This to the gentleman who stood beside me. He smiled and waved his hand to her. Then he said, between his teeth:
"Civilized savages! To have them _here!_"
"It don"t hurt "em," said the officer beside us. "They"re incurables.
They won"t any of "em remember what they saw for ten minutes. People don"t understand crazy folks and idiots. They"re the easiest cowed people in the world. Long as they know they"re watched, they"ll do whatever you tell them--this kind will. They"re harmless."
"But why have them here?" I insisted. "If they are to be poisoned, why not do it more quickly and--"
"Poisoned!" he exclaimed, astonished. "Why, if one of the attendants was caught even striking one, he"d be dismissed quick. They get treated well. Only it is hard to keep attendants. We can"t get "em to stay here more than a month or so--just till they get paid. We have to go to the raw immigrants to get them even then. n.o.body else will come."
"Naturally," remarked the gentleman beside me.
"Yes, it"s kind of natural. This kind of folks are hard to work with, and the men attendants get only about seventeen to twenty dollars a month, and the women from ten to twelve dollars."
"So the attendants of these helpless creatures are raw immigrants," I said; "who, perhaps, do not speak English, who are constantly changing.
The water they get is from driven wells, the sights and exercise are obtained from and in and by the dead trenches. The air they breathe is like this, night and day, you say, and no one ever leaves alive when once sent here."
"No one."
"Who does the work--the digging, the burying, the handling of the dead, the carting, and the work for the insane?"
"Medium term prisoners. All these are from one to six months men,"
waving his hand over the men working below us in the horrible trench.
"Do you think they leave here with an admiration for our system of caring for the city"s dead--whether the death be social, mental, or physical? Do they go back with a desire to reform and become like those who devise and conduct this sort of thing?"
He laughed.
"Why, it"s just a picnic for them to come up here. You can"t hardly keep "em away with a club. Of course, the same ones don"t work right _here_ long; but when a fellow gets sent up to _any_ of these places, he comes over and over until he gets ambitious to go to Sing Sing and be higher toned."
I thought of the same information given me at the Police and Criminal Courts a little while ago. I wondered if there might not be some flaw somewhere in the whole reformatory and punitive system. From the time a fourteen-year-old boy is taken up for breaking a window; sent to the reform school, where he is herded with older and worse boys, until he pa.s.ses through the police court again,--let us say at sixteen, as a "ten-day drunk,"--to herd again in a windowless prison van, packed close with fifteen hardened criminals (as I saw a messenger boy of fifteen on my way to the island), and taken where for ten days he enjoys the society of the most abandoned; returns to town the companion of thieves; and goes the next time for three or six months for pet.i.t larceny, then for some graver crime, on and up. At last, when he has no more to learn or to teach, he is given a cell or room alone until the State relieves him of the necessity of following the course which has been mapped out for and steadily followed by so many. He knows when he is a three months" man where he is going at last. Has he not helped to dig the trenches for the men who looked so hard and vile to him when he broke that window and stood in the Police Court by their sides?
Perhaps you will ask: "Why did he not take the warning, and follow a better course, turn the other way?"
Perchance it might be asked on the other hand--since court, and morgue, and cemetery officials unite in the a.s.sertion that the above record is almost universal, and that our present methods not only do not reform, but actually prevent the reform of offenders--why this system is still followed by the State, and if the warning has not been ample and severe here, also.
Are we to expect greater wisdom, more far-seeing judgment and a loftier aim in these unfortunates of society than is developed in those who control them?
Since it is all such a dismal failure, why not plan a better way? Why not begin at the other end of the line to keep offenders apart? Why herd them--good, bad, and indifferent--together, in the stage of their career when there is hope for some, at least, to reform; and begin to separate them only when the last mile of the road is reached?
