A man was sentenced for playing cards for money. He could not
pay the $45 fine demanded, and in default, was sent to the chain-gang
for eight months. He wore stripes, night and day, and if contumacious,
was whipped by the guards. His work was in a stone quarry, a deep hole,
into which the summer sun poured an insufferable heat. He was forced to
do his work with a 49-pound hammer in that funnel-shaped pit, at a
hundred degrees in the shade--if he could find any shade. One day he
told the guard he was sick, and could not work any longer. The guard
shifted the quid in his mouth and remarked that he ought to have said so
that morning. But the man meant what he said, and proved it by dying a
day or two later. Probably you may have played cards for money at some
time in your life. Did it ever occur to you that you merited torture and
death for it?
Or do you think that, after such an experience (if you survived it), or
after being twice arrested for the same crime and kept in jail five
years three times over, or after doing time for a crime you never
committed--that you would come out at the end of it all, smiling, full
of energy and enterprise, loving your neighbor, eager for honest toil?
Would you embrace Mr. Moyer (or whomever your jailer was) and tell him,
with tears of gratitude, that you could never repay him for his
warm-hearted, big-brained care of you--the starving, the dungeoning, the
clubbing, and all the rest of the university course?
Would you feel like that? Or would you stare out upon the world into
which you were contemptuously tossed with dull, hating, revengeful eyes,
suspicious of all men, hopeless of good, but resolved to get even, so
far as you might, by plying the evil trades which your life of slavery
had taught you? Would you behave like Christ upon the Cross, or like an
ordinary man? Convicts are ordinary men, except that they are often, to
begin with, diseased men, or hemmed in by conditions so untoward as to
make an honest life ten or a hundred times harder than it ever was for
you.
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