Chapter II

This is an age of mercy to the merciless. The good Scriptural code, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf: it is a creed outworn. We have replaced it with a regime of “reformation,” a penology of persuasion. In our own country this sign and consequence of moral degeneration, this power and prevalence of the mollycoddle, are especially marked. We no longer kill our assassins; as a rule, the only disadvantages they suffer for killing us are those incident to detention for acquittal, with a little preaching to remind them of their mortality. Wherefore our homicide list is about twice annually that of the battle of Gettysburg.

The American prison of to-day is carefully outfitted with the comforts of home. Those who succeed in breaking into it find themselves distinctly advantaged in point of housing, and are clothed and fed better than they ever were before, or will be elsewhere. Light employment, gentle exercise, cleanliness, and sound sleep reward them, and when expelled their one ambition is to go back. The “reformation” consists in lifting them to a higher plane of criminality: the man who enters as a stupid thief is graduated a competent forger, and comes back (if he can) with an augmented self-respect and an ambition to kill the warden. Some of us old fogies think that a prison was best worth its price to the community when it was a place that a rascal would rather die out of than get into; but we are _voces in deserto_ and in the ramp and roar of the new penology altogether unheard.

These remarks are suggested by something in France. In that half-sister republic the guillotine, though still a lawful dissuader from the error of assassination, is not at the time of writing in actual use. Murderers are still sentenced to it, but always the sentence is commuted to imprisonment during life or good behavior. Coincidently with the decline of the guillotine there is a notable rise in the rate of assassination. Somebody having had the sagacity to suggest the possibility of something more than an accidental relation between the two phenomena, it occurred to a Parisian editor to collect “views” as to the expediency of again bringing knife and neck together in the good old way. He got views of all sorts of kinds, naturally, and knows almost as much about public opinion as he did before. It is interesting to note that the literary class is nearly a unit against the chopping-block, as was to be expected: persons who work with the head naturally set a high value upon it—an over-appraisement in their own case, for their heads are somewhat impaired by their habit of housing their hearts in them. There was an honorable minority: Mistral, the Provençal poet, who pointed out (in verse) that a people too squeamish to endure the shedding of criminal blood has taken a long step in the downward path leading to feebleness.

Wherefore I say: Bravo, Mistral! You have done something to prove that not all poets are persons of criminal instincts.