Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/294

 of this sentence he shall be taken to a house of penal servitude; all of which is herewith brought to public knowledge.

“Headquarters, Freiburg, 30 September, 1849. “The Commanding General von Hirschfeld.”&emsp;

This monstrous proceeding called forth, even from many of those who did not share Kinkel's political opinions and who disapproved of his acts, expressions of the profoundest indignation. The sentence pronounced by a regular court-martial was called illegal simply because it was not a sentence of death. It was called an “act of grace,” that the king, nominally accepting that so-called illegal sentence of the court-martial, changed the confinement in a fortress into imprisonment in a penitentiary. What was confinement in a fortress? It was imprisonment in a fortified place under military surveillance, which permitted the prisoner to retain all the signs of his civil identity, his name, his clothes, his character as a man, and had treatment on the part of his guards not unworthy of that character—a kind of imprisonment in which he could continue his accustomed mental occupations—imprisonment, to be sure, but not disgrace, not degradation to the level of the common felon. And what was confinement in a house of penal servitude? Imprisonment in an institution intended for the ordinary criminal, where the prisoner was on the same level with the thief, the forger, the highwayman; where his head was shorn, his ordinary dress exchanged for the striped jacket, where he lost his name and received in its stead a number, where, in case of a breach of disciplinary rules, he was punished with flogging, where he had to abandon his whole mental life to do menial labor of the lowest kind. And this was called an act of grace! It was not to mitigate a sentence of death, because there was no such sentence,