XI.
It will be perceived that, like all reformers, I am going too far. I begin with demanding secrecy in police trials, and I end by suggesting that they be abolished altogether. But in fact nothing struck me more forcibly in the proceedings of the police court than their apparent futility. It was all a mere suppression of symptoms in the vicious classes, not a cure. This one or that one would not steal, or assault and batter, for the given term of his imprisonment, but this was ludicrously far from touching even the tendency to theft and violence. These bad boys and girls came up and had their thrashing or their rap over the knuckles, and were practically bidden by the conditions of our civilization to go and sin some more. Perhaps there is no cure for vice and crime. Perhaps there is nothing but prevention, in the application of which there is always difficulty, obscurity, and uncertainty.
The other day, as I passed the court-house, that sad vehicle which is called the Black Maria was driving away from the high portal into which it backs to receive its dead. (The word came inevitably; it is not so far wrong, and it may stand.) The Black Maria may still be Maria (the reason why it should ever have been I do not know), but it is black no longer. On the contrary, it is painted a not uncheerful salmon color, with its false sash picked out in drab; and at first glance, among the rattling express wagons, it looked not unlike an omnibus of the living, and could have passed through the street without making the casual observer realize what a dreary hearse it was. I dare say it was on its way to the House of Industry, or the House of Correction, or Deer Island, or some of those places where people are put to go from bad to worse; and it was fulfilling its function with a merciful privacy, for its load of convicts might have been dragged through the streets on open hurdles, for the further edification of the populace. Yet I could not help thinking—or perhaps the thought only occurs to me now—that for all reasonable hope as to the future of its inmates the Black Maria might as well have been fitted with one of those ingenious pieces of mechanism sometimes employed by the Enemies of Society, and driven out to some wide, open space where the explosion could do no harm to the vicinity, and so when the horses and driver had removed to a safe distance—
But this is perhaps pessimism.
It is very hard to say what pessimism really is, and almost any honest expression concerning the monotonous endeavor and failure of society to repress the monotonous evolution of the criminal in conditions that render his evolution inevitable, must seem pessimistic. I do not suppose that we ought to kill him merely because we cannot hope to cure him, though society goes to this extreme in certain extreme cases. Is it right to kill the criminal at one stage of his career, and not at another? After the first conviction the rest is inevitable, and each succeeding conviction follows as a matter of course. A bleaker pessimist than myself might say that all criminal courts seem to be part of the process in the evolution of the criminal. Still, criminal courts must be.