CHAPTER XLVI.
IF PAIN IS NOT AN EVIL, IT CERTAINLY IS A VERY GOOD IMITATION.
The world inside of the walls has a public opinion of its own, and it is at least quite as often just as the public opinion whose sphere is not circumscribed by stone walls and iron bars. The man who accepts the situation, resolved to get his hand as easily as possible out of the tiger's mouth, soon becomes known as a sensible fellow, willing to give others no trouble and anxious to have no trouble given him. Such a man will rarely be molested.
Patient, uncomplaining endurance always excites pity and sympathy. The most ignorant, the most brutal warder will scarcely oppress the man who goes quietly and unresistingly along the thorny road stretched out before him; who, not taking the thorns for roses, is not disappointed at finding few roses among the thorns.
Those, however, who are determined to see the rough side of prison life may easily do so; the appliances are there and they will certainly be accommodated. An English prison is a vast machine in which a man counts for just nothing at all. He is to the establishment what a bale of merchandise is to a merchant's warehouse. The prison does not look upon him as a man at all. He is merely an object which must move in a certain rut and occupy a certain niche provided for it. There is no room for the smallest sentiment. The vast machine of which he is an item keeps undisturbed upon its course.
Move with it, and all is well. Resist, and you will be crushed as inevitably as the man who plants himself on the railroad track when the express is coming. Without passion, without prejudice, but also without pity and without remorse, the machine crushes and passes on. The dead man is carried to his grave and in ten minutes is as much forgotten as though he had never existed.
The plank bed, the crank, the bread-and-water diet, unauthorized but none the less effectual clubbing at the hands of warders, the cold in the punishment cells penetrating to the very marrow of the bones, weakness, sickness and unpitied death are the certain portion of the rebel.
Some are found idiotic enough to invite such a fate, though fewer now than formerly. The progress of education in England during the last twenty years, and the philanthropic efforts of many societies and private persons, but above all the covert but successful efforts of the authorities to deport them to this country instantly after their release, have had an immense effect in thinning the ranks of prison inmates. The Judges, too, have been forced by public opinion to be much less severe than they used to be, and that counts for much even in the inside of prisons.
Nothing can be more capricious than the sentences they pass. In very few cases does the law set any limit. "Life or any term not less than five years" is the usual reading of the statute books, and the consequence naturally is that one Judge will give his man five years, while another will condemn his to twenty years for precisely the same crime committed under precisely the same circumstances as the first one.
Another great blot on the English judicial system is that no court of appeal exists to which a sentence might be referred for review, so that the most unjust and unequal sentences are constantly passed from which there is no appeal but in the forlorn hope—rather, entire hopelessness—of a petition to the Home Secretary. I have often seen a man who had been sentenced to five years for murder working by the side of another whose sentence was twenty years for some crime against property. Such contrasts, of course, excite great discontent, and in some cases are the reason why men set up a hopeless resistance to what they feel to be persecution and injustice.