Chapter IV: Book III: The Outcast (1)

The life of the underworld, of those thrown upon the scrap-heap of the modern industrial machine; vivid and powerful passages portraying the lives of tramps, criminals and prostitutes.

Not Guilty

BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD

(See page 66)

In defending the Bottom Dog I do not deal with hard science only; but with the dearest faiths, the oldest wrongs and the most awful relationships of the great human family, for whose good I strive and to whose judgment I appeal. Knowing, as I do, how the hard-working and hard-playing public shun laborious thinking and serious writing, and how they hate to have their ease disturbed or their prejudices handled rudely, I still make bold to undertake this task, because of the vital nature of the problems I shall probe.

The case for the Bottom Dog should touch the public heart to the quick, for it affects the truth of our religions, the justice of our laws and the destinies of our children and our children's children. Much golden eloquence has been squandered in praise of the successful and the good; much stern condemnation has been vented upon the wicked. I venture now to plead for those of our poor brothers and sisters who are accursed of Christ and rejected of men.

Hitherto all the love, all the honors, all the applause of this world, and all the rewards of heaven, have been lavished on the fortunate and the strong; and the portion of the unfriended Bottom Dog, in his adversity and weakness, has been curses, blows, chains, the gallows and everlasting damnation. I shall plead, then, for those who are loathed and tortured and branded as the sinful and unclean; for those who have hated us and wronged us, and have been wronged and hated by us. I shall defend them for right's sake, for pity's sake and for the benefit of society and the race. For these also are of our flesh, these also have erred and gone astray, these also are victims of an inscrutable and relentless Fate.

If it concerns us that the religions of the world are childish dreams or nightmares; if it concerns us that our penal laws and moral codes are survivals of barbarism and fear; if it concerns us that our most cherished and venerable ideas of our relations to God and to each other are illogical and savage, then the case for the Bottom Dog concerns us nearly.

If it moves us to learn that disease may be prevented, that ruin may be averted, that broken hearts and broken lives may be made whole; if it inspires us to hear how beauty may be conjured out of loathsomeness and glory out of shame; how waste may be turned to wealth and death to life, and despair to happiness, then the case for the Bottom Dog is a case to be well and truly tried.

Moleskin Joe[A]

[A] By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.

(_From "Children of the Dead End"_)

BY PATRICK MACGILL

(See pages 32, 47)

'Twas towards the close of a fine day on the following summer that we were at work in the dead end of a cutting, Moleskin and I, when I, who had been musing on the quickly passing years, turned to Moleskin and quoted a line from the Bible.

"Our years pass like a tale that is told," I said.

"Like a tale that is told damned bad," answered my mate, picking stray crumbs of tobacco from his waistcoat pocket and stuffing them into the heel of his pipe. "It's a strange world, Flynn. Here today, gone tomorrow; always waiting for a good time comin' and knowin' that it will never come. We work with one mate this evenin', we beg for crumbs with another on the mornin' after. It's a bad life, ours, and a poor one, when I come to think of it, Flynn."

"It is all that," I assented heartily.

"Look at me!" said Joe, clenching his fists and squaring his shoulders. "I must be close on forty years, maybe on the graveyard side of it, for all I know. I've horsed it ever since I can mind; I've worked like a mule for years, and what have I to show for it all today, matey? Not the price of an ounce of tobacco! A midsummer scarecrow wouldn't wear the duds that I've to wrap around my hide! A cockle-picker that has no property only when the tide is out is as rich as I am. Not the price of an ounce of tobacco! There is something wrong with men like us, surely, when we're treated like swine in a sty for all the years of our life. It's not so bad here, but it's in the big towns that a man can feel it most. No person cares for the like of us, Flynn. I've worked nearly ev'rywhere; I've helped to build bridges, dams, houses, ay, and towns! When they were finished, what happened? Was it for us--the men who did the buildin'--to live in the homes that we built, or walk through the streets that we laid down? No earthly chance of that! It was always, 'Slide! we don't need you any more,' and then a man like me, as helped to build a thousand houses big as castles, was hellish glad to get the shelter of a ten-acre field and a shut-gate between me and the winds of night. I've spent all my money, have I? It's bloomin' easy to spend all that fellows like us can earn. When I was in London I saw a lady spend as much on fur to decorate her carcase with as would keep me in beer and tobacco for all the rest of my life. And that same lady would decorate a dog in ribbons and fol-the-dols, and she wouldn't give me the smell of a crust when I asked her for a mouthful of bread. What could you expect from a woman who wears the furry hide of some animal round her neck, anyhow? We are not thought as much of as dogs, Flynn. By God! them rich buckos do eat an awful lot. Many a time I crept up to a window just to see them gorgin' themselves."

