It
is certainly much wholesomer, on the other hand, to uncover your own
deformity than to hide it, especially when you know, or fear, that the
hiding is unsuccessful.
There is a sense of brotherhood, long since unfamiliar to human
intercourse under usual conditions, but welcome even at the cost of
conditions such as these. The truth gradually emerges to our
consciousness--it is not the evil in us that kills brotherhood, but the
vain, unending effort to make the evil seem good. Now our eyes meet one
another's frankly; the skilfullest counterfeit was worse than the worst
reality. There is nothing in us to be proud of, but something to be
thankful for. Society has done its worst to us; but it could not take
away from us our mutual kindliness, or the qualities that justify it. We
are condemned as wicked, but we are comforted by one another's good.
Prison, in short, more convincingly than any abstract argument,
demonstrates its own futility as a means of either taking revenge upon
the prisoner, or of inducing him to hate crime and to turn to good.
Revenge, of course, is officially discredited nowadays, though it is
practised as actively as ever under guises more or less civilized; but
the pretense of moral reform by penal imprisonment is becoming too
preposterous to be tolerated much longer. On the contrary, prison
renders the great aggregate of prisoners collectively self-conscious;
the goats find themselves, and are forced into antagonism with the sheep
not only as individuals but as a body.
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