INTRODUCTION

In calling the reader’s attention to the following pages it may be well to strike at once the personal note and explain my acquaintance with the writer. I am not an official visitor at Sing Sing Prison. I am not a philanthropist. In philanthropy as now practiced I have only a limited confidence. Had I not had a personal reason for going to the House of Sorrow I should have felt it an intrusion, almost an impertinence, to have forced myself where men have at least the right not to be stared at while undergoing their agony.

I met Charles Chapin at the request of another prisoner at Sing Sing—a young man doing a life-term for a similar transgression of the law—whom I had come to know by correspondence. A story of mine having attracted his attention he was kind enough to write me. After an exchange of letters I went “up the river” to see him, finding a tall, stalwart, manly, bright-faced lad of twenty-six who had gone there at twenty-two. This meeting was the starting point of an affection which has become one of the precious things in my life.

The writer of this book had been at Sing Sing but a very short time when my younger friend asked me if I would see the new arrival. Here again my own books had prepared the way for me, and, as far as the conditions permitted, our coming together was not different from what it would have been had we met at a club. My recollection is that we talked of the public interests of the day, of literature, and of the scene around us. As to the last there was not a murmur of complaint. In subsequent meetings we have kept to the same tone, though we could not have become as friendly as we are without an element of what I may call mutual solicitude stealing into our intercourse.

My object in bringing up this point is to underscore the fact that when it comes to human dealing there is no difference between the man whom we somewhat hideously call a convict and anybody else. We arrest him, we try him, we sentence him, we lock him behind bars—and having in our own thought thrust him outside the human race we fancy that it must seem to him a matter of course to be in the limbo of outcast souls.

But not at all! Arrested, tried, sentenced, buried in a cell, he is to himself as much a man, and the very same man, as ever he was. As truly as men at liberty he finds the prisoner’s life abnormal. Normality, after all, is only what we are accustomed to. Short of perfection it is not a standard in itself. For the individual normal life is the life to which he has trained himself, and no two lives have been trained alike. Normality is an inner principle more than it is an outer one. Outwardly, through a sort of moral cowardice, we conform as best we can to accepted patterns which inwardly we reject; but it is the inner ideal by which we truly live. There are honored men by the million all over the world whose methods would render them abnormal to most of their fellow-citizens were the bluff to be called. We do not call the bluff, and we dare not, for the reason that the vast majority of us fear that in any such unmasking we ourselves should be exposed.

At the same time hidden wrong, however concealed by our social false-fronts, demands an expiation. We are so constituted—uprightness is so much the native principle of the human being—that our universal departure from the only norm there is cannot go unrecognized. Unconsciously, subconsciously, and even to some extent consciously, we call for sacrifice and propitiation. The more dogged our refusal to repent and reform the more persistent our demand for something or someone to suffer in our stead.

Modern American slang has coined a word for this, doubtless because the need cried out for expression. Like all slang it is the voice of the man in the street, finding the right outlet for his pent-up soul where the scholar and lexicographer have walked round it. In this case, however, modern and ancient instinct have been one, and in our slang word of to-day we link up with a mighty tradition and go back to our first recognition of the soul’s necessities.

We speak of the man on whom the hard consequences fall as—the goat. So did the people who first read the results of wrong in terms of tragedy. The burden of their sin was intolerable. Unwilling to see that they could throw off that burden by giving up the sin they sought means whereby they might go on committing the sin and escape the penalty. So once a year they took a goat and laid their sin upon his head, sending him off into the wilderness to get rid of him. He became the scape-goat who bore their punishment so that they could begin with a clean slate again. It was naïve, childish, but significant.

And in the convict, I am driven to believe, modern civilization is not looking for the brother to be treated wisely because his weakness is so obvious and his suffering so great. If that were all the way would be found as soon as there was a will. The difficulties of dealing with the prison and prisoner are, to my mind, largely inventions. When we consider what gigantic obstacles we have overcome when it was to our interest to overcome them anything here is child’s play. We shake our heads and pull long faces chiefly to get dust into our own eyes, so that we may better carry out the purpose we really have at heart.

That purpose is to find a goat. Is not that the underlying motive of the world-wide cruelty that has made the prison of the Christian the nearest thing to Calvary? Is not that the reason why the most philanthropic and tender-hearted among us can mentally look on at barbarities such as have rarely been surpassed on earth and never turn a hair? In the prisoner we have found our goat. He is suffering not for his own sins alone, but for ours. Naïvely, childishly, but significantly, we outrage every human instinct within him, so that our own secret self-reproach may be appeased. The world as it is, society as we have formed it, must have a goat; and we seize the weakest and most defenseless thing on which we can lay our hands.

I should say right here that I am not speaking from personal knowledge. I know only what every other member of the public knows—what has been written of in newspapers and books, exposed in plays and moving pictures, and never contradicted. I am aware too that efforts at humanizing the prison system have been made here and there, and the Sing Sing of to-day is a proof of them. But they have been made by individuals and have never had the public back of them. When the public, through its elected representatives, have been able to intervene it has been largely to nullify or put a stop to anything meant to mitigate the poor goat’s suffering. Our women, our clergymen, our reformers will cry out against atrocities four thousand miles away, and not lift a finger to stop the operation of the third degree—to cite nothing else—against their own countrymen at their own gates. Here perhaps one should say in the words of One more tolerant than I, “These things ought ye to have done and not leave the other undone.”

It is the more amazing then to see the human sacrifice coming through his crucifixion with exaltation in his face and a new life in his heart. That happens. It happens rarely enough, God knows, but the miracle comes to pass. It has happened in the case of the boy friend I have already mentioned. It has happened in other instances, some of which I myself have known. I have watched it happening in the case of him whose book I am now commending to the public.

To reconstruct a sane and helpful life when all that is left of the self is what one has in common with the animal is an indication of a mighty principle of growth. The writer of these pages is not the man who went “up the river” two years ago. The book reads as though its author had climbed through smiling hills only to fall over a frightful precipice. Possibly; and yet one might fall over a precipice to find oneself in a valley of fruits and flowers, even if among them there are bitter herbs. That is the new life which out of anguish the man is creating for himself and helping to shed about him. The reader will not have finished this book when he has read to the last line, not any more than we have done with a life when we scan its record on a tombstone. The best part of it will lie in the invisible pages through which the tale goes on.