On a previous occasion Valencia was threatened by a strong force of Carlists under that distinguished Carlist general, Cabrera, and it was feared that he would capture a large body of convicts at that time employed on a new road, Las Cabrillas, a little distance from the city. There were hardly any troops in the capital except the city militia only recently organised and barely equal to the duties and dangers imposed upon them. Great fears were entertained that Cabrera would seize the convicts and incorporate with his own force. Montesinos was desired to prevent this, and he turned up in person one evening at Las Cabrillas, where he assumed command and drew off the greater number, happily escaping without attack or interference by the enemy. So loyal was the demeanour of the Valencian prisoners that under the direction of Montesinos at another time they were armed and resisted an attack made upon the gates of their convent prison by the insurgents in a rising in Valencia. The following extraordinary story is related in an official publication by the well known poet Don Ramon de Campoamor, at that time governor of the province of Valencia. A formidable band of brigands was devastating the neighbourhood of Valencia and a reign of terror prevailed. The governor sent for Colonel Montesinos and inquired whether there were any old brigands among the convicts in custody and who were willing to atone for past misdeeds by coming to the assistance of the authorities. Montesinos, who made it a rule to know all his prisoners by heart, their present dispositions, and indeed their inmost thoughts, spoke confidently of one as quite a reformed character, and at the governor's request entrusted him with the special mission of clearing out the country. The convict, after receiving his instructions, went out with a sufficient escort, hunted down the brigands, broke up their bands, killing or capturing the whole. Here the commanding influence of Montesinos was paramount even beyond the walls of the presidio. By the power of his strong will he called out fine qualities and exacted loyal service from the worst materials whom he had won to a high sense of discipline.
A minor and more sentimental instance is recorded of the confidence he could repose in his reformed criminals. The mother of one of the convicts was at the point of death. The man was summoned to the governor's office and informed of her desperate condition. "Do you wish to see her in her last moments?" asked the governor. "Can I trust you to return if I give you permission to leave the prison for a time?" The man much moved solemnly promised not to misuse his liberty. He was allowed to exchange his prison uniform for a peasant's dress; he went without escort to his mother's cottage, received her blessing, and went back to durance as had been agreed.
The experience of Valencia was unique and short-lived. A commendable effort was made to extend the principles on which Montesinos had acted, and decrees embodying them and recommending them for general adoption were issued but soon became a dead letter. Excellent in theory, their success depended entirely on the man to give them effect. A second Montesinos did not appear and Spanish prisons continued to exhibit the worst features down to the present day.
A movement towards prison reform had been commenced as early as 1844, when three new "model" prisons were planned for Madrid, but their construction was long delayed. About the same date a model convict prison was planned at Valladolid, but slow progress was made with this and with other new prisons, including that of Saragossa, and at the Casa de Galera of Alcalá de Henares. A penitentiary was also projected on the island of Cabrera, opposite Cadiz. The chief effort was concentrated on the model prison of Madrid, which was undertaken in 1876 after much debate and discussion. It was to be an entirely new building, to which were devoted all the funds that might have been expended upon the impossible reform and repair of the hideous old Saladero. Several years passed before the building began, and not until 1884 did the tenants of the dismantled Saladero move into the new prison. It is for the most part on the cellular or separate system, by which each individual is held strictly apart from his fellows, according to the most modern ideas, which have claimed to have exerted a potent effect in the reformation of offenders and the diminution of crime. Nevertheless the system is still in its trial and its beneficial results are by no means universally conceded. The new prison is a very distinct improvement on the old, and the former horrors and atrocities are fast disappearing, but the secluded solitary life has its own peculiar terrors which press hardly on transgressors, with results that are very distinctly deterrent if not very largely reformatory.
