, mainly a shiftless selfishness: “ Well, I could go out now and make half-crown moulds out of plaster-of-Paris, and turn out good shillings, and can split pound-notes and break a safe open—that is the trades I’ve learned here.”

“ I can well understand why so many return to prison,” contributes K., an educated man. “ Fear of gaol is absolutely wiped out (in the uneducated) after a few weeks or months, and prison proves a better home to otherwise

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destitute persons than tramping the roads.” There are, in point of fact, not a few of the older “ Tims” who take care to get “ in” during autumn, and for long enough to hibernate snugly under a roof. “To a refined and educated man, however,” continued K., “ prison life is a veritable torture. Everyone is herded together, and I was nearly driven silly by the perpetual slang and excessive hard swearing, not only by the prisoners, but also by the officers in charge. Nice way to reform a man, isn’t it? The officers are, generally speaking, of the lowest class, where, if reform is really wanted by the country, they should be of the highest intelligence, coupled with a scientific knowledge especially of psychology and the nervous system. . . Prison life as at present constituted is practically useless to protect the public. If the public want protection then it is up to them to devise means of improving the prospective crime-maker. Imprisonment certainly won’t do it.”

The opinion of Glaucon, the sex-invert, is worth quoting. “ You know,” he says, “ the chief desire and aim of every man in these places should be to go out far more suited for the duties of citizenship than when we came in, but, apart from our own friends, who is there to help us? A man comes to these places and he has to battle along just on his own, and no encouragement, no enlightenment, nothing to show and explain why he should live different.” Glaucon wrote from a country camp where there was far more freedom, and at which better living conditions prevailed than in a town gaol. Evidently these good things are not enough. “ What is required,” he went on, “is help to develop along our normal lines, and Example is required —don’t you think—chiefly from those in authority over us? . . . You can’t usefully dose the lot with the same medicine, you can’t usefully give all the members of a family the same food. And yet it has not been realised by those in charge of these places—You know my struggle is tremendous,” he adds, “ more so because one does not receive encouragement of any description in these places.”

Forth, the particularly intelligent returned soldier who was of the “ accidental offender” class, wrote in disgust:

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" There is very little hope of the average young man who enters here paying his debt to outraged Society. . . He receives no help that would give him an incentive to try and climb again, rather he is looked at as though he were a little lower than the animals. His self-respect is undermined by this—he leaves here an embittered man. Some . . . could be lifted by giving them something clean and wholesome to think about. Now is the time to think; whatever comes in, comes to stay, and because evil is the most prevalent here, it is the most haely to be picked up.” In another letter he speaks of the ” want of something clean and wholesome to absorb the mind, rather than filth so easily picked up in this environment. The short-timer, up to six months, should never be sent here at all in a lot of cases, it seems to be the starting-point for a series of trips, and the prison atmosphere gets them. . . Some go out with the intention of making someone pay, with the result of making bad a lot worse. The long-term prisoners are, as they admit, often really more happy and at ease when they return to prison after release, the reason being that they cannot remake a place for themselves in the outer world again, for they have been so long without using their faculties that these have atrophied and, after a few rebuffs, they decide that prison at least offers a sure refuge, and, as I have heard repeated quite often— ‘ A man’s better off here, life’s worries over.’ A lost dog or cat on the street may be cared for, but an ex-convict —not in this country. Society denies him the right.”

Young Lochinvar, out of bitter experience, cries: “ Society forgives? It never does. So long as an ex-convict . . . keeps working with his head down to make profits for somebody, everybody will say ‘ Good fellow;’ but let him try to get into a Lodge . . . or a County Council, or the Civil Service, or lift himself up in Society, and he’ll soon be flung back into the ditch.”

That had certainly been Half-a-Btor's lot more than once . . . and Tannhauser was under no illusions. “ Society forgives?” echoes the latter. “ I And Society devoid of all feeling for fallen members, like a pack of wolves—that luckless member who is down has his death-warrant.”

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“ ’Tis easy for the forgiver to forgive and forget. Not so for the forgiven, the mark is there yet.’ If you have ever been in gaol, even for two days, you know that mark is indelible.

“ I wonder what it would be like to have someone near, to have a good talk over things?” wonders X. wistfuly. “ I often think it would save lots of trouble and worry, and perhaps a life at times, if we could with trust confide in someone. Many, I am sure, would turn to the better just through one kind word, instead of casting one aside and saying, ‘ Go, dog, to where you came from.’ ”

“ I have been in prison before,” says N., “ but the mistakes have not been corrected, and I have gone on breaking the laws ... I have been converted a dozen times, but the fault seems to have been in not developing the best that is in me. You can’t get the best out of a hack by using it as a plough-horse.”

“ It is wonderful what a few words from someone who understands can do,” writes Tannhauser again, referring gratefully to a high official who had paused one day, and spoken with understanding: “ What we need is to cultivate self-respect.—lf you crush self-respect, it will either oppress the individual with an overpowering sense of his littleness, or it may arouse him to a frenzy of bitter malevolence, in which extremity he will speculate on vigorous reprisals.”

“ When you are down on it, and everything seems right against you,”—this from Atossa, a bitter and proud woman, “ kindness shown then, God will bless you and her for it. It makes me feel ashamed, in place of me being out helping perhaps some poor cripple, here I am, living on charity.

. . . Mrs C. encourages one. I had made up my mind to sulk” (on a festive occasion) “ in my cell, but seeing the outsiders take such an interest in us, I would not show a mean spirit.— This sort of life, if you give way, would make you grow hard. But here I am a stranger to Mrs. C., she has very little ground where she is, but she buys flower-seeds, watches them spring up day by day, and when in full bloom robs herself of them and brings them

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here. An act of kindness like that could not help but touch you.”

“ Kindness, a deep earnest knowledge of human nature, and discernment,” Tannhauser wants to see applied to prisoners, with the hope of making them better. “ The establishment of these country camps is a big step towards improving the physical condition, and when a similar is effected in the mental, then we will begin to get some worthwhile effects,” writes Warren. “ Although the work is hard, it is healthy open-air work, in which one can take an interest. . . . It is a powerful factor for good to be employed on work that is valuable service to the community, thereby justifying one’s existence.” What is more, he speaks most gratefully of the “ excellent type of man” in charge of his own camp, and says, “ The lessons in self-control which I see every day in the attitude of those in authority cannot help but bear good fruit. It seems only fair that their point of view should get a little ventilation also. . . . There are times when if Job was an officer in the Prison service, he’d lose his reputation. We are always assured of an attentive hearing and a square deal, and this goes far. The ‘ old man’ has each of us classified and docketed in his brain-box and treats each man on his merits. Result—Efficiency maximum, Trouble negligible. Give honour where honour is due.” Such praise of a male officer is unique in my experience, but of the women-officers it is happily quite common. We have very few women prisoners: largely, perhaps, through the influence of these kindly and understanding women. And with a little psychological training, these would do better still.

