Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/94



The newspapers were so extravagant in their abuse of Governor Altgeld for his pardon of the anarchists that one not knowing the facts might have received the impression that the Governor had already pardoned most of the prisoners in the penitentiary, and would presently pardon those that remained, provided the crimes they had committed, or were said to have committed, had been heinous enough. The fact was that he issued no more pardons, proportionately at least, than the governors who preceded him, since notwithstanding the incessant grinding of society's machinery of vengeance the populations of prisons grow with the populations outside of them.

But partizanship was intense in those days; and the fact that Governor Altgeld was responsible for such a hegira from the Capitol at Springfield as Colonel McKenzie had longed to behold in the Capitol at Frankfort exacerbated the bitter feeling. The sentiment thus created, however, did increase the hopes of convicts, and the Governor was continually importuned by their friends—those of them that had friends, which was apt to be a pitifully small percentage of the whole number—to give them back their liberty. A few weeks after the pardons had been issued to the anarchists, George Brennan of Braidwood, then a clerk in the State House, told me a moving story of a young man of his acquaintance, who was then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet.