Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/177

 The Police-Court Reporter

(From "Midstream")

(American novelist and war-correspondent, born 1878)

When I think of prisons; of the men who send other men there; of chairs of death and hangings, and of all that bring these things about—it comes to me that the City is organized hell; that there is no end to our cruelty and stupidity. I bought from door to door in city streets the stuff that makes murder; I sat in the forenoon under the corrective forces, which were quite as blindly stupid and cruel.

The women I passed in the night, appeared often in the morning. I talked to them in the nights, and heard them weep in the days; I saw them in the nights with the men who judged them in the days. Out of all that evil, there was no voice; out of all the corrective force there was no voice. The City covered us all. I was one and the other. The women thought themselves beasts; the men thought themselves men—and, voiceless between them, the City stood.

The most tragic sentence I ever heard, was from the lips of one of these women I talked with her through the night. She called it her work; she had an ideal about her work. Every turning in her life had been man-directed. She confessed that she had begun with an unabatable passion; that men had found her sensuousness very attractive when it was fresh. She had preserved a certain sweetness; through such stresses that the upper world would never credit. Thousands of men had come to her; all perversions, all obsessions, all mad