Part 9
Then he laughed, and his chuckle died away on the wire. That expressed him; that was exactly what he would have done for a brother, exactly what he did do for many a brother, since he regarded all men as his brothers, and treated them as such if they would let him. He was always going down to the city prisons, or to the workhouses, and talking to the poor devils there, quite as if he were one of them, which indeed he felt he was, and as all of us are, if we only knew it. And he was working all the time to get them out of prison, and finally he and I entered into a little compact by which he paid the expenses incident to their trials--the fees for stenographers and that sort of thing--if I would look after their cases. Hard as the work was, and sad as it was, and grievously as my law partners complained of the time it took, and of its probable effect on business (since no one wished to be known as a criminal lawyer!), it did pay in the satisfaction there was in doing a little to comfort and console--and, what was so much more, to compel in one city, at least, a discussion of the grounds and the purpose of our institutions. For instance, if some poor girl were arrested, and a jury trial were demanded for her, and her case were given all the care and attention it would have received had she been some wealthy person, the police, when they found they could not convict, were apt to be a little more careful of the liberties of individuals: they began to have a little regard for human rights and for human life.
We completely broke up the old practice of arresting persons “on suspicion” and holding them at the will and pleasure of the police without any charge having been lodged against them; two or three trials before juries, the members of which could very easily be made to see, when it was pointed out to them a few times in the course of a three days’ trial, that there is nothing more absurd than that policemen should make criminals of people merely by suspecting them, and sending them to prison on that sole account, wrought a change. It annoyed the officials of course, because it interfered with their routine. It was no doubt exasperating to be compelled to stay in court two or three days and try some wretch according to the forms of law, just as if he were somebody of importance and consequence in the world, when they would so much rather have been out at the ball-game, or fishing, or playing pinochle in the guard-room at police headquarters with the detail that had been relieved. Jones managed to get himself fined for contempt one day, and he immediately turned the incident to his own advantage and made his point by drawing out his check-book with a flourish, writing his check for the amount of his fine, and declaring that this proved his contention that the only crime our civilization punishes is the crime of being poor.
But he was most in his element when the police judge was absent, as he was now and then. In that exigency the law gave Jones, as mayor, the power to appoint the acting police judge; and when Jones did not go down and sit as magistrate himself, he appointed me; and we always found some reason or other for letting all the culprits go. The foundations of society were shaken of course, and the editorials and sermons were heavy with all the predictions of disaster; one might have supposed that the whole wonderful and beautiful fabric of civilization which man had been so long in rearing was to fall forever into the awful abyss because a few miserable outcasts had not been put in prison. But nothing happened after all; the poor _misérables_ were back again in a few days, and made to resume their hopeless rounds through the prison doors; but the policemen of Toledo had their clubs taken away from them, and they became human, and learned to help people, and not to hurt them if they could avoid it; and that police judge who once fined Jones became in time one of the leaders in our city of the new social movement that has marked the last decade in America.
I learned to know a good many people in that underworld, many of whom were professed criminals, and there were some remarkable characters among them. I learned that, just as Jones had said, they were all people, just folks, and that they had so much more good than bad in them, that if some way could be devised whereby they might have a little better opportunity to develop the good, there was hope for all of them. Of course, in any effort to help them,--and our efforts were not always perhaps wholly wise,--we encountered that most formidable and fundamental obstacle to prison reform, the desire in the human breast for revenge, the savage hatred which is perhaps some obscure instinct of protection against the anti-social members of society: it stands forever in the way of all prison reform, and of ameliorations of the lot of the poor. It is that which keeps the barbarity of capital punishment alive in the world; it is that which makes every prison in the land a hell, where from time to time the most revolting atrocities are practiced. Out of those experiences, out of the contemplation of the misery, the pathos, the hopelessness of the condition of those victims, I wrote “The Turn of the Balance.” I was very careful of my facts; I was purposely conservative, and, forgetting the advice of Goethe, softened things down; as for instance, where I had known of cases in which prisoners had been hung up in the bull-rings for thirty days,--being lowered to the floor each night of course,--I put it down as eight days, and so on. And the wise and virtuous judges and the preachers and the respectable people all said it was untrue, that such things could not be. Since then there have been investigations of prisons in most of the states, with revelations of conditions far worse than any I tried to portray. And such things have gone on, and are going on to-day; but nobody cares.