"I have looked in at windows too," I said.

"Most men do," answered Joe. "You've heard of old Moses goin' up the hill to have a bit peep at the Promist Land. He was just like me and you, Flynn, wantin' to have a peep at the things which he'd never lay his claws on."

"Those women who sit half-naked at the table have big appetites," I said.

"They're all gab and guts, like young crows," said Moleskin. "And they think more of their dogs than they do of men like me and you. I'm an Antichrist!"

"A what?"

"One of them sort of fellows as throws bombs at kings."

"You mean an Anarchist."

"Well, whatever they are, I'm one. What is the good of kings, of fine-feathered ladies, of churches, of anything in the country, to men like me and you?"

The Carter and the Carpenter[A]

[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.

(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)

BY JACK LONDON

(See page 62)

The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved upper lip, I should have taken in the United States for anything from a master workman to a well-to-do farmer. The Carpenter--well, I should have taken him for a carpenter. He looked it, lean and wiry, with shrewd, observant eyes, and hands that had grown twisted to the handles of tools through forty-seven years' work at the trade. The chief difficulty with these men was that they were old, and that their children, instead of growing up to take care of them, had died. Their years had told on them, and they had been forced out of the whirl of industry by the younger and stronger competitors who had taken their places.

These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse. Not much of a show, they thought, but to chance it was all that remained to us. It was Poplar, or the streets and night. Both men were anxious for a bed, for they were "about gone," as they phrased it. The Carter, fifty-eight years of age, had spent the last three nights without shelter or sleep, while the Carpenter, sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London's streets? Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to "move on." You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley, or dark passage-way, and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is a law of the powers that be that you shall be routed out.

But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer.

Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me. And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London Town this night. Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?

I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter. Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and there are tens of thousands of people abroad on it. I tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and succeeded in making them believe, they took me for a "seafaring man," who had spent his money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no unusual occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and was temporarily broke while looking for a ship. This accounted for my ignorance of English ways in general and casual wards in particular, and my curiosity concerning the same.

The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he told me that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter, lean and hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the breeze, swung on in a lone and tireless stride which reminded me strongly of the plains wolf or coyote. Both kept their eyes upon the pavement as they walked and talked, and every now and then one or the other would stoop and pick something up, never missing his stride the while. I thought it was cigar and cigarette stumps they were collecting, and for some time took no notice. Then I did notice.

_From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray crumbs of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen._

These two men talked. They were not fools, they were merely old. And, naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal, they talked of bloody revolution. They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and madmen would talk. And who shall blame them? In spite of my three good meals that day, and the snug bed I could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and my evolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis of things--in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk rot with them or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not of their sort are revolutions bred. And when they are dead and dust, which will be shortly, other fools will talk bloody revolution as they gather offal from the spittle-drenched sidewalk along Mile End Road to Poplar Workhouse.

BY HORACE GREELEY.

(American editor, 1811-1872; prominent abolitionist)

Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night.

The Hunt for the Job

(_From "Pay Envelopes"_)

BY JAMES OPPENHEIM

(See page 45)

The Hunt began early next morning--the Hunt for the Job. The hunter, however, is really the hunted. Now and then he bares his skin to the unthinking blows of the world, and runs off to hide himself in the crowd. You may see him bobbing along the turbulent man-currents of Broadway, a tide-tossed derelict in the thousand-foot shadows of the sky-scrapers. The mob about him is lusty with purpose, each unit making his appointed place, the morning rush to work bearing the stenographer to her machine, the broker to his ticker, the ironworker to his sky-dangling beam. In the mighty machine of the city each has his place, each is provided for, each gets the glow of sharing in the world's work. The morning rush, splashed at street crossings with the gold of the Eastern sun, is rippled with fresh eyes and busy lips. They are all in the machine. But our young man crouching in a corner of the crowded car is not of these; slinking down Broadway he is aware that the machine has thrown him out and he cannot get in. He is an exile in the midst of his own people. The sense of loneliness and inferiority eats the heart out of the breast; the good of life is gone; the blackness soaks across the city and into his home, his love, his soul.

