Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/143

 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.