What those actually subjected to the treatment feel we may read in their own effusions. The literary quality of prison writers does not rank high but they sometimes put their views forcibly. One says of the "model":—"If I leave this trying place alive I can at least declare that I have been buried underground and had made the acquaintance of the grave diggers." Another writer:—"If you wish to know what life is like here, come and take your lodging inside. They are handsome, but curious, well provided with means to drive you out of your mind. There is a water tap which overflows in drought and runs dry in wet weather; a pocket handkerchief and a towel; a plate, a basin and a wooden spoon, a broom, a dust box, one blanket and a mattress with four straws that gives you pain in every limb: many things more, but one alone much needed is absent, a rope by which you commit suicide."
It has been said that the worst use to which a man may be put is to shut him up in a prison. A still more wasteful extravagance is to put him out of the world. The penalties known to Spanish law have been very various; there have been many forms of imprisonment, perpetual imprisonment, greater or less detention, exile, the application of fetters of several sorts, handcuffs, shackles, the guarda amigo or "holdfriend," the "persuader" or "come along with me"; the leg irons and waist chains of varying weights. Penal labour was enforced in maniobras infimas by convicts chained together on public works, fortifications, harbours and mines. All forms of secondary punishment have been inflicted, winding up with capital, the death sentence inflicting the extreme penalty of the law. This last irrevocable act does not find favour with all Spanish legists, whose chief objection is the familiar one that when a judicial error has been committed, rectification is altogether impossible. Spain can add one to the many well known cases such as those of Callas and Lesurques, and it may be quoted here as it is probably little known.
The case occurred in Seville and grew out of a sudden quarrel in a tavern followed by a fight to the death with knives. The combatants went on the ground and attacked each other in the regular fashion when one dropped to the ground mortally wounded and the other with his second ran away. The wounded man's second went up to see whether his principal was dying or already dead, when he got up and declared that he was entirely unhurt. He had slipped upon a stone and fallen with the obviously cowardly desire to escape from his antagonist's attack. The second was furiously angry and rated his man soundly. He retorted fiercely and another quarrel and another encounter ensued, also with knives, in which the first man again fell and this time was killed outright, by his own second, who at once made off. The body lay where it had fallen until next morning, when the police found it. The story of the original quarrel but nothing of the second had become known, and it was naturally concluded that death had been inflicted by the first combatant. On the face of it the evidence was conclusive against him, and he did not attempt to deny the facts as they appeared when arrested and put upon his trial. At that time the law treated homicide in a duel as murder and the victim suffered the extreme penalty without protest, believing himself to be guilty. The truth was never known, until the real offender, years after, confessed the part he had played, but too late of course to prevent the judicial murder of the innocent man. This case has naturally been added to give weight to the many powerful arguments against capital punishment.
The extreme penalty of the law is nowadays inflicted in Spain by the garrote, a method of strangulation by the tightening of an iron collar, the substitute for hanging introduced by King Ferdinand VII (1820). Till then the hanging was carried out in the clumsiest and most brutal manner. The culprits were dragged by the executioner up the steps of a ladder leaning against the scaffold. At a certain height he mounted on the victim's shoulders and thus seated flung himself off with his victim underneath. As they swung to and fro the hangman's fingers were busily engaged in choking the convict so as to complete the strangulation. The garrote is a very simple contrivance. The condemned man sits on a stool or low seat, leaning his back against a strong, firm upright post to which an iron collar is fixed. This, when opened, encircles his neck, and is closed and tightened by a powerful screw, worked by a lever from behind. Death is instantaneous.
Public executions must prove very popular performances with a people who still revel in a bull fight and flock to look at the hairbreadth escapes of human beings from hardly undeserved death by the horns of a fierce beast tortured into madness. De Foresta, an Italian traveller,[25] tells us that never was a greater concourse seen in Madrid than that which collected in 1877 to witness the execution of two murderers, Mollo and Agullar, when it was estimated that 80,000 people were present. Ford describes an execution in Seville in 1845 when the crowd was enormous and composed largely of the lower orders, of the humbler ranks, "who hold the conventions of society very cheap and give loose rein to their morbid curiosity to behold scenes of terror, which operates powerfully on the women,