Some go bitter and are for throwing bombs; some despair and are for wiping themselves away; some--the rank and file--are for fighting to the last ditch. Peter pendulated between all three of these moods. In ordinary times he would have been all fight; in these hard times, drenched with the broadcast hopelessness of men, he knew he was foredoomed to defeat. Only a miracle could save him.

Trudging up Seventy-ninth Street to Third Avenue, fresh with Annie's kiss and the baby's pranks, he had the last bit of daring dashed out of him by a strange throng of men. Before a small Hebrew synagogue, packed in the deep area were forty unemployed workers, jammed crowd-thick against the windows and gate. It was fresh weather, not cold, yet the men shivered. Their bodies had for long been unwarmed by sufficient food or clothing; there was a grayness about them as of famished wolves; their lips and fingers were blue; they were unshaved and frowzy with some vile sleeping place. Hard times had blotched the city with a myriad of such groups. And as Peter stopped and imagined himself driven at last among them, he saw a burly fellow emerge from the house and begin handing out charity bowls of hot coffee and charity bread. Peter, independent American workman, was stung at the sight; the souls of these workers were somehow being outraged; they were eating out of the hands of the comfortable, like so many gutter dogs.

The rest of the morning Peter dared now and then to present himself at an office to ask work. At some places he tried boldness, at others meekness, and at last he begged, "For God's sake, I have a wife and baby--" He met with various receptions at the hands of clerks, office boys, and bosses. A few were sorry, some turned their backs, the rest hurried him out. Each refusal, each "not wanted in the scheme of things," shot him out into the streets, stripped of another bit of self-reliance. In spite of himself, he began to feel his poor appearance, his drooping lip, his broken purpose. He was a failure and the world could not use him. He hardly dared to look a man in the eyes, to lift his voice above a whisper, to make a demand, to dare a refusal. He slunk home at last like a cowed and beaten animal.

The Unemployable

(_From "The Workers"_)

BY WALTER A. WYCKOFF

(A professor in Princeton University who went out and lived for long periods as a laborer, in order to know the facts of industry at first hand)

Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity. One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I overheard, early one morning, at a factory gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew, who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to support. He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater's den, barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.

The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outline of the bones. Pitiful beyond words were his efforts to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no mortal tongue can speak.

The Bread Line

BY BERTON BRALEY

(Contemporary American poet)

Well, here they are--they stand and stamp and shiver
Waiting their food from some kind stranger hand,
Their weary limbs with eagerness a-quiver
Hungry and heartsick in a bounteous land.

"Beggars and bums?" Perhaps, and largely worthless.
Shaky with drink, unlovely, craven, low,
With obscene tongues and hollow laughter mirthless;
But who shall give them scorn for being so?

Yes, here they are--with gaunt and pallid faces,
With limbs ill-clad and fingers stiff and blued,
Shuffling and stamping on their pavement places,
Waiting and watching for their bit of food.

We boast of vast achievements and of power,
Of human progress knowing no defeat,
Of strange new marvels every day and hour--
And here's the bread line in the wintry street!

Ten thousand years of war and peace and glory,
Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,
Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams;

Ten thousand years replete with every wonder,
Of empires risen and of empires dead;
Yet still, while wasters roll in swollen plunder,
These broken men must stand in line--for bread!

The Unemployed Problem

(_From "Past and Present"_)

BY THOMAS CARLYLE

(See pages 31, 74)

And truly this first practical form of the Sphinx-question, inarticulately and so audibly put there, is one of the most impressive ever asked in the world. "Behold us here, so many thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every hour. We are right willing and able to work; and on the Planet Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many. We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead us,--by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of Time? Or if you declare that you cannot lead us? And expect that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of starvation? What is it you expect of us? What is it you mean to do with us?" This question, I say, has been put in the hearing of all Britain; and will be again put, and ever again, till some answer be given it.

An Answer

BY WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

(Ex-president of the United States; born 1857)

"What is a man to do who is starving, and cannot find work?"

"God knows."

The Parish Workhouse

BY GEORGE CRABBE

(See page 29)

Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapors flagging play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and--far the happiest they!--
The moping idiot and the madman gay.

