Facts and Fictions of Life. Gardener Helen Hamilton

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СКАЧАТЬ were stacked five deep. There were seven wee ones, hardly larger than would be filled by a good-sized kitten.

      I said: "They are so very small. I don't see how a baby was put inside."

      The man to whom I spoke – a deck hand who was a "ten-day-self-committed," so the captain told me later – smiled a grim, sly smile and said:

      "I reckon you're allowin' fer trimmin's. This kind don't get piliers and satin linin's. It don't take much room for a baby with no trimmin's an' mighty little clothes."

      "Why are two of them dark wood and all the rest light?" I asked of the same man.

      "I reckon the folks of them two had a few cents to pay fergittin' their baby's box stained. It kind of looks nicer to them, and when they get a little more money, they'll come and get it dug up and put it in a grave by itself or some other place. It seems kind of awful to some folks to have their little baby put in amongst such a lot."

      He said it all quite simply, quite apologetically, as if I might think it rather unreasonable – this feeling that it was "kind of awful to think of the baby in amongst such a lot."

      At that time, I did not know that he was a prisoner. He showed me a number of things about the boxes and spoke of the open cracks and knot holes through which one could see what was inside. I declined to look after the first glance.

      "You don't mind it very much after you're used to it," he said. "Of course, you would, but I mean us."

      I began to understand that he was a prisoner.

      "When you're a prisoner, you get used to a good deal," he said, later on, when they were unloading the bodies and some of the men looked white and sick. "They're new to it," he explained to me. "It makes them sick and scared; but it won't after a while."

      "Why are most of them here?" I asked. "Most of them look honest – and – "

      "Honest!" he exclaimed, with the first show he had made of rebellion or resentment. "Honest! Of course most of us are honest. It is liquor does it mostly. None of us are thieves – yet!"

      I noticed the "us," but still evaded putting him in with the rest.

      "Why do they not let liquor alone, after such a hard lesson?"

      He laughed. He had a red, bloated, but not a bad face. He was an Englishman.

      "Some of us can't. Some don't want to, and some – some – it is about all some can get."

      Later on, I was told that this man was honest, a good worker, and that he was "self-committed to get the liquor out of him. He's been here before. When he gets out, he will be drunk before he gets three blocks away from the dock, and he'll be sent here again – or to the Island!"

      "And has this system gone on for a hundred years," I asked, "without finding some remedy?"

      "Well, since the women began to take a hand, some little has been done," the officer replied. "They built a coffee and lodging house right near the landing, and take returning prisoners there, and give them a chance to work if they want to – in a broom factory they built. Some get a start that way and if they work and are honest, they get a letter saying so when they find places. It is only a drop in the bucket, but it helps a few."

      "It looks a little as though, if women were to take a hand in public, municipal, or governmental affairs, that reform, and not punishment, might be made the object of imprisonment if imprisonment became necessary, doesn't it?"

      He laughed.

      "Politics is no place for women. This they are doing is charity. That is all very well, but they got no business meddling with city government, and courts, and prisoners only as charity."

      "Yet you say that, for a hundred years, those who look after the criminal population, thought very little of helping the men who came out, much less did they think of beginning at the other end and trying to keep them from going in. Women have been allowed to devise public charities, even, for only a few years past. They had no experience in building manufactories and conducting coffee and lodging houses; they have but little money of their own to put into such things and yet they have bethought them to start, in embryo, right here where the returning convict lands, what appears to have vast possibilities as you say. Now if this effort for the prevention of crime and want were at the other end of the line in municipal government, don't you think it might go even nearer the root of the matter and do more good?"

      "How would you like to be a ward politician and a heeler?" he inquired, wiping a smile away and looking at my gloves.

      "I should not like it at all."

      "Well, now, look at that! Of course no lady would, so – "

      "Do you think it possible that the world might get on fairly comfortably without having 'heelers' and 'ward politicians' – in the sense you mean – in municipal or state government? And that it might be better without such crime producers?" I added, as he began to laugh.

      "You women are always visionary. Never practical. You – "

      "I thought you said that the one and only really practical measure yet taken to reduce the criminal population as it returns from the Islands was invented and is conducted by women and – "

      "You can just make up your mind that in every family of six there'll be one hypocrite and one fool, either one of which is liable to be a criminal, too, and the State has got to take care of 'em somehow. But the prisons are getting too full and the Almshouses and Insane Asylums are growing very large. But there is the Two Brothers' Island. I've got to attend to my business now. Take the trip with me again some time."

      But it seems to me, I shall not need to go again, and that no judge or legislator would need to take the journey more than once, unless, perchance, he took it in the person of either the hypocrite or the fool of his family; which, let us hope, no judge and no legislator is in a position to do.

      AN IRRESPONSIBLE EDUCATED CLASS

      Education, using the word in its restricted scholastic sense, is always productive of restlessness and discontent, unless education, in its practical relations to life, furnishes an outlet and safety valve for the whetted and strengthened faculties. Mere mental gymnastics are unsatisfactory after the first flush of pleasurable excitement produced in the mind newly awakened to its own capabilities.

      There seems to be something within us which demands that our knowledge be in some way applied, and that the logic of thought find fruition in the logic of events. The moment the laborers of the country found time and opportunity to whet their minds, they also developed a vast and persistent unrest – a dissatisfaction with the order of things which gave to them the tools with which to carve a fuller, broader life, but had not yet furnished them the material upon which they might work. Their plane of thought was raised, their outlook was expanded, their possibilities multiplied; but the materials to work with remained the same. Their status and condition clashed with their new hopes and needs. This state of things produced what we call "labor troubles," with all their complications. Capital and labor had no contest until labor became (to a degree) educated.

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