“ It is essential to have the mind catered for,” wrote Warren later. He had come to realise that men emerge from these camps just as helpless in regard to the management of time, money, and sex as from the harder prisons. “ How can we be unselfish here? What have we that we can share? It is a case of every man for himself,” wrote the selfish Nigel, who had spent close upon fourteen years within the same walls. When the Dominian authori-

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ties were asked “ What do you do to help them be less selfish?” there was no reply.

“ The emotions become pretty deadened in an institution where the answer to every question is ‘ No,’ ” is the verdict of Eteocles. “No doubt the average prisoner is in many ways like a child, but his mind has very little spring left in it.”

“ Just fancy, nine years of one’s life for a few petty thefts, it makes me mad to think of it,” wrote Rod. “ Even Shylock only wanted his pound of flesh, but these modern people want their pound of flesh and half a pound of hone too.” “ Their justice is ‘ might is right,’ at least that has been my experience.”

“ It is surprising how few care for us unfortunate beings, and their very carelessness helps to demoralise the men,” says V. “ Revenge and punishment, solitary confinement and bread and water is all the change we get in the way of correction, so what can you expect the result to be? This place is but a Hell on earth. ... I admit there are

some bad people in our midst, but even they deserve a thought. . . . Surely the free and respectable can afford to help, if not to forgive. The truth is, the world knows nothing of what we have to undergo here, and care less — then why do they grumble when the poor discharged prisoner comes out with vengeance in his heart? When a man is sentenced, he leaves the outside world ... to meet a system of soul-degradation.”

“ How I would love to get away from it all,” writes Y. “ Our punishment is fairly hard, you know, as our daily companions are prisoners too, and their conversations are generally depraved.”

“ There are some things that sour a person’s soul, and one is confinement,” says Z. “We were never made to be shut away from our fellow men and women like this from year to year. It only breeds contempt and even worse.”

“ I admit with shame my wrong-doing,” says X. in another letter—“ But that does not make it right for the ‘ Haves’ to do the same as the ‘ Have-Nots’ in a way which the Law does not prohibit. They do it in a large way and

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daily, and we call them smart and good business men, because our system protects the ‘ Haves’ while it prosecutes the ‘ Have-Nots.’ ”

“My experience of Prison Life is, that it tended to harden a man,” writes U., and the burden of many a song is this—“ I want someone good—to talk to me, not to preach to me.” “ I can’t stand being preached to,” wrote Rod early in our acquaintance: “ A letter I got just after

I was sentenced read— ‘ Dear Friend, lam sending you some tracts which I hope you will take an interest in.’ Then this kind lady went on to observe how I was like the beasts of the field, she also underlined about 30 texts for me to look up. I never got any further than this, but Oh, if you knew how that good woman hit me in my weakest spot. I cried with rage. Well I sent that letter back to her, and I hope it did not hurt her feelings half as much as hers hurt mine.” One of the commonest mistakes made about our prisoners seems to be that they have no feelings.

“ There are quite a few people who do us many kindnesses, but these kindnesses are not much more than entertainment and the usual Christmas gifts. We apprecite them very much,” writes A., “ but the greatest kindness one can do to we folk is something instructive, that will help to lift us out of the haze we are in.”

“If prison,” cries Marcus (Cherry’s champion), after six years of it, “is going to do me any good, surely I have done enough. They want to crush me, I feel sure. . . . It takes all the power one has to overcome the spirit sinking. . . .I am sure this life makes one childish . . . About prisoners being happy, it would break your heart to see them all yarded together, with their troubles to themselves. My heart often goes out to some of those poor creatures, even in my position. . . . What have I done to suffer so? This life is nearly driving me crazy, it should not be allowed, the people does not know the circumstances, for one to be buried alive. It is not human.”

“ A lecture on Russia,” a “ real live topic,” was the subject of talk for days after. So was an entertainment at a Women’s Prison, where there was “ less quarrelling for

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many days after.” “ The innovation of concert-parties visiting here is inestimable for good,” says Larry. “We folk respond to music as nothing else. The most apathetic person is transformed, the influence lasts for many days.”

“A woman singing in Church!” cries Lance. “I realised in that moment what I had lost. Surely if God wished to save a man’s soul, He could not fail by sending His message through the voice of a woman.” “ They do get touched with music”—a friendly and attentive official once noted—“ Many’s the time I’ve seen them, after service, come out looking softer. That would be the time for the parson to have had a friendly word with them — but no, he always just jumped on his bicycle and hurried off.”

“The knowledge that even one person believes you will make good” is noted gratefully as a help in doing so. Without it, “ during my many years of incarceration, I have seen many a brave spirit go down. I have watched them fight against the strong current of evil tendencies, suddenly lose hope, cease struggling, then drift with the tide, a total wreck.”

“ Behaviour Doctors! Splendid!” cries Larry. “ You cannot beat catching ’em young at all businesses. If you had Child Guidance Clinics, millions would be saved in cash, and untold suffering by the youthful delinquent being taken and closely examined for the reason of his ‘ moral slip.’ ”

“ What we require in Reformative prisons is real womanly women, ones who will be interested . . . who will teach us how to become law-abiding citizens.” So says W., and one may venture the belief that a Borstal without a Matron is wrongly conceived. But Religion, the only recognised definite agency for changing hearts and ills in our “ good” prisons—what do prisoners make of that? Very little, I fear. Except for some sex-inverts and “ pauper spirits,” it seems to be beyond them. “ Whoso loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how shall he love God, Whom he hath not seen?” “ Conversions” I have certainly known, but, so far, not one that has long survived release; even Tann-

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hauser, I hear as I write, has lapsed from the ‘ Christianity’ he professed; while, on the other hand, every prisonworker learns to be suspicious of being approached “ as a good Christian man” or woman, for that is considered by most of the inmates to be the correct jam for the pill of being cadged from. The preaching of religion is, however, duly attended to—and attended:—

“ Nine of the prisoners accepted the invitation to be saved,” says P., concerning one unusual revivalistic service,—“ but I would much rather be saved privately, you know.”

