Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/60

40 into so separate a treatment of our criminals. We cannot afford to humanise our prisons, while we will not afford to humanise our slums. Again and again, when you appeal for real prison reform, the obstructive argument arises: "Why should we take so much trouble for the criminal, when hundreds of thousands of the honest struggling poor are so much worse off?"

But we have to take trouble anyhow; and the more unintelligently we take trouble the greater is likely to be the cost of our criminals per head to the State. In New York State, America, where Mr. Mott Osborne has been trying to establish the principle of self-government among the prisoners of Sing-Sing, there was actually a danger that (under an extension of the system) the prisons might become self-supporting. And at once trade interests did everything they could to get it condemned; the contractors were afraid of losing their State contracts.

That is just one little glimpse of what we are up against where vested interests are concerned—interests so strongly represented in the legislatures even of "free nations." But we are up against something much bigger than that. We are up against a moral reluctance of the whole community to pronounce the word "Brother." For if the State is going to show a really understanding mind toward the criminal, it has got to show it just as much to the whole social problem of poverty and disease.