Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/91

 failing to discover and obtain where hope has told them such things were, they seek for it, at last, in the horrid belly of social damnation. Their motto, 'A short life and a merry is better than a long and lonely one!' tells too truly the story of many a poor girl's heart. My God, my God, have mercy on the lonely ones! for thou alone knowest that many and many a sin against society and thee is committed by such and others, not of settled purpose of ill-doing, but because urged on by sheer despair. Many a crime has been committed from a mental aberration caused by the horrors of loneliness. Human tribunals take but little, if any, account of a criminal's antecedents and surroundings. He or she is judged too harshly, in the main; and thus it will be until mankind learns a deeper lesson of wisdom than yet presides over its courts and councils. Only God can truly know a heart; and whilst this fact is so clear, it is better to err on charity's side, if error must enter into the account at all. In prison there is at least a community of punishment, and the sense of this goes far to relieve the tedium of incarceration; for, bad though it be, many a one has found it preferable to the perpetual and dreadful solitude to which liberty condemned them.

Why are there such vast numbers of deserted wives and husbands?—so many ruined and cheerless hearths and homes? The answer is: because neither of the heads of the household has even dreamed that the companion had rights which the other was bound to respect; and the greatest of these rights, and the one most disregarded, is the right of being loved by that other—loved tenderly, truly, kindly, humanly. The