“ Hell? Don’t believe in it,” is a very common criticism. A woman, however, was once so impressed by her priest’s eloquent presentation of it as the everlasting future home of prostitutes like herself if they did not mend their ways, that she came out of Church determined to “ get enough money for masses, to get me out of it!” She had but her one old way of earning this. —It was, one may suppose, to reform her from that way that she was sent to gaol—and to that sermon!

“ Miss D. gave me a Crucifix, such a beauty! I trust it will bring me luck,” confides Atossa. The worship of Luck is the real worship of the prisoner and Chance the name of his one true God.

“ I have heard it spoken Sunday after Sunday out here that, if we come to God and confess our sins truly and ask forgiveness, He has promised to blot out our transgressions and remember them no more; but sometimes I think that it is meant for the publicans and sinners to practice that which the Pharisees preach.”

After all, “ A religion only becomes a force for good,” remarks shrewd R., “ when it is reflected in the preacher.” Perhaps, then, it is Christianity applied by Society instead of merely preached, that would come home to prisoners?

As it is, what a welter! What a clamour and cry as of souls in torment! They are, indeed, in torment! They are the prey of appetites, of passions of all ignoble kinds, of social mutilation. I have slept in a corridor of prison cells, and been awakened again and again in the dark hours by the groans and ejaculations of their storm-tossed occu-

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pants, miserable even in sleep. And I have sat, too, hour after hour in the cells, and wondered how long my own love for the community would endure if, day after day, night after night, for year upon year, that community kept me locked away from it—locked away, pining—sometimes for being, or doing, nothing so very bad. If pain and misery were the one sure cure, ah, then we might have the right to inflict it—the right of the surgeon with his scalpel. But, is it?

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One could go on and on with such quotations and sketches, but it is time to turn to the question of my preface, and ask again, “ Why do these decent prisons, these Moral Hospitals, in this favoured State fail so lamentably as deterrent and reformative agencies?”

The answer often given in Dominia by grumbling taxpayers is—“ Because they are too comfortable, and make the brutes too happy.”

Well, I do not think that the “ brutes” I have been quoting sound “ too happy,” nor could anyone with knowledge or psychological insight believe that they are so. Moreover no taxpayer who sampled our prison accommodation for a w T hile would ever again mistake its decency for “ comfort.” If it were winter time, when every house in Dominia needs heat, he would find that necessity provided nowhere in prison—except, maybe for “ Divine Service,” or the rare concert or lecture. He would get no butter, eggs, or fruit in his diet, and very little milk either, unless exceptionally fortunate. He would probably not enjoy his meals in any case, for he would eat them always alone, locked safely in his cell. In that same cell he would spend, on an average, fourteen hours of every twenty-four. Possibly, too, he would hardly like our prison ways with sanitation, shaving, baths, etc., though such brutes as Half-a-Star, Warren, Mucklemouth, Neville and Company may, of course, be expected to revel in them.

The old idea was, of course, and is, that severity of treatment will stop crime, and nothing else will. But, if that were true, hanging should long since have stopped stealing, and the drastic conditions in our prisons forty or fifty years ago should have rid Dominia of criminals for ever. “If terror were a deterrent.” writes one Superintendent in another State, “ our gaols in the eighties would have been empty. But my daily average in those evil days was close upon ten times what it is to-day.” It is on record that two well-known criminals, on leaving a certain Dominian prison in “ those evil days,” “ swore that they’d take

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a life for every lash and indignity laid on them; and how well they are keeping their oath is well-known.”

No, revenge will never “ reform” its object. But neither, apparently, will “ decent” physical conditions. The scientist, Kropotkin, immured for political reasons in the “ model prison” of Clairvaux, noted this fact. He had there, he tells us, “ to part with the illusion that it was”— for the purpose of reforming its inmates—“ any better than the filthy prisons I had experienced in Siberia.” “As regards their effects on prisoners, and their results for Society at large,” he writes, “ the best reformed prisons are as bad as the dirty lock-ups of old.”

Now why?

May it not be because every human being, however, “ animal” he may be, is really always more than an animal?

The other day it came to my knowledge that a man visited one of our Dominian country gaols. It happened that this very man, years before, had been sent, though a political prisoner, to this very prison, and now, all political feeling having subsided and human feelings being uppermost, he was paying a friendly visit to the Governor. He was taken round his old home to see what a fine institution it really was—especially now that the septic tank (shall we say) had been put in. At first, like the usual visitor, he really admired! The air down the corridors of empty cells, each with its door flung wide open, was sweet and fresh, and of extreme peace. The baths had multiplied since his time and were really very nice. The kitchen was spotless; the loaves, new-baked and well-baked, a loaf to every man, smelt and tasted very good indeed. “Now what in the world used one to feel so bitter and indignant about?” he began to ask himself. At that moment the signal was given for dinner. The inmates filed in, each in his prison clothes (he must indeed have had special privilege, since he was allowed to see them!): the roll was called, the individual loaves and individual food-tins were distributed: the files marched off; —all with the greatest decorum. When the last man had gone there came to his ears a sound—the locking of doors. “At that sound”

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there came upon that one-time prisoner “ all the reality of prison-life, completely obliterating the pleasant mask of it that he had been surveying. Left alone for some reason until the last door clanged he turned his face away and wept.”

But, Why? I ask again. Wasn’t he really just a sentimental fool? Isn’t the delinquent a bad man who has deliberately done wrong, and isn’t he being justly punished? After the appointed time is he not sure to see the error of his ways?

The assumption that the right answers are in the affirmative underlies the whole prison system. But—is it valid? Is it true? Do the actual facts warrant it?