Here too the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man:
Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide,
And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride imbitters what it can't deny.

Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who press the downy couch while slaves advance
With timid eye, to read the distant glance;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;
Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain and that alone can cure:
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would ye bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?

BY KENKŌ HOSHI

(Japanese Buddhist priest of the Fourteenth Century)

It is desirable for a ruler that no man should suffer from cold and hunger under his rule. Man cannot maintain his standard of morals when he has no ordinary means of living.

The Bread of Affliction

(_From "Children of the Ghetto"_)

BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL

(English poet and novelist, born 1864; has written with tenderness and charm of the struggles of Judaism in contact with modern commercialism)

At half-past five the stable-doors were thrown open, and the crowd pressed through a long, narrow white-washed stone corridor into a barn-like compartment, with a white-washed ceiling traversed by wooden beams. Within this compartment, and leaving but a narrow circumscribing border, was a sort of cattle-pen, into which the paupers crushed, awaiting amid discomfort and universal jabber the divine moment. The single jet of gas-light depending from the ceiling flared upon the strange simian faces, and touched them into a grotesque picturesqueness that would have delighted Doré.

They felt hungry, these picturesque people; their near and dear ones were hungering at home. Voluptuously savoring in imagination the operation of the soup, they forgot its operation as a dole in aid of wages; were unconscious of the grave economical possibilities of pauperization and the rest, and quite willing to swallow their independence with the soup. Even Esther, who had read much, and was sensitive, accepted unquestioningly the theory of the universe that was held by most people about her, that human beings were distinguished from animals in having to toil terribly for a meagre crust, but that their lot was lightened by the existence of a small and semi-divine class called _Takeefim_, or rich people, who gave away what they didn't want. How these rich people came to be, Esther did not inquire; they were as much a part of the constitution of things as clouds and horses. The semi-celestial variety was rarely to be met with. It lived far away from the Ghetto, and a small family of it was said to occupy a whole house. Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or impressive broad-cloth, and radiating an indefinable aroma of super-humanity, sometimes came to the school, preceded by the beaming Head Mistress; and then all the little girls rose and curtseyed, and the best of them, passing as average members of the class, astonished the semi-divine persons by their intimate acquaintance with the topography of the Pyrenees and the disagreements of Saul and David, the intercourse of the two species ending in effusive smiles and general satisfaction. But the dullest of the girls was alive to the comedy, and had a good-humored contempt for the unworldliness of the semi-divine persons, who spoke to them as if they were not going to recommence squabbling, and pulling one another's hair, and copying one another's sums, and stealing one another's needles, the moment the semi-celestial backs were turned.

RYAN WALKER

(_American Socialist cartoonist, born 1870_)]

ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE

(_American sculptor, born 1878_)]

No. 5 John Street

BY RICHARD WHITEING

(English author and journalist, born 1840. The volume here quoted is one of the most amazing pictures of slum-life ever penned)

After midnight the gangs return in carousal from the gin shops, the more thoughtful of them with stored liquor for the morning draft. Now it is three stages of man--no more: man gushing, confiding, uplifted, as he feels the effect of the lighter fumes; disputatious, quarrelsome, as the heavier mount in a second brew of hell; raging with wrath and hate, as the very dregs send their emanations to the tortured brain.

The embrace, the wrangle, and the blow--this is the order of succession. Till one--to mark it by the clock--we sing, "'Art to 'art an' 'and to 'and." At about one forty-five you may expect the tribal row between the gangs, who prey on one another for recreation, and on society for a living. Our brutes read the current gospel of the survival of the fittest in their own way, and they dimly apprehend that mankind is still organized as a predatory horde. The ever-open door brings us much trouble from the outside. The unlighted staircase is a place of rendezvous, and, not unfrequently, of deadly quarrel, in undertones of concentrated fury, between wretches who seek seclusion for the work of manslaughter. Our latest returning inmate, the other night, stumbled over the body of a woman not known at No. 5. She had been kicked to death within sight and sound of lodgers who, believing it to be a matrimonial difference, held interference to be no business of theirs.

