At the meeting we had there in the afternoon, Aristides
reported our having been warned against our danger
in the night by that murderer, and public record of
the fact was made. The Altrurians consider any
sort of punishment which is not expiation a far greater
sin than the wrong it visits, and altogether barren
and useless. After the record in this case had
been made, the conference naturally turned upon what
Aristides had seen of the treatment of criminals in
America, and when, he told of our prisons, where people
merely arrested and not yet openly accused are kept,
I did not know which way to look, for you know I am
still an American at heart, Dolly. Did you ever
see the inside of one of our police-stations at night?
Or smell it? I did, once, when I went to give
bail for a wretched girl who had been my servant, and
had gone wrong, but had been arrested for theft, and
I assure you that the sight and the smell woke me
in the night for a month afterwards, and I have never
quite ceased to dream about it.
The Altrurians listened in silence, and I hoped they
could not realize the facts, though the story was
every word true; but what seemed to make them the
most indignant was the treatment of the families of
the prisoners in what we call our penitentiaries and
reformatories. At first they did not conceive
of it, apparently, because it was so stupidly barbarous;
they have no patience with stupidity; and when Aristides
had carefully explained, it seemed as if they could
not believe it. They thought it right that the
convicts should be made to work, but they could not
understand that the state really took away their wages,
and left their families to suffer for want of the
support which it had deprived them of. They said
this was punishing the mothers and sisters, the wives
and children of the prisoners, and was like putting
out the eyes of an offender’s innocent relatives
as they had read was done in Oriental countries.
They asked if there was never any sort of protest against
such an atrocious perversion of justice, and when
the question was put to me I was obliged to own that
I had never heard the system even criticised.
Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my own knowledge.
VII
Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and
come back to our travels, with their perpetual novelty,
and the constantly varying beauty of the country!
The human interest of the landscape, that is always
the great interest of it, and I wish I could make
you feel it as I have felt it in this wonderful journey
of ours. It is like the New England landscape
at times, in its kind of gentle wildness, but where
it has been taken back into the hand of man, how different
the human interest is! Instead of a rheumatic
old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his
gaunt girls to help him, or perhaps his ageing wife,
getting in the hay of one of those sweet meadows,
and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their
work; or instead of some young farmer, on the seat
of his clattering mower, or mounted high over his
tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one
else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce
or sullen, as the case might be, the work is always
going on with companies of mowers or reapers, or planters,
that chatter like birds or sing like them.
Copyrights
Through the Eye of the Needle from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