I hear that old inmate wept because, suddenly realising —after many days —the meaning of prison to the prisoner, he remembered all the misery that even that well-kept prison meant, all its inability to make m,en better, all its dreadful power to make them worse. He remembered the agony of being torn from wife and children, his powerlessness in the face of their agony and deprivation. It came upon him again what it meant to be an “ outcast.” He remembered the continuing daily lack, not only of all that he loved and all that he liked, but also of all choices, of every exercise of his own will, all share in current events, all expression of emotion, personal judgment, personal initiative, and skill, and taste. He remembered, too, all the endless small humiliations, slights and pin-pricks at the hands of the rough-fibred men set over him, tiny things at which, as a free-man, he would have only smiled, but which, to the virtual slave, were bitter as gall. And I know he remembered also, the miseries of his fellow-suf-ferers, their mental stagnancy, their oft-times moral filthiness, their social famishing, their consequent crippling, frustration, and, in many cases, therefore, their degradation as human beings. Standing there, hearing the keys turn in lock after lock, he remembered all the deforming influences of that supposed Reformatory and I do not wonder that he wept.

Let us again turn to Kropotkin. “In the immense majority of cases, prisons (even model prisons) exercise

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the most deteriorating effect. The thief and swindler, who had spent some years in a prison, generally comes out better prepared for his former career; he has learned how to do it better, he is more embittered against Society.” And he concludes with these words: “Prisons are Universities of crime, maintained hy the State* What! The charge that a State maintains or permits Schools of Crime constitutes a terrible indictment. Let us examine it. What do other competent observers say? Dr. Mary Gordon, a Prison Inspector in England, author of “ Penal Discipline” has no doubt or hesitation. “It may appear,” she says, “ that so far I have no good word to say for our prison system in any of its forms. I have not. I think it creates a criminal class, and directly fosters recidivism; that our method is dead and done with, and in need of decent cremation—We do not only not deter, we actually make-over our prisoner to crime.” The Bishop of St. Albans recently put the facts in this graphic form: “If you put the Archbishop of Canterbury in prison for eighteen months, he might come out all right, but I doubt it!” If any Dominia bishop had but a month of such an experiment his Church, one ventures to think, would soon be leading a Crusade there for Penal Reform.

Nor is Scotland in a different case. Dr Devon, one of her Prison Commissioners, is emphatic enough. “In my opinion,” he says, “ it is beyond dispute that our methods result in the making of criminals; that in the majority of cases imprisonment not only does no good but does positive harm.”

What is our own real position? I venture the opinion that every unbiased observer tells the same tale. Quite recently a Prison Chaplain wrote to the Dominia papers complaining of “that terrible moral infection, prison-con-tamination,” and stated that he knew men who, “ convicted for some relatively small offence, have, during their stay in prison, learned all there is to know about crime.” My own experience of prisoners compels me to give evidence, without reservation, in corroboration. The nice clean Prisons of Dominia are Schools of Crime maintained by the State!

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Criminals cannot, however, be let loose upon innocent people. If prison fails to reform them, what on earth will make them better? Well, let us look back at some actual instances and see if we can discover anything useful from them, remembering, as Dr Healy has taught us, that we should take delinquents on,e by one, as individuals.

Consider, first, the case of our William. The development of his feelings and his social understanding, arrested in youth, never received help from repeated imprisonment, but was helped on at last by an outside citizen who made friends with him, and so put him in touch with her own matured standards. Other friends of hers, also outside, helped him in the same way till William grew to a point where he helped himself —legitimately. All were women, well-versed in the art of supplying the needs of individuals. Prison regarded William only as part of a mass, and had surrounded him with men only. These women cured the

criminal.” There are many Williams.

Consider Miles —again a complete prison failure; but touched at last with better things, again by the sympathy of an “ outsider,” and again through a definite trait of his make-up—in this case its aesthetic trend. Women and men worked together, on his release, to teach him a congenial means of livelihood, which prison had never done; to develop and train his stunted money-sense, which prison had never done; to provide him with those normal healthy interests, which prison had altogether denied him; and so to nullify the vice which prison had taught him. These friends, through patience, goodwill and skill, applied to Miles’ individual needs, cured their “ criminal.” There are not a few like Miles.

Consider Tim d Co —No amount of consigning to the corner these naughty “ kids” ever succeeded in making them willing to accept the responsibilities and grow up. But women’s discerning friendship, once more, started Noeline on the right track, and Noeline started Noel, though here too, the other women’s interest and help had to be faithfully sustained. A sustained friendship with a woman too, appears to be keeping Tim on a route at least

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a little above the gutter. There are any number of these childish natures among our law-breakers.

Then there was Joe, more of a “ four-footer” than a man. It was drink which always uncovered his “ beast”liness, and prison certainly succeeded in keeping him from that. It did nothing, however, to make his natural sex-pro-pensity develop into human affection and respect for women. That part of his education was undertaken by a woman and the results both as to sex-control and drinkcontrol were excellent. But Jonathan, though kept away from drink by years of prison, relapsed at once on release. So did Old Andy, Aurelius, Annie, and numbers of other drink-diseased offenders. No psychological or other scientific help was forthcoming for any of them, young or old. Amelia however, put herself on a kind of voluntary probation to an outside friend ) and kept eagerly in touch, because she found, in that way, help in abstaining. And Amelia has won out.

But now think of Young Lochinvar, the Romantic, with an ardent love-nature and a broken home—that last so often a “ cause of crime.” He was imprisoned very early and very often; and prison was never any deterrent at all. On the other hand, it most unfortunately stopped his chances of marriage and fatherhood, the due social developments of his strong love-instincts, found capable of reforming a Martin. No psychological help, either, was ever available. The drowning “ citizen” in Young Lochinvar was not only left to drown—he was struck under by society’s own anti-social bludgeon. So it was with Tannhauser, too, again a romantic lover by nature, with the broken home, the early repression, the downward thrusts of repeated imprisonment, the repeated anti-social act following on affectional disturbance. The one hopeful outlook for Tannhauser, failing the happy marriage that grows less and less likely, is sublimation of his love-instinct through his instinct for religion; and the fostering of this has been due again to “ outside” friends, who are mainly women. The “Minnesinger” type of outlaw is not very uncommon in Dominia.

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Rod —What can I say of Rod, except—Alas! This young rebel, whom repeated years of imprisonment had never reformed in the least, had for two years been growing more and more civilised, through the agency of his affection for understanding, “ outside” friends, when an acquaintance supplied by imprisonment misdirected his splendid capacity for loyalty, and destroyed him. As a means of over punishment and ruination our penal system proved, in his case, all too tragic a success. As a deterrent and reformative agency

Cornelius f Nothing was discovered about his early life, his better proclivities, his more hopeful tastes and talents, because in his case there were no facilities. It is possible that psychological investigation and treatment might have led to understanding and reform. Prison had no power to mend his gambling instinct and trust without understanding did not make him trustworthy. Emphatically this was a case where scientist and social servant working together were necessary. Prison officials, even good ones, failed; so did I. But that does not mean that Cornelius & Co. are incurable. It does mean that prison cannot cure them.

