Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/223

 to him, and comforts a tortured prisoner with pious exhortations to be patient and submit:

"Item. An occasion for twaddling had come, and this good soul seized it, and twaddled into a man's ear who was fainting on the rack."

Later a sarcastic contrast is drawn between the dinner the official enjoys at home and the convict's gruel he had just ordered diluted.

The first chaplain, well meaning and gentle, is also a failure, through simple inanity:

"Yet Mr. Jones was not a hypocrite nor a monster; he was only a commonplace man—a thing moulded by circumstances instead of moulding them. * * * But at the head of a struggling nation, or in the command of an army in time of war, or at the head of the religious department of a jail, fighting against human wolves, tigers, and foxes, to be commonplace is an iniquity and leads to crime."

On the enlightened officialdom that permits all this, Reade is one with Dickens. When an urgent appeal for investigation is sent to headquarters, the reply is returned that the inspector would reach that place in his normal circuit in six weeks:

"'Six weeks is not long to wait for help in a matter of life and death,' thought the eighty-pounders, the clerks who execute England."

Most unpardonable of all are such cases as Carter,—