XXII
And yet somebody after all did care about all those miserable souls who are immured in the terrible prisons which society maintains as monuments to the strange and implacable hatred in the breast of mankind; perhaps, in the last chapter of these vagrant memories, I allowed to creep into my utterance some of the old bitterness which now and then would taint our efforts, do what we might. And that is not at all the note I would adopt, though it used at times to be very difficult not to do so; one cannot, day after day, beat against the old and solid and impregnable wall of human institutions without becoming sore and sick in one’s soul.
And there is no institution which society so cherishes as she does her penal institutions, and most sacrosanct of these are the ax, the guillotine, the garrote, the gibbet, the electric chair. We tried at each session of the legislature to secure the passage of a bill abolishing capital punishment, but the good people, those who felt that they held in their keeping the morals of the state, always opposed it and defeated it. Beloved and sacred institution! No wonder the ship-wrecked sailor, cast upon an unknown shore, on looking up and beholding a gallows, fell on his knees and said; “Thank God, I’m in a Christian land!”
Travelers visit prisons and places of execution, those historic spots where humanity made red blots on its pathway in the notion that it was doing justice, and always they sigh and shake their heads, beholding in those events only a supreme folly and a supreme cruelty.
All the executions, all the imprisonments of the past are seen to have been mistakes made by savages; there is not one for which to-day a word is uttered in excuse. All the Golgothas of the world have become Calvaries, where men go in pity and in tears in the hope that their regret may somehow work a retroactive expiation of the guilt of their cruel ancestors--and they rise from their knees and go forth and acquiesce in brutalities that are to-day different only in the slightest of degrees from those they bemoan.
And so all the other executions of death sentences, on subjects less distinguished, with no glimmer of the halo of romance, no meed of martyrdom to illumine them, are seen to have been huge and grotesque mistakes of a humanity that at times gives itself over to the elemental savage lust of the blood of its fellows.
I do not say, of course, that there was any similarity between the offenses of those whom Jones and I were concerned about in those days and those striking figures who illustrate the history of the world and mark the slow spiral path of the progress of mankind; these were the commonest of common criminals, poor, mistaken, misshapen beings, somehow marred in the making.
It was my lot to defend a number of those who had committed murders, some of them murders so foul that there was nothing to say in their behalf. All one could say was in behalf of those whom one would save from committing another murder. But when you have come to know even a murderer, when day after day you have visited him in his cell, and have talked with him, and have seen him laugh and cry, and have had him tell you about his family, and that amazing complexity which he calls his life, when gradually you come to know him, no matter how undeserving he may be in the abstract, he undergoes a strange and subtle metamorphosis; slowly and gradually, without your being aware, he ceases to be a murderer, and becomes a human being, very much like all those about you. Thus, there is no such thing as a human being in the abstract; they are all thoroughly and essentially concrete.
I have wandered far in these speculations, but I hope I have not wandered too far to make it clear that Jones’s point of view was always and invariably the human point of view; he knew no such thing as murderers, or even criminals, or “good” people, or “bad” people, they were all to him men and, indeed, brothers. And if society did not care about them, except in its desire to make way with them, Jones did care, and there were others who cared; the poor cared, the working people cared,--though they might themselves at times give way to the same elemental social rage,--they always endorsed Jones’s leniency whenever they had the opportunity. They had this opportunity at the polls every two years, and they never failed him.
They did not fail him even in that last campaign of his, though every means known to man was tried to win them away from their peculiar allegiance. It was a strange campaign; I suppose there was never another like it in America. As I think of it there come back the recollections of those raw spring nights; we held our municipal elections in the spring in those days, that is, spring as we know it in the region of the Great Lakes. It is not so much spring as it is a final summing-up and recapitulation of winter, a coda to a monstrous meteorological concerto as doleful as the allegro lamentoso of Tschaikovsky’s “Sixth Symphony.” There is nowhere in the world, so far as I know, or care to know, such an abominable manifestation of the meanness of nature; it is meaner than the meanness of human nature, entailing a constant struggle with winds, a perpetual bending to gusts of snow that is rain, or a rain that is hail, with an east wind that blows persistently off Lake Erie for two months, with little stinging barbs of ice on its breath--and then, suddenly, it is summer without any gentle airs at all to introduce its heat.