Why, if the city _must_ bury its dead in trenches and under the conditions only half described above (because much of it is too sickening to present), why, if cremation or some better mode of burial is not possible--and certainly I think it is--why, at least, need the awful, the ghastly, the inhuman combination be made of burying together medium term criminals, imbeciles, lunatics, and thousands of corpses all on one mere sc.r.a.p of land? If a seven-foot ma.s.s of corruption exhaling through the air and percolating through land and water must be devoted to the dead poor of a great city, why in the name of all that is civilized or humane, permit any living thing to be detained and poisoned on the same bit of earth?
I saw a woman who had come to visit her mother who was one of these poor, insane creatures. "I can"t afford to keep her at home," she said, "and then at times she gets "snags" and acts so that people are afraid of her, so I had to let her come here. It is kind of awful, ain"t it?"
I thought it was "kind of awful," for more reasons than the poor woman could realize, for she was so used to foul air and knew so little of sanitary conditions that she was mercifully spared certain thoughts that seem to have escaped the authorities also.
"It is her birthday and I brought her this," she said, showing me a colored cookie. "She will like it. We can visit here one day each month if we have friends."
"How many bodies do you carry each week?" I asked of the captain of the city boat.
"About fifty," he said. But later on both he and the official on the Island told me that there were six thousand buried here yearly, so it will be seen that his estimate per week was less than half what it should have been.
I looked at the stack of pine boxes, the ends of which showed from beneath a tarpaulin on the deck.
They were stacked five deep. There were seven wee ones, hardly larger than would be filled by a good-sized kitten.
I said: "They are so _very_ small. I don"t see how a baby was put inside."
The man to whom I spoke--a deck hand who was a "ten-day-self-committed,"
so the captain told me later--smiled a grim, sly smile and said:
"I reckon you"re allowin" fer trimmin"s. This kind don"t get piliers and satin linin"s. It don"t take much room for a baby with no trimmin"s an"
mighty little clothes."
"Why are two of them dark wood and all the rest light?" I asked of the same man.
"I reckon the folks of them two had a few cents to pay fergittin" their baby"s box stained. It kind of looks nicer to them, and when they get a little more money, they"ll come and get it dug up and put it in a grave by itself or some other place. It seems kind of awful to some folks to have their little baby put in amongst such a lot."
He said it all quite simply, quite apologetically, as if I might think it rather unreasonable--this feeling that it was "kind of awful to think of the baby in amongst such a lot."
At that time, I did not know that he was a prisoner. He showed me a number of things about the boxes and spoke of the open cracks and knot holes through which one could see what was inside. I declined to look after the first glance.
"You don"t mind it very much after you"re used to it," he said. "Of course, _you_ would, but I mean _us_."
I began to understand that he was a prisoner.
"When you"re a prisoner, you get used to a good deal," he said, later on, when they were unloading the bodies and some of the men looked white and sick. "They"re new to it," he explained to me. "It makes them sick and scared; but it won"t after a while."
"Why are most of them here?" I asked. "Most of them look honest--and--"
"Honest!" he exclaimed, with the first show he had made of rebellion or resentment. "Honest! Of course most of us are honest. It is liquor does it mostly. None of _us_ are thieves--yet!"
I noticed the "us," but still evaded putting him in with the rest.
"Why do they not let liquor alone, after such a hard lesson?"
He laughed. He had a red, bloated, but not a bad face. He was an Englishman.
"Some of us can"t. Some don"t want to, and some--some--it is about all some can get."
Later on, I was told that this man was honest, a good worker, and that he was "self-committed to get the liquor out of him. He"s been here before. When he gets out, he will be drunk before he gets three blocks away from the dock, and he"ll be sent here again--or to the Island!"
"And has this system gone on for a hundred years," I asked, "without finding some remedy?"
"Well, since the women began to take a hand, some little has been done,"
the officer replied. "They built a coffee and lodging house right near the landing, and take returning prisoners there, and give them a chance to work if they want to--in a broom factory they built. Some get a start that way and if they work and are honest, they get a letter saying so when they find places. It is only a drop in the bucket, but it helps a few."
"It looks a little as though, if women were to take a hand in public, munic.i.p.al, or governmental affairs, that reform, and not punishment, might be made the object of imprisonment if imprisonment became necessary, doesn"t it?"