The first thud of war between the "Hooligans" is generally for two sharp. The seconds set to, along with their principals, as in the older duel. For mark that in most things we are as our betters were just so many centuries ago, and are simply belated with our flint age. And now our shapelier waves of sound break into a mere foam of oath and shriek. At times there is an interval of silence more awful than the tumult; and you may know that the knife is at its silent work, and that the whole meaner conflict is suspended for an episode of tragedy. If it is a hospital case, it closes the celebration. If it is not, the entertainment probably dies out in a slanging match between two of the fair; and the unnamable in invective and vituperation rises, as in blackest vapor, from our pit to the sky. At this, every room that holds a remnant of decency closes its window, and all withdraw, except, perhaps, the little boys and girls, who are beginning to pair according to the laws of the ooze and of the slime....

Night in the Slums[A]

[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.

(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)

BY JACK LONDON

(See pages 62, 125)

I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my "seafaring" clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for the creatures of prey that prowled up and down. At times, between keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and tear and gripe and rend. When they spring upon their human prey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body till the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor sentiment, and they will kill for half a sovereign, without fear or favor....

The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist. But they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle. And woe the day when England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied men are on the firing line! For on that day they will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and the people of the West End will see them, as the dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another, "Whence come they?" "Are they men?"

But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie. They were only here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like grey shadows along the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they spring were everywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every boozing den, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, and tousled, leering and gibbering, overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful to look upon.

And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses, the living deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step they took and every breath they drew. And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and watched it all....

The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labor. If this is the best that civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss.

A Night's Lodging

BY MAXIM GORKY

(A true voice of the Russian masses, born 1868; by turns peddler, scullery-boy, baker's assistant and tramp, he became all at once the most widely known of Russian writers. In this play he has portrayed the misery of the outcasts of his country. The scene is in the cellar of an inn, the haunt of thieves and tramps. Luka, the aged pilgrim, is talking to a young girl)

LUKA:--Treat everyone with friendliness--injure no one.

NATASHA:--How good you are, grandfather! How is it that you are so good?

LUKA:--I am good, you say. Nyah--if it is true, all right. But you see, my girl--there must be some one to be good. We must have pity on mankind. Christ, remember, had pity for us all and so taught us. Have pity when there is still time, believe me, that is right. I was once, for example, employed as a watchman, at a country place which belonged to an engineer, not far from the city of Tomsk, in Siberia. The house stood in the middle of the forest, an out-of-the-way location; and it was winter and I was all alone in the country house. It was beautiful there--magnificent! And once--I heard them scrambling up!

NATASHA:--Thieves?

LUKA:--Yes. They crept higher, and I took my rifle and went outside. I looked up--two men, opening a window, and so busy that they did not see anything of me at all. I cried to them: Hey, there, get out of that! And would you think it, they fell on me with a hand ax! I warned them. Halt, I cried, or else I fire! Then I aimed first at one and then at the other. They fell on their knees saying, Pardon us! I was pretty hot--on account of the hand ax, you remember. You devils, I cried, I told you to clear out and you didn't! And now, I said, one of you go into the brush and get a switch. It was done. And now, I commanded, one of you stretch out on the ground, and the other thrash him. And so they whipped each other at my command. And when they had each had a sound beating, they said to me: Grandfather, said they, for the sake of Christ give us a piece of bread. We haven't a bite in our bodies. They, my daughter, were the thieves who had fallen upon me with the hand ax. Yes, they were a pair of splendid fellows. I said to them, If you had asked for bread! Then they answered: We had gotten past that. We had asked and asked, and nobody would give us anything. Endurance was worn out. Nyah--and so they remained with me the whole winter. One of them, Stephen by name, liked to take the rifle and go into the woods. And the other, Jakoff, was constantly ill, always coughing. The three of us watched the place, and when spring came, they said, Farewell, grandfather, and went away--to Russia.

NATASHA:--Were they convicts, escaping?

LUKA:--They were fugitives--they had left their colony. A pair of splendid fellows. If I had not had pity on them--who knows what would have happened? They might have killed me. Then they would be taken to court again, put in prison, sent back to Siberia--why all that? You can learn nothing good in prison, nor in Siberia. But a man, what can he not learn!

The Menagerie

(_Night in a County Workhouse_)

BY UPTON SINCLAIR

Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,
Come from your couches soft, your perfumed halls,
Come watch with me throughout the weary hours.
Here are there sounds to thrill your jaded nerves,
Such as the cave-men, your forefathers, heard,
Crouching in forests of primeval night;
Here tier on tier in steel-barred cages pent
The beasts ye breed and hunt throughout the world.
Hark to that snore--some beast that slumbers deep;
Hark to that roar--some beast that dreams of blood;
Hark to that moan--some beast that wakes and weeps;
And then in sudden stillness mark the sound--
Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide!

Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,
Come keep the watch with me; this show is yours.
Behold the source of all your joy and pride,
The beasts ye harness fast and set to draw
The chariots of your pageantry and pomp!
It is their blood ye shed to make your feasts,
It is their treadmill that moves all your world.
Come gather now, and think how it will be
When God shall send his flaming angel down
And break these bars--so hath he done of yore,
So doeth he to lords and ladies grand--
And loose these beasts to raven in your streets!

A Sentiment on Social Reform

BY EUGENE V. DEBS

(American locomotive engineer; born 1855; president of his union, and later the best known of American Socialist lecturers)

While there is a lower class, I am in it.
While there is a criminal element, I am of it.
While there is a soul in jail, I am not free.

The "Solitary"

(_From "My Life in Prison"_)

BY DONALD LOWRIE

(The writer of this picture of prison life, after serving a sentence of fifteen years in San Quentin, has become one of the leaders in the prison reform movement in California)

He was a thin young man of medium height, with long, straggly blonde hair and beard. He was garbed in a ragged suit of dirty stripes. His steel-gray eyes blinked as though the light hurt them, and yet they were very alert, and there was a defiance, an indomitableness in their depths. They protruded slightly, as the eyes of persons who have suffered so frequently do. The lines radiating from the corners bespoke mental as well as physical distress, as did the spasmodic twitching of his mouth. His skin was akin to the color of a thirsty road and his garments looked as though he had not had them off for months--the knees and elbows bulged and the frayed edges of the coat curled under. I was conscious of a warring within me. I had not yet learned who he was, and still I knew I was gazing at a human creature who had been through hell....

"Treat Morrell right," admonished the lieutenant as he withdrew from the room and left us together.

Morrell! The notorious "Ed" Morrell, about whom I had heard so much, and who had been confined in the "incorrigibles" for five years!

The majority of the prisoners, as well as the freemen, believed him innocent of the offence with which he had been charged and for which he had been subjected to such awful punishment. So this man was Ed Morrell! No wonder I had been agitated....

He arose from the chair and stood dejectedly while I took the necessary measurements, and then I led the way to the back room, where the bathtub was located. I started to return to the front room for the purpose of marking his clothes, but he stopped me.

"Wait a minute," he urged. "Wait and see what a man looks like after five years in hell. I was a husky when I went up there, hard as nails and full of red blood, but look at me now."

While speaking, he had dropped off the outer rags, and a moment after stood nude beside the tub of warm water. The enormity of what he had suffered could not have been more forcibly demonstrated. His limbs were horribly emaciated, the knee, elbow, and shoulder bones stood out like huge knots through the drawn and yellow skin, while his ribs reminded me of the carcass of a sheep hanging in front of a butcher's establishment. The hollows between them were deep and dark. I thought of the picture I had seen of the famine-stricken wretches of India....

"What are those scars on your back?" I asked as he sank onto his knees in the water.

"Scars," he laughed, sardonically. "Scars? Those ain't scars. They're only the marks where the devil prodded me. I was in the jacket, cinched up so that I was breathing from my throat when he came and tried to make me 'come through,' and when I sneered at him he kicked me over the kidneys. I don't know how many times he kicked; the first kick took my breath away and I saw black, but after they took me out of the sack I couldn't get up, and I had running sores down here for months afterwards. I ain't right down there now; I've got a bad rupture, and sometimes it feels as if there was a knife being twisted around inside of me. It wouldn't be so bad if they'd got me right, but to give a man a deal like that dead wrong is hell, let me tell you...."

As we stepped into the barber shop there was a noticeable air of expectancy. The word had passed through the prison that the new warden had released "Ed" Morrell from "solitary." All but one of the half dozen barbers were strangers to Morrell. They had been committed to the prison after his siege of solitary confinement had begun. The one exception was old Frank, a lifer with twenty years' service behind him....

He took a step backward and a hush fell over the little group.

"With all due respect, Ed, you're the finest living picture of Jesus Christ that I've ever seen, so help me God. And, Ed," he added, hastily, his voice breaking, "we're all Jesus Christs, if we'd only remember it."