Jones was not very well that spring; and his throaty ailment was the very one that should have been spared such dreadful exposures as he was subjected to in that campaign. It was in the days before motor cars, and he and I drove about every night from one meeting to another in a little buggy he had, drawn by an old white mare named Molly, whose shedding of her coat was the only vernal sign to be detected anywhere. But Jones was so full of humor that he laughed at nearly everything--even his enemies, whom he never would call enemies. I can see him now--climbing down out of the buggy, carefully blanketing old Molly against the raw blasts, then brushing the white hairs from his front with his enormous hands, and running like a boy up the stairway to the dim little hall in the Polish quarter where the crowd had gathered. The men set up a shout when they saw him, and he leaped on the stage and, without waiting for the chairman to introduce him,--he scorned every convention that obtruded itself,--he leaned over the front of the platform and said:
“What is the Polish word for liberty?”
The crowd of Poles, huddling about a stove in the middle of the hall, their caps on, their pipes going furiously, their bodies covered with the strange garments they had brought with them across the sea, shouted in reply.
“_Wolność!_”
And Jones paused and listened, cocked his head, wrinkled his brows, and said:
“What was that? Say it again!”
Again they shouted it.
“Say it again--once more!” he demanded. And again they shouted it in a splendid chorus. And then----
“Well,” said Golden Rule Jones, “I can’t pronounce it, but it sounds good, and that is what we are after in this campaign.”
Now that I have written it down, I have a feeling that I have utterly failed to give an adequate sense of the entire spontaneity and simplicity with which this was done. It was, of course, tremendously effective as a bit of campaigning, but only because it was so wholly sincere. Five minutes later he was hotly debating with a working man who had interrupted him to accuse him of being unfair to union labor in his shops, and there was no coddling, no truckling, no effort to win or to please on his part, though he would take boundlessly patient pains to explain to anyone who really wanted to know anything about him or his official acts.
He was natural, simple and unspoiled, as naïve as a child, and “except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” He fully realized that the kingdom of heaven is within one’s self; he was not looking for it, or expecting it anywhere outside of himself, certainly he was not expecting it in a political campaign, or in the mere process of being elected to an office. He regarded his office, indeed, only as an opportunity to serve, and he had been in that office long enough to have lost any illusions he may ever have had concerning it; one term will suffice to teach a man that lesson, even though he seek the office again.
He was like an evangelist, in a way, and his meetings were in the broad sense religious, though he had long since left his church, not because its ministers were always condemning him, but for the same reasons that Tolstoy left his church. His evangel was that of liberty. He had written a number of little songs. One of them, set to the tune of an old hymn he had heard in Wales as a boy, had a noble effect when the crowd sang it. It was the _Gad im Deimle_. His wife, who is an accomplished musician, had transposed its minors into majors, and in its strains, as they were sung by the men in his shops,--and there was singing for you!--or by the people in his political meetings, there was all the Welsh love of music, all the Welsh love of liberty, and a high and pure emotion in the chorus:
Ever growing, swiftly flowing, Like a mighty river Sweeping on from shore to shore, Love will rule this wide world o’er.
It was his Welsh blood, this Celtic strain in him, that accounted for much that was in his temperament, his wit, his humor, his instinctive appreciation of art, his contempt for artificial distinctions, his love of liberty, his passionate democracy. Sitting one evening not long ago in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons I saw the great Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, saw him enter and take his seat on the government bench. And as I looked at him I was impressed by his resemblance to someone I had known; there was a strange, haunting likeness, not in any physical characteristic, though there was the same Welsh ruddiness, and the hair was something like--but when Mr. Lloyd George turned and whispered to the prime minister and smiled I started, and said to myself: “It is Jones!”
XXIII
There was something pathetic in that last campaign, the pathos, perhaps, of the last phase. The long years of opposition had begun to tell: there was a strong determination to defeat him. He had not wished to stand again for the office, but, after the Toledo custom, there had been presented to him an informal petition, signed by several thousand citizens, asking him to do so, and he had consented. But when he wrote a statement setting forth his position--it was a document with the strong flavor of his personality in it--the newspapers refused to publish it; some of them would not publish it even as advertising, and he opened his campaign on the post-office corner, standing bare-headed in the March wind, his son Paul blowing a saxophone to attract a crowd. Many of his old supporters were falling away; it seemed for a time that he alone would have to make the campaign without any to speak for him on the stump; far otherwise than in that second campaign, when, after having been counted out in the Republican convention, he had run for the first time independently, a “Man Without a Party,” as he called himself; and thousands, themselves outraged by the treatment his own party had accorded him, in the spirit of fair play had rallied to his standard.
