The facts I adduce may be discredited, but if they
are true they will not be lost. My eight hundred inarticulate comrades
are always present in my thoughts. I have left them in the body, but I
see their faces wherever I turn. It is a crime that any human beings
should be arbitrarily kept in the conditions which surround them, and if
I can loosen one stone of the Bastile which, at Atlanta and elsewhere,
annually engulfs and destroys so many of them, I shall be content.
XIII
THE BANQUETS OF THE DAMNED
The walls of jails are good non-conductors of what goes on behind them,
and this applies to other prisons as well as to that at Atlanta. Yet
once in a while a groan or protest, or a partial account of some
outbreak, finds its way through; and in many cases the gist of the story
is to the effect that the food is bad or scanty. Other things the men
behind the bars suffer stoically, or not so stoically; but lack of food
arouses them to despair and frenzy. We have lately heard reports from
Sing Sing illustrative of this condition there; and many another jail
could echo the complaints of the unfortunates in that gloomy
hell-chamber.
Convicts know that they are to be punished, that the government has
sentenced them, that it is the law; and though they may find cause to
disagree with the decree that consigns them to hopeless and useless
servitude, they accept it as at least legal and incident to the game as
played.
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