Prisons

BY EMMA GOLDMAN

(Anarchist lecturer and writer; born in Russia, 1869)

Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less shipwrecked crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence. It is not at all an unusual thing to find men and women who have spent half their lives--nay, almost their entire existence--in prison. I know a woman on Blackwell's Island, who has been in and out thirty-eight times; and through a friend I learn that a young boy of seventeen, whom he had nursed and cared for in the Pittsburgh penitentiary, had never known the meaning of liberty. From the reformatory to the penitentiary had been the path of this boy's life, until, broken in body, he died a victim of social revenge. These personal experiences are substantiated by extensive data giving overwhelming proof of the futility of prisons as a means of deterrence or reform.

The Prison System

(_From "Resurrection"_)

BY LEO TOLSTOY

(See pages 88, 110)

"It is just as if a problem had been set: to find the best, the surest means, of depraving the greatest number of people!" thought Nehlúdof, while getting an insight into the deeds that were being done in the prisons and halting-stations. Every year hundreds of thousands were brought to the highest pitch of depravity, and when completely depraved they were liberated to spread broadcast the moral disease they had caught in prison.

In the prisons of Tumén, Ekáterinburg, Tomsk, and at the halting-stations, Nehlúdof saw how successfully the object society seemed to have set itself was attained. Ordinary simple men holding the Russian peasant social and Christian morality lost this conception, and formed a new, prison, one founded chiefly on the idea that any outrage to or violation of human beings is justifiable, if it seems profitable. After living in prison these people became conscious with the whole of their being that, judging by what was happening to themselves, all those moral laws of respect and sympathy for others which the Church and the moral teachers preach, were set aside in real life, and that therefore they, too, need not keep these laws. Nehlúdof noticed this effect of prison life in all the prisoners he knew. He learnt, during his journey, that tramps who escape into the marshes will persuade comrades to escape with them, and will then kill them and feed on their flesh. He saw a living man who was accused of this, and acknowledged the act. And the most terrible thing was, that this was not a solitary case of cannibalism, but that the thing was continually recurring.

Only by a special cultivation of vice such as was carried on in these establishments, could a Russian be brought to the state of these tramps, who excelled Nietzsche's newest teaching, holding everything allowable and nothing forbidden, and spreading this teaching, first among the convicts and then among the people in general.

The only explanation of what was being done was that it aimed at the prevention of crime, at inspiring awe, at correcting offenders, and at dealing out to them "lawful vengeance," as the books said. But in reality nothing in the least resembling these results came to pass. Instead of vice being put a stop to, it only spread farther; instead of being frightened, the criminals were encouraged (many a tramp returned to prison of his own free will); instead of correction, every kind of vice was systematically instilled; while the desire for vengeance, far from being weakened by the measures of Government, was instilled into the people to whom it was not natural.

"Then why is it done?" Nehlúdof asked himself, and could find no answer.

FROM THE PSALMS

He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary ... to hear the sighing of the prisoner; to loose those that are appointed to death.

Ballade of Misery and Iron

BY GEORGE CARTER

(Some years ago the _Century Magazine_ received several poems from an inmate of the State penitentiary of Minnesota. Upon investigation it was found that the poet, a young Englishman, had been driven to stealing by starvation. Subsequently his pardon was procured)

Haggard faces and trembling knees,
Eyes that shine with a weakling's hate,
Lips that mutter their blasphemies,
Murderous hearts that darkly wait:
These are they who were men of late,
Fit to hold a plow or a sword.
If a prayer this wall may penetrate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!

Poets sing of life at the lees
In tender verses and delicate;
Of tears and manifold agonies--
Little they know of what they prate.
Out of this silence, passionate
Sounds a deeper, a wilder chord.
If sound be heard through the narrow grate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!

Hark, that wail of the distant breeze,
Piercing ever the close-barred gate,
Fraught with torturing memories
Of eyes that kindle and lips that mate.
Ah, by the loved ones desolate,
Whose anguish never can pen record,
If thou be truly compassionate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!

L'ENVOI

These are pawns that the hand of Fate
Careless sweeps from the checker-board.
Thou that know'st if the game be straight,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!

BY KENKŌ HOSHI

(See page 135)

So long as people, being ill-governed, suffer from hunger, criminals will never disappear. It is extremely unkind to punish those who, being sufferers from hunger, are compelled to violate laws.

