cause to give full discussion to this subject later on, I will only touch
it here; but the fact is that we imprison malefactors or law-breakers (not
always synonymous by any means, since there are a score of artificial
crimes for one real one) not because we believe that to be the right thing
for them, but simply by reason of our inability to imagine anything more
suitable and sane. Moreover, there are the steel and stone jail buildings
themselves, which cost much in money and more in graft; what shall be done
with them? The wardens and guards, too--all the fantastic appanages of
these institutions--are they to be cast incontinently upon a frigid world?

The law, in short, lags leagues and ages behind the moral sense of the
community, so encumbered with its baggage train that it can never fetch up
lost ground. We know perfectly well that the only punishments that can
improve men are punishments of conscience from within, and of love from
without--which is practically the same thing; and that punishment by
imprisonment is punishment by hate in fact, whatever it may be in theory,
and therefore diabolical and destructive. It can only inflame and multiply
the evils it pretends to heal; and this is no theory, but a certified and
established truth. Everybody who has been through it, knows it, everybody
who dares to think may know it.

The whole thing is ridiculous, a huge and clumsy absurdity, stepping on
its own feet and smelling to heaven. And here in our America it is to-day
worse than in Italy or Russia, in some respects, because we know better
that it is wrong, and therefore try to hide its enormities from open
daylight. We lie and dissimulate about it, investigators whitewash it,
conservative citizens deprecate exaggeration about it, wardens and
guards--some of them, not all--are more wicked in their secret practises
with convicts than they would be if they did not know that they would be
stopped if the community knew of them. And it was inevitable that only a