Robin Hood gives us a cl,ear-cut case of social development arrested at the boyish stage in which the outlaw is the hero. Prison, applied time after time, merely “fixed” the habit and inhibited progress. There was a complete lack of social teaching; and an environment designed, as by malign intent, to foster the “outlaw” in him and frustrate the “ citizen.” His “ fall” on release was due to revenge upon our penal methods. His “ rise,” —self suggested and accompanied by voluntary restitution—was due to normal human development and socialisation, made possible only by living and loving “outside,” in the community.

As for Cherry and his like—Surely words are vain and comment is needless. To send such as these to prison is to outrage Justice. It is in itself a crime.

It is likewise a crime to imprison Pearly and the large family of defectives of which he is a member. Tfiey go through Dominian Schools but, it would seem, their status

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is not recorded, or action is not taken. Prison has failed again and again with them all. It has neither “ reformed” nor “ deterred,” and no wonder! It has power, with such weak ones, only of corruption. Letting them out does not protect either them or Society. Custodial care and special training, in a Home devoted to the care of defectives, would have given Pearly his one chance in life. Later, under favourable conditions, probation very carefully applied might have been tried, with immediate return in case of relapse.

For Clara and Clarence prison w r as useless and obviously stupid. Fifty times, in Clara’s case, was the mistake repeated, each time only increasing her need to “ escape” into phantasy. A psychologist, had one been available in her youth, might have saved all the trouble by giving right direction to her wayward imagination. Prison again did nothing to change Clarence’s desires; while his own intelligence, a friend “outside,” and the right niche have, so far, modified them into social acceptability.

i Giglamps and Mucklemouth belong to the same category. Repeated imprisonment neither mended them when “ in” nor protected Society from them when “ out.” A psychologist’s help might have done something in both directions. Giglamps was able to indicate his own best chance, of “ co-ordination” through a spiritual shepherd. Mucklemouth’s real trouble is now probably mental disease. He would in any case, in the right hands, have proved valuable clinical material, instead of a mere social pest.

As for Glaucon, Lemuel, and the rest of their kind, Prison Officials themselves agree as to the uselessness of imprisonment as a cure. Flogging only seems to make them worse. Scientific help in adolescence, mental and spiritual, might have elucidated much, for Society as well as for these offenders.

Then our lovable, unstable — Coppertop. A hoy probably to the end of his days! Prison can never do more than further retard his development. Religious and brotherly folk could possibly help him, even now. Science could have given him a valuable lead in his teens, which were spent in punishment. Much the same may be said of Larry,

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except that his due guardians might have to be found in a non-penal Home—with a good Library.

Finally, Imprisonment in my Half-a-Star’s boyhood increased his nervous instability without reforming either desire or will. It supplied evil teachers; it corrupted good manners, it denied, through its stigma, any chance on release; and it produced, by those means, a rebel and an agitator instead of a potentially brilliant and fine leader. Probation, even now, under proper auspices, above all, with good friends might yet succeed. Here, too, was the crying need for scientific help of the right kind.

The “ distressed reader”—by this time really distressed, I hope—at this stage may perhaps be expected to exclaim —“But do Dominian prisons make any attempt to reform? What remedial agencies besides preaching, do they say that they employ? What are their curative methods, and who applies them?”

Well, if so, there is one thing particularly significant about any “ remedial agencies” which may exist—no prisoner knows anything about them, and the prison officials are silent on the matter. Sometimes lam taken by an official swelling with pride, round one of them, very orderly, swept and garnished, and with not one single wicked spirit showing so much as the tip of its tail. Once, though, I seemed to see the shadow of a tail, when a frank Governor remarked—“ You know as well as I do that, if there was anything in this institution that I didn’t want you to see, you never would get the chance to see it!”

On the other hand, never, not once in all my experience has any Governor or lesser head offered as an occasion for the pride he expected me to share in his institution, the number of inmates it had reformed, with their subsequent triumphant success. No Governor has ever shown me, or expounded his machinery for, reform or cure.

Now, notwithstanding the curious apathy and neglect concerning the purposes for which prisons (nowadays) are supposed to exist, certain agencies there are, even in Dominia, which, if pressed, the average officer might claim as “ remedial.” There is the “ Gospel of Hard Work” for

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some eight hours a day. There is the insistence of cleanliness, order, and strict obedience to Rule and Regulations. There, as noted, is Divine Service, with sermon, once a week—generally. There is a little elementary schoolteaching for the very ill-educated. Occasionally, there may be a lecture or a concert by an outsider. There is, indeed, a prison library, but the less said about the value of its contents, I fear, the better. The Staff? All practically warders. And they? Well, as you might expect—physically quite good; mentally, only so-so, but certainly for reformative purposes, untrained; morally—well, I doubt if their morals are really much considered, their “ human” morals, that is. If they are good officials, keen on discipline, zealous in the performance of their prison duties, faithful to routine and reasonably humane, it does not seem to matter to the heads what they axle in themselves any more than it matters to them what in himself each prisoner is either. Here and there among these warders will be found a skilled tradesman; but he is not there to hand on his skill, through thorough training, to those who seek, by that means, education and help against the future. Some few, working through this channel on prison requisites only, do acquire the smattering of a trade, but no trade can be taught thoroughly in a Dominian prison. The supreme difficulty of an enlightened man appointed to such a job would be that he was grafted into an obsolete system with a dead-weight of obsolete prison ideas. Lastly, among the possibly reformative agencies, comes the voluntary prison visitor. Here and there, in some prisons, a specimen will be found—mostly suspected, none too welcome, jealously watched, limited in every generous activity. If there comes from such a breath of honest criticism, he may, as I have seen, be hounded from the precints on some trumped-up and spurious pretext. I can think of nothing more in the way of curative influences in our “ Moral Hospitals.”

