"A DISGRACE TO CIVILIZATION."
"A heart-breaking story, founded on fact, in McCLURE's MAGAZINE for the current month, is an arraignment of the nineteenth century civilization that, considering its boasts of enlightenment and decency, is as horrible an official crime as any that has given so dark a stain to Russian treatment of innocence."
Following this is a long outline of Mr. Ward's story, and then the article continues:
"It is impossible to conceive of more awful inhuman injustice than this. But the story is not overdrawn. It has happened with variations scores, if not hundreds, of times. It is occurring or liable to occur this very day, not alone in Boston, but in Cleveland.
"At a meeting of the judges, a short time ago, Judge Lamson used the following language:
"'The detention of innocent persons as witnesses is, under the best of circumstances, bad. It is clearly the duty of the people of this country or their representatives to see that the present disgraceful method in vogue in the county jail is abolished. We have no right, under any law, to place innocent persons on a plane with criminals. It is nothing more or less than an outrage, inflicted on helpless people. I hope that the people of this county will be aroused to the enormity of this problem, and very soon put an end to this imposition.'
"And the counterpart of the story in McCLURE's MAGAZINE has happened here within a short time. Lewis Gerardin, a sailor, was released last April, after being detained six months. Several months before, Frank Blaha, a saloon-keeper, who committed the crime of murder in the second degree, managed to get bail. While Gerardin was held he received pathetic letters from his wife and family begging him to come home. They did not know why he was held, and he said that if they were to learn of his imprisonment they could not understand his innocence of crime. One day a letter was received from home, announcing that his favorite little son had died but a week before. The last words of the child called for his father. But Gerardin was not released until the prosecutor was ready to dismiss him.
"Such possibilities are a disgrace to any community that tolerates such a horrible law or such a feeble administration of it, and such callousness to human suffering that it will not save these innocent victims from its outrageous injustice. When to this brutality are added the comparative safety of the criminal, and the vile jails and the vile inmates with whom young boys and girls and honest men and decent women are thrown for the crime of witnessing a crime, it convicts the civilization of the age with a combination of stupidity and heartlessness that had better say nothing of the Czar of Russia or the ferocious Kurds. In its essential injustice and inhumanity it is not many removes from the lynchings of the South."