Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/284

 they had homes, or in some manner finding for them a way out of their troubles. And I shall always remember with a pleasure that there is such good in humanity after all, when I recall that boy in the workhouse whom a father in a far-off city was seeking. The boy was working with other prisoners on a bit of public work in one of the parks that winter morning, and after he had secured a parole, the Chief drove out to the park, and got the boy, clothed him with garments he had bought himself, bought a railway ticket and sent the boy away to Chicago and his home. If he had waited until the lad was brought in at night, he explained, the old man would have lost a whole day of his son's companionship!

That is what I mean when I say that a government should be made human, or part of what I mean; such incidents are specifically noticeable because they stand out in such contrast against the hard surface of that inhuman institutionalism the reformers with their everlasting repressions and denials and negatives are trying to make so much harder. Charley Stevens, the old circus man whom I appointed as Superintendent of the Workhouse, very successfully applied the some principle to the management of that institution, which he conducted with his humor and quaint philosophy more than by any code of rules. He usually referred to his prison as the Temple of Thought, and he abolished from it all the marks of a prison, such as stripes and close cropped polls, and all that sort of thing. He was criticized, of course, since the conventional notion is that pris