There is a Leper Settlement in which Dominia is quite interested, situate in the other sea. A late report states with pride and pleasure the numbers of patients cured and patients improved. There was little mention of its septic

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tanks and its prize pig,-;. And, if you vtelt a Dominian Hospital, with its segregation, its discipline, its curtailment of liberty, you will find in a hundred little ways that there, too, the purpose and direction of incarceration moves to one end— Cure. The Doctor and Nurse are moved by the same impulse, to apply science to physical disease. It matters not how unpromising the human material. It matters not that the patient is himself to blame for the disorder. The resources of the State are at his disposal and nothing that cleanliness, kindness, skill and competence can do, is denied, for it is well understood in the community that the general weal is advanced, that even the healthy profit, when the sick are cured. Every individual case is carefully considered, when necessary by a team of experts, and with a single eye to recovery. A man with small-pox is not given the same conditions and treatment as a man with measles, or a broken leg, or heart-trouble. When the treatment is prescribed he is carefully watched. No unskilled hand may interfere. Every adjustment is made to meet the idiosyncrasy of the patient. If treatment fails, it is changed. If an infection is quickly cleared, or a wound healed in record time, everyone rejoices, and the patient goes. Why? Because the sole end of the place is Cure —not mere detention for some set and specified time.

Compare this whole system with that of the so-called “ Moral” Hospitals of Dominia. Pacing beside my complacent escorts in these well-ordered precincts I ask myself —“ But where are the skilled physicians and surgeons, the trained nurses, the careful charts, the individual treatment, the quiet insistence on Curef” Once upon a time there was no attempt made to cure the physical leper. He was declared unclean, and sent to the lazar-house. The day of his deliverance has dawned, for science and human concern are now able to alleviate his sufferings and even to boast of cure. But, as I pace Dominia’s very best prison —I have to confess that it is no “ Moral Hospital” at all, no clinic for souls diseased, for hearts starved, for minds myopic—it is merely a pretentious lazar-house swept and garnished. —Periodically, too, by some inscrutable decree

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it lets loose its patients, still in a highly leprous state, because, it is said, “ their time is up.”

We shall, I submit, get nowhere, until we see, and make others see, that our talk about our prisons being “ reformative” and not “punitive” is mere humbug, when it is not sheer hypocrisy. As a matter of fact, in the eyes of law-abiding citizens, and in the hearts and minds of most prison officials, do not prisons really exist merely to punish? A Hospital is a monument to human goodwill towards the physically disabled and diseased, dangerous as these may be to the community. Is not a prison, on the other hand, one to human ill-will? Who supplies the scientific knowledge, who trains the nurses, who administers the individual treatment, to our morally disabled and diseased?

“ Why, does not the punishment itself reform?” I hear some worthy soul ask reproachfully. “Do not prison discipline, sermons, industry, cleanliness, effect a moral cure?

Well, as a matter of scientific truth, does it? and why? Ask William, or any of his mates. Ask any real authority. Hobhouse and Brockway, both “ ex-prisoners,” have some very pregnant observations on this point in their book on “ English Prisons.” “ Punishment, it is sometimes thought,” say they, “ produces a moral reformation. It would be rash to say that this is never true, but it may be safely said that it is very rarely true of punishment by the Law. The offender is often not guilty in his own judgment, and his punishment then appears to him arbitrary, cruel, and unjust . . . and the conviction that he is being made to suffer pointlessly and unjustly will produce the directly contrary effect to moral reform.” “ The offender’s view may be a wrong one,” Dr Devon reminds us, “ but, until it is altered, it will affect his conduct. ... Of course he ought to be chastened by his affliction, but it is not what ought to be that requires consideration, if we would help him to do better, but what is. . . Punishment does not deter the great mass of our fellow-citizens from committing crimes. They are law-abiding because they have no inclination to break the law. . . . Let it press on them, and they may tell another story. ... In

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those bad old days of his, a convert did. . . what pleased him.” The italics are mine. Sometimes it is the conscious desires that dictate conduct, sometimes others, more obscure because sub-conscious. The sub-conscious may even be at war with the conscious, a fact which explains much in our Larrys, Coppertops and Tannhausers. But always it is the individual desires which form the motives of conduct, and these must be enlisted and trained if your man is ever to move towards good under his own helm.

This may explain why mass-discipline, the inculcation of good habits, the cheerless cleanliness and the rest, fail in our prisons, as fail they certainly do. First it is massdiscipline; second, it is hated. What is one to expect? Schools, ships, hospitals, institutions of all degrees employ discipline, but none of them employs nothing else. It is always, where there is any semblance of success, only a means to a specific end. When necessary, it is altered, lightened, even abrogated. But in prison? Never! Every inmate must observe the same discipline and observe it absolutely. It is the fetish of the system. No man must be treated differently from any other. All prisoners are considered as a mass. They are, all alike, kept safe, kept clean, kept in order; they are fed alike, clothed alike, housed alike —locked up, unlocked, worked, preached at—all punctually and devotedly alike, all in the mass. As an individual, the prisoner in prison does not exist; he is simply prisoner. The system thus refuses to face facts, for he is, of course, an individual all the time, with individual needs and desires.

Almost invariably, again, he hates his condition in prison, and everything belonging to it. Even the best of good habits inculcated under conditions one loathes are apt to be dropped as soon as the compulsion ceases. This is not ideal, but human nature works that way. One of my untidiest friends spent a youth of such enforced tidiness that his soul revolted. Free at last, untidiness became to him the loveliest proof of blessed liberty! “ Why,” says Dr. Cabot, very sensibly, “ should men change bad habits and acquire good ones, merely because they have been confined in an institution where they are forced to do work chosen

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almost without reference to their future careers or their present tastes . . . forced and unpalatable labour?” There is, of course, no reason. And, as a matter of fact, men do not change bad habits in that way. The instant it becomes possible, they revert to the old ones, and find them nicer. This is true of all “ forced, unpalatable” prison discipline. By compulsion you may regulate a practice, but you will never redeem a man. To do that you must alter his own desires.

Prison does shout “ No, no, no,” to some of the bad desires, with insistent repetition; but far more help is needed if the delinquent is to say “ yes” himself to desires which are socially acceptable. Unless the individual is studied, and his right “ yes” comes from his reformed desires. how can his recovery be lasting? It must be his own right “ Yes—point” that he comes to, not yours or mine; and this is why so much preaching is futile. In all that I have seen of “ reformed” men. reformation has meant simply development, the due development of each one along his own natural lines. It has been started, in each case, by someone who has taken the trouble to find out, not the bad, but the good in the man—the good taste, the good desires already existing-—-and has worked with them as the foundation. If you look back over the past chapters you will see that this is so and why I am so sure of it. You must get in touch with a man’s natural “ admirations, hopes and loves” before you can change them, and if you cannot change them you cannot change him, whatever the compulsion and whatever the discipline. But, on the other hand, if you can help even any one desire that is good towards its due purpose of social usefulness, almost miraculous may seem the way it will improve the rest. It is like starting stagnant water running at any one point; the runnel may clear the whole swamp—particularly if help is available at critical moments.

