Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/141



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 jus