The Red Robe

BY EUGÈNE BRIEUX

(French dramatist, born 1858; author of a series of powerful dramas exposing the sources of corruption in French social, political and business life. The present play has for its theme the law as a snare for the feet of the poor and friendless. The principal character is a government prosecuting attorney, driven by professional ambition and jealousy, and the nagging of his wife and daughters. A murder has been committed, and the newspapers are scolding because the criminal has not been caught. Suspicion falls upon a poor wretch of a smuggler, who is hounded and bullied into incriminating himself. At the last moment, when the case is in the hands of the jury, the prosecuting attorney's conscience is troubled, and he realizes that he is sending an innocent man to the gallows)

MME. VAGRET:--But--these circumstances, how could you have ignored them up to now?

VAGRET (_his head bowed_):--You think I have ignored them?--Would I dare to tell you all? I am not a bad man, you'd grant? I wouldn't desire that anyone should suffer through my fault. Well!--Oh! but how it shames me to confess it, to say it aloud, after having confessed it to myself! Well! When I studied this case, I had got it so fixed in my head, in advance, that this fellow Etchepare was a criminal, that when an argument in his favor presented itself to my mind, I kept it away from me, shrugging my shoulders. As to the facts about which I am telling you, and from which suddenly my doubt has been born--at first I sought only to prove to myself that these facts were false, taking, in the testimony of the witnesses, only what would combat their exactness, repelling all the rest, with a frightful _naiveté_ in my bad faith.--And in the end, to dissipate my last scruples, I said to myself, like you: "It is the affair of the defense, not mine!" Listen and see to just what point the exercise of the profession of prosecutor renders us unjust and cruel; I had, myself--I had a thrill of joy at first, when I saw that the judge, in his questioning, left in the shadow the sum of those little facts. There, that is the trade! you understand, the trade! Ah! poor creatures that we are, poor creatures!

MME. VAGRET:--Possibly the jury may not condemn him?

VAGRET:--It will condemn him.

MME. VAGRET:--Or that it will admit some extenuating circumstances.

VAGRET:--No. I urged them too emphatically against this. Was I not ardent enough, my God! violent enough?

MME. VAGRET:--That's true. Why should you have developed your argument with so much passion?

VAGRET:--Ah! why! why! Long before the session, it was so well understood by everyone that the accused was the culprit! And then, everyone was trying to rouse my dander, trying to make me drunk! I was the spokesman for humanity, I had to reassure the country, bring peace to the family--I don't know what all else! My first demands were comparatively moderate. But when I saw that famous advocate make the jury weep, I thought I was lost; I felt that the case was getting away from me. Contrary to my custom, I made a reply. When I stood up again, I was like a combattant who goes to meet defeat, and who fights with desperation. From that moment, Etchepare no longer existed, so to speak. I no longer had the care to defend society, or to maintain the accusation--I was fighting against that advocate; it was a tourney of orators, a contest of actors; I had to come out the conqueror at all hazards. I had to convince the jury, to seize it and tear from it the "Yes" of a verdict. It was no longer a question of Etchepare, I tell you; it was a question of myself, of my vanity, of my reputation, of my honor, of my future. It's shameful, I repeat, it's shameful! At any cost, I wanted to avoid the acquittal which I felt was certain. And I was possessed by such a fear of not succeeding, that I employed all the arguments, good and bad--even those which consisted in representing to those frightened men their homes in flames, their loved ones assassinated. I spoke of the vengeance of God upon judges who had no severity. And all that in good faith--or rather without consciousness, in a fit of passion, in a fit of passion against the advocate whom I hated with all my forces.... The success was even greater than I could have wished; the jury is ready to obey me, and for myself, my dear--I let myself be congratulated, and I pressed the hands which were held out to me.--That's what it is to be a prosecutor!

MME. VAGRET:--Console yourself. There are perhaps not ten men in France who would have acted otherwise.

VAGRET:--You are right. Only--if one reflects, it is precisely that which is frightful.

BY KENKŌ HOSHI

(See pages 135, 151)

The governing class should stop their luxurious expenditures in order to help the governed class. For only when a man has been provided with the ordinary means of living, and yet steals, may he be really called a thief.

A Hanging in Prison

(_From "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"_)

BY OSCAR WILDE