The first thing needed, then, is human goodwill. There was once an old music-master who had an extremely delicate touch. “It must be hard on you to have pupils who thump,” someone said to him. “ Not at all,” he replied. “ If I get a pupil who thumps, I look on that simply as the

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stage he is at, and I hope that I may he able to help him beyond it.” Now that is the right spirit for every warder, and everyone else, too, on the staff of a prison. If they have it not, they should not be there.

Human Goodwill, however, by itself, is not enough. “ The good-natured goose has a limited use,” so far as the prisoner is concerned. Mere coaxing is not much better than mere preaching or discipline, when it comes to making a man want, in his heart of hearts, to change his ways. Insight and understanding are wanted and that is where the psychologist and the trained social servant comes in.

“ I am like a nurse working without a doctor, and without training!” I have heard Miss M. say again and again in despair. “ I wish I knew whether this man is even normal. I wish I knew what he really could do, if he could be trained to it.” This from Miss M., whom life had taught to understand so many things.

A certain imaginative sympathy, it is true, must be inborn. Social service is really an art, and needs the due artistic aptitude. Nevertheless certain training, and particularly the help of specialists would have made even Miss M. more useful. There would have been a lesser drain upon her energy and a greater economy in her efforts.

There is no need, in these pages, to say more of the value of women in this work. The English Prison Commissioners are wise enough to have a regular band of women visitors devoted to boy-prisoners. May they soon let their men-prisoners have somje too! England, in any case, has already recognised the worth of the voluntary prisonvisitor, working in his own way, with the co-operation of the prison-authorities. This is not true of Dominia, and if ever one of its penal heads should read these pages without death from heart-failure, he will not be pleased to see the plain fact told. The voluntary prison-worker, however “ freely” some of them may have to be admitted, is officially unbeloved. “ They make mistakes,” one learns. Just as if the officials themselves are immune! And the mistakes made by the officials are infinitely greater than any that it is in the power of the volunteer to make, though, being official, they nearly always escape detection. This

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is particularly true of the mistakes “of omission.” Think of my Rod, of Half-a-Star—of Miles, Robin and Cherry—and guess what official mistakes in those cases have cost the country, to say nothing of the victims!

If the volunteer, however, is disliked by the penal priests and Levites, he is endlessly welcome to the thieves, and to those who, from other causes, have fallen among thieves. To them he comes from the lovely world “ outside.” “It makes one feel not quite so hopeless,” they say. “ It’s good to see somebody smile at one!” “ It’s such a relief to see somebody fresh!” “It makes us feel not quite so forgotten!” How often have I heard these words! For, at the present stage and status of the ordinary inmate, everything has to be “ humanised” for him before he can recognise it, far less understand it. He wants decency, friendliness, goodwill, religion, all to wear a “ meat-face,” as a child once characterised the human visage. He “catches” everything much more quickly from a fellowcreature than he can be taught it from books, or meditation, or even his own uninterpreted experiences. This is one reason why it is so hopeless to expect him to “reform” while his only daily companions are as bad as himself—or worse. If you had a naughty boy of your own would you dream of segregating him, with other naughty boys, even for an hour, in the hope of making him better?

This brings the discussion to a further point. We have abundant proof that such “ fine prisons” as Dominia’s do not reform; and we have found at least some reasons behind the fact. Is there any good reason to believe that they could reform? Given individual attention, goodwill scientific and social aid, together with the book-education which England of late years has supplied to some of her prisons, —Could Prisons reform?

Frankly, I doubt it—unless you could so change them that they ceased to be prisons at all. Why? Because “ you can’t train for freedom under conditions of slavery.” You can teach mathematics, or biology, or theology that way—perhaps—but you cannot tfeach the right human behaviour needed in the normal world. The world of prison is not normal, it is unnatural in the extreme. As

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CnmmaJ and the Community” savsm pnton the criminal is not himself a -tudv Inf him) based on observations made when he * tory l f and mis:ead - r -g Uke writing a Natural Hisrh° f f a , case of caged birds. Parts will be rieht hut the whole win be wrong.” Whatever weio-h» " d ut gf b**? « behind this statement. I find it r “i hj su ® clei l t emphasis to describe adequately 1 found it. The “best prisoner” is often citizen, and the “bad prisoner” ’nac often the “ h^d^ Uahk member of ®oci«y. for the fact that : ® bad P nsoner Proves at least that he is neither a 5JaV n n ° r a hypocrite. It is only on Wh f?? 0311 really get IO kzlow your “ criminal ” ~ T he ■' al -“f? e a -u able to spread himself. Tne truth cannot develop any social being properly if v o u keep him away from aII that makes “ society” and normal 2* Wsite sex. from the caW and responof dependents; from the love of friends, especially those arcn-civJisers. women and children: from the use th * tnanagement of time, resources, tastes and free “ play-' and every outlet for adventure--rom the wor d of art and beauty, even the humblest from ah need to exereise initiative, choke, judgment, self-con- .*- unselfishness; and from the understanding- even the .mstaxes. that come only through the test and trial o f vnose faculties. Moreover, if you do not allow a human oerng to develop he will assuredly deteriorate. So much, ?n ; .-s pr Devon, does separation from society and friends. 1 cest. action of the sense of initiative t impair mental capacity that the longer a person is eat off from the mam current of _fe in the community, the less is he fitted to return to it.” We hear argument nowadays anarnst the snort sentence, bat there is a real case against long ones' is brought,” the experienced Doctor continues. —to sympathetic contact with someone in the to mm unity who will enable him to resist temptation and encourage him in weH-dcmg. he never does reform,”

' Someone the coisbbjißj’ be it remarked. mat iocmm cccr*.tei with internment.