But now things had changed, and an incident which occurred at the beginning of this campaign was significant of the feeling toward him, though in all kindness it most not be told in detail. There was a prominent man in town who had publicly reviled him and criticized him and persecuted him, who had done that which cut him more deeply than all else, that is, he had impugned his motives and questioned his sincerity. In some human hunger for understanding, I suppose, Jones went to this man with his written statement of his position and asked him to read it, merely to read it. The fellow’s answer was to snatch the paper from Jones’s hand and tear it up in his face. It is easy to imagine what a man ordinarily would do in the face of such an amazing insult; surely, if ever, the time had come for the “shotgun and the club.” Mayor Jones was large and powerful, he had been reared in the oil fields, where blows are quick as tempers; he was athletic, always in training, for he took constant physical exercise (one of the counts against him, indeed, was that he slept out of doors on the roof of his back porch, a bit of radicalism in those days, grown perfectly orthodox in these progressive times), and he was a Celt, naturally quick to resent insult, of a temperament prompt to take fire. But he turned away from the fellow, without a word.
He came to my office immediately afterward, and I saw that he was trying hard to master some unusual emotion. I shall never forget him as he sat there, telling me of his experience. After a little while his face broke into that beautiful smile of his, more beautiful than I had ever seen it, and he said:
“Well, I’ve won the greatest victory of my life; I have won at last a victory over myself, over my own nature. I have done what it has always been hardest for me to do.”
“What?” I asked.
He sat in silence for a moment, and then he said:
“You know, it has always seemed to me that the most remarkable thing that was ever said of Jesus was that when he was reviled, he reviled not again. It is the hardest thing in the world to do.”
The struggle over the renewal of the franchise grants to the street railway company had already begun, and the council had attempted to grant it the franchise it wished, renewing its privileges for another twenty-five years. When Mayor Jones vetoed the bill, the council prepared to pass it over his veto, and would have done so that Monday night had it not been for two men--Mayor Jones and Mr. Negley D. Cochran, the editor of the _News-Bee_, a newspaper which has always taken the democratic viewpoint of public questions. Mr. Cochran, with his brilliant gift in the writing of editorials, had called out the whole populace, almost, to attend the meeting of the council and to protest. The demonstration was so far effective that the council was too frightened to pass the street railway ordinance. The attorney for the street railway company was there, and when there was a lull in the noise, he sneered:
“I suppose, Mr. Mayor, that this is an example of government under the Golden Rule.”
“No,” replied Jones in a flash, “it is an example of government under the rule of gold.”
Unless it were because of his interference with the nefarious privileges of a few, one can see no reason why the press and pulpit should have opposed him. What had he done? He had only preached that the fundamental doctrine of Christianity was sound, and, as much as a man may in so complex a civilization, he had tried to practice it. He had taught kindness and tolerance, and pity and mercy; he had visited the sick, and gone to those that were in prison; he had said that all men are free and equal, that they have been endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. He had said that it is wrong to kill people, even in the electric chair, that it is wrong to take from the poor, without giving them in return. He had not said these things in anger, or in bitterness; he had never been personal, he had always been explicit in saying that he, as a part of society, was equally to blame with all the rest for social wrongs. The only textbooks he ever used in his campaigns were the New Testament, the Declaration of Independence, and, of course, his beloved Walt Whitman. And yet the pulpits rang every Sunday with denunciations of him, and the newspapers opposed him. Why was it, because a man endorsed these old doctrines upon which society claims to rest, that society should denounce him?
I think it was because he was so utterly and entirely sincere, and because he believed these things, and tried to put them into practice in his life, and wished them to be more fully incorporated in the life of society. Society will forgive anything in a man, except sincerity. If he be sincere in charity, in pity, in mercy, in sympathy for the outcast, the despised, the imprisoned, all that vast horde of the denied and proscribed, still less will it forgive him, for it knows instinctively that the privileges men have or seek could not exist in a system where these principles were admitted as vital, inspiring force.
There was nothing, of course, for one who believed in the American doctrines to do but to support such a man, and when he appeared to be so utterly without supporters it seemed to be one’s duty more than ever, though I own to having shrunk from such unconventional methods as Jones employed. That meeting at the post-office corner, for instance; someone might laugh, and in the great American self-consciousness and fear of the ridiculous, what was one to do? The opposition, that is, the two old parties, the Republican and Democratic, had nominated excellent men against Jones; the Republican nominee, indeed, Mr. John W. Dowd, was a man to whom I had gone to school, an old and very dear friend of our family, a charming gentleman of cultivated tastes. It was not easy to be in the attitude of opposing him, but my duty seemed clear, and I went into the campaign with Jones, and we spoke together every night.