CHAPTER XLVI.

IF PAIN IS NOT AN EVIL, IT CERTAINLY IS A VERY GOOD IMITATION.

The world inside of the walls has a public opinion of its own, and it is

at least quite as often just as the public opinion whose sphere is not

circumscribed by stone walls and iron bars. The man who accepts the

situation, resolved to get his hand as easily as possible out of the

tiger's mouth, soon becomes known as a sensible fellow, willing to give

others no trouble and anxious to have no trouble given him. Such a man

will rarely be molested.

Patient, uncomplaining endurance always excites pity and sympathy. The

most ignorant, the most brutal warder will scarcely oppress the man who

goes quietly and unresistingly along the thorny road stretched out

before him; who, not taking the thorns for roses, is not disappointed at

finding few roses among the thorns.

Those, however, who are determined to see the rough side of prison life

may easily do so; the appliances are there and they will certainly be

accommodated. An English prison is a vast machine in which a man counts

for just nothing at all. He is to the establishment what a bale of

merchandise is to a merchant's warehouse. The prison does not look upon

him as a man at all. He is merely an object which must move in a certain

rut and occupy a certain niche provided for it. There is no room for the

smallest sentiment. The vast machine of which he is an item keeps

undisturbed upon its course.

Move with it, and all is well. Resist, and you will be crushed as

inevitably as the man who plants himself on the railroad track when the

express is coming. Without passion, without prejudice, but also without

pity and without remorse, the machine crushes and passes on. The dead

man is carried to his grave and in ten minutes is as much forgotten as

though he had never existed.

The plank bed, the crank, the bread-and-water diet, unauthorized but

none the less effectual clubbing at the hands of warders, the cold in

the punishment cells penetrating to the very marrow of the bones,

weakness, sickness and unpitied death are the certain portion of the

rebel.

Some are found idiotic enough to invite such a fate, though fewer now

than formerly. The progress of education in England during the last

twenty years, and the philanthropic efforts of many societies and

private persons, but above all the covert but successful efforts of the

authorities to deport them to this country instantly after their

release, have had an immense effect in thinning the ranks of prison

inmates. The Judges, too, have been forced by public opinion to be much

less severe than they used to be, and that counts for much even in the

inside of prisons.

Nothing can be more capricious than the sentences they pass. In very few

cases does the law set any limit. "Life or any term not less than five

years" is the usual reading of the statute books, and the consequence

naturally is that one Judge will give his man five years, while another

will condemn his to twenty years for precisely the same crime committed

under precisely the same circumstances as the first one.

Another great blot on the English judicial system is that no court of

appeal exists to which a sentence might be referred for review, so that

the most unjust and unequal sentences are constantly passed from which

there is no appeal but in the forlorn hope--rather, entire

hopelessness--of a petition to the Home Secretary. I have often seen a

man who had been sentenced to five years for murder working by the side

of another whose sentence was twenty years for some crime against

property. Such contrasts, of course, excite great discontent, and in

some cases are the reason why men set up a hopeless resistance to what

they feel to be persecution and injustice.

It always seemed to me that the standpoint of the Board of Directors,

established in 1864, and which continued without change until very

recently, was altogether wrong. They appeared to think that in their

dealings with other men the only course was to be the application of

"force, iron force," as one of the governors expressed it. The very

great majority require no such application, and the few difficult ones

could easily be managed in another way. Certainly it is necessary that

all prison discipline be penal, but it is not necessary that it be

ferocious and inhuman, as certainly is the English. Starvation, the

crank, the plank bed, the fearful cold of the cells are not measures

necessary in dealing with any man.

Whatever they could think of to harden, to degrade, to insult, to

inflict every form of suffering, both physical and mental, which a man

could undergo and live, was embodied in the rules they made. Their

prisons were to be places of suffering and of nothing but suffering.

So far as the directors were concerned the regulations were carried out

to the letter, but each prison is under the control of a resident

governor, with a deputy governor to assist him. These gentlemen are

always men of good social position, retired officers of the army, who

have seen the world and have experience in controlling men. They are

rarely inclined to unnecessary severity, but are generally willing to

apply the rules with as much consideration as such rules admit. The

governor's discretion, however, is limited, but daily contact more or

less with men whom he sees to differ very little from free men, and whom

he sometimes finds to be even better than many he knows who are not, but

who perhaps ought to be, on the wrong side of the bars, makes him

unwilling to throw too many sharp points on the path which has to be

trodden by men for whom he often cannot help feeling considerable

sympathy.

I have more than once heard governors express their disapproval of the

starvation system and of the ferocity of treatment toward men who some

day or other must go back to society.

Under such governors the new arrival speedily finds out that to a

certain extent his comfort depends upon himself. No man can make a bad

thing good or trick himself into believing that suffering is pleasure.

If pain be not an evil, it is an exceedingly good imitation, and the

wisest philosopher is just as restless under the toothache as the most

perfect idiot.

[Illustration: PENTONVILLE PRISON.]