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What, then is the sense of putting him in prison? Why not keep him out; under the care of “ someone in the community,” if what you really want is reformation? But, of course what you are really after may be retaliation, or the chance of “ deterring” someone unknown by ruining this culprit that you do know. If so, are you justified, on tHe facts? It is to be noted that, in the process, you punish, also, in the name of justice certain other persons who are perfectly innocent. Do you know the wife and children, the mother and father, of any prisoner? or can your fancy paint the shame and sorrow, the sense of failure and disgrace? Why, again, punish the taxpayer, by making him pay for Governors and waiders whose work, for any good social end, is so hopeless and so useless, and for institutions which are “ Universities of Crime”? “ The same amount of money,” that Prison Commissioner from Scotland goes on, “ spent in helping them to do well as it costs to imprison them for doing ill, would prevent many of them from offending.”

“ Does the witness mean to suggest, then, that Prisons should be abolished?” The answer is in the affirmative! Long years of prison work have taught him that they do the community more harm than good, and that, from the point of view of the inmate, they are soul-destroying and barbarous.

“ Is it, then, suggested that the offender should be let loose upon Society?” By no means!

“ Then what does the witness suggest?”

Well, in the first place I would leave no stone unturned to catch the offender every time, and to catch him quickly. This would mean an improved Police, and reformed Police Methods. “ Early discovery is easy recovery,” and the best deterrent, short of the “ inner desires” is—just that. “ The criminal,” as Mr P. Morrell once wrote to a London Journal, “ usually gambles in chances, he trusts to luck, he hopes he may escape detection, and he very often does.” If you want to stop him do not let him escape, or “ get away with it.” No amount of punishment will “ deter” a man with red blood in his veins, who has pulled off the little game six times and only been caught at the seventh!

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In the second place, having caught him, I would not sentence him at once, unless it were quite clear that Probation was the best “ treatment.” This would be decided by a consideration of his social history and mentality, on the report of competent investigators, and in nine cases out of ten, in my opinion, Probation would meet the case. Of course, though, Probation would not mean mere Police supervision. Probation would be the real, friendly but firm, supervision in the community that it ought to be. The Probation Officer would be a properly-qualified, properly-trained, properly-paid official, assisted by voluntary workers, and the work of the team would be to find the good in each individual and to exploit that good to the utmost so that the suppressed powers and half-gifts, so poisonous otherwise, might develop for social ends. In every case of dishonesty there should also be decreed as much restitution as seemed possible; for restitution is of inestimable value to the thief—to say nothing of his victim.

But the tenth case remains; what of him? That case I would send, before sentence, to a Receiving Moral Hospital (a real, not a sham one), where scientists and social servants, trained for their work, would And out, not what he has dove but what he is. That would involve ascertaining his moral preferences and social aptitudes, with the appropriate probable line of development. Pending the report of the Hospital, the offender would be detained, under conditions modified to suit the need. Finally, sentence would be passed ordaining the treatment finally recommended. There remains the case of the incurable. Well, if the abnormality were beyond us, it would be a case, not of gaolers, but of specialists in another Moral Hospital, in close touch with a Mental Hospital. There, if he proved really incurable, he should remain for life.

Of the ultimate institution —devoted still, remember, to the study, and possible recovery , of the individual case—one wing should certainly be devoted specifically to the drinkdiseased. Every resource, of psychology, psychiatry, mental, moral and physical hygiene, of education and of real spirituality, should there be applied to each case. Every-

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thing, too, should be done to introduce the inmates to possible friends “ outside” who would undertake to shepherd them on release. In such cases there should be no release except on Probation, with the patient reverting at once to Hospital on relapse; not waiting, as at present, for the almost inevitable crime.

Two or three such real Moral Hospitals, if properly administered, could take charge of all the “ tenth cases” in Dominia; and the new System would prove, even with its specialists, far less expensive than the old, for it would eliminate the waste, human and material, as well as the contamination, involved in our too numerous morallazarets.

Such a system would, too, it is suggested, carry with it quite enough “punishment”—for who likes to be promptly caught, convicted, and made to disgorge? Who would choose to live, even in the community, under the definite supervision which all free men abhor, supervision which the law-breaker certainly cannot be expected to love. It would prove a far better deterrent than imprisonment, because, to a most discouraging degree, it would eliminate “ luck.” It would afford no opportunity for the “ University” courses in crime. It would be a far more effective protection to society from the criminal, and, more important possibly, a greater protection to the civilised members of society, from the results of their own collective ignorance, negligence and injustice. Infinitely brighter, too, under some such system, would be the prospects of redeeming from the human scrap-heap such good human material as proved available in William, Miles, Tim, Robin, Rod—and others of my “ People in Prison.”

Am Imy brother’s keeper? That is the ultimate question.

I am! You are! “ Every community has the criminals it deserves.” If it still retains brutal unthinking and unfeeling elements, if it still remains repressive and tyrannical, it may expect crimes of violence within its gates. If it wrongly values the body and under-values the soul and spirit, it may expect crimes of lust and crimes of unhealthy appetite. If it is selfish, if it bows down before the Golden Calf, if it is the slave of great possessions, of machinery

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and of high speed; if in its scale of values the material is more than the man; if economically it is sub-human, following jungle-law . . . then, it may expect, and will certainly have, to plague it with an exaggeration of its own faultiness, its resorts of thieves, its nests of sex-crim-inals, and its gangs of violence. If the average of citizenship be low then the standard of the weaker citizen, of the less developed, the less protected, of the lop-sided and the sickly personality will be lower still. If the community worship at the shrine of Chance it must expect embezzlements and peculations to decorate the altar of its God.

Each and every individual member of the community bears thus some responsibility towards every other. In some sort, in some degree, all men and women ARE the “ keepers” of their brothers and sisters with the right • more, the duty—to lead them not into temptation, but to deliver them from the evil, and to be their guides and protectors in their striving towards the good.

On the other hand, I for one am unable to discover a basis, human or divine, for the proposition that there is a right—let alone a duty—devolving upon any citizen to become or to appoint any other to become, his brothers’ or sisters’—gaoler.

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APA: Baughan, B. E. (Blanche Edith). (1936). People in prison. Unicorn Press.

Chicago: Baughan, B. E. (Blanche Edith). People in prison. Auckland, N.Z.: Unicorn Press, 1936.

MLA: Baughan, B. E. (Blanche Edith). People in prison. Unicorn Press, 1936.

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People in prison Baughan, B. E. (Blanche Edith), Unicorn Press, Auckland, N.Z., 1936

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Contents of this book

Cover Page - Page 20 of 186

Cover Page - Page 20 of 186

Cover Page - Page 20 of 186

Cover Page - Page 20 of 186

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