Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

And a certain use in the world, no doubt.

But I did take a position in the office of the secretary of state that offered the opportunity I had been longing for; I wished to finish my law studies, and, deeper down than any ambition for the bar, I was nourishing a desire to write, or if it does not seem too pretentious, an ambition in literature; and neither of these aims could well be accomplished, say from midnight on, after working all day on a morning newspaper.

It was a pleasant change. Springfield was lovely in the spring, which came to it earlier than it visited Chicago, and it was a relief to escape the horrid atmosphere of a great brutal city which as a reporter it had seemed my fate to behold for the most part at night. There was a sense of spaciousness in the green avenues of the quiet town, and there was pleasant society, and better perhaps than all there were two big libraries in the Capitol, the law library of the Supreme Court and the state library; and after the noisy legislature had adjourned a peace fell on the great, cool stone pile that was almost academic.

Twice or thrice a day Governor Altgeld was to be seen passing through its vast corridors, his head bent thoughtfully, rapt afar from the things about him in those dreams of social amelioration which had visited him so much earlier than they came to most of his contemporaries. He had read much, and during his residence there the executive mansion had the atmosphere of intellectual culture. Whenever I went over there, which I did now and then with his secretary for luncheon or for an evening at cards, our talk was almost always of books.

We were all reading George Meredith in those days, and Meredith’s greater contemporary, Thomas Hardy. “Tess” had just appeared, and it would be about that time that “Jude” was running as a serial in Harper’s Magazine, though with many elisions and under its tentative titles of “The Simpleton” and “Hearts Insurgent”; and we all fell completely under a fascination which has never failed of its weird and mysterious charm, so that I have read all his works, down to his latest poems, over and over again. Hardy is, perhaps, the greatest intelligence on our planet now that Tolstoy, from whom he so vastly differed, is gone, and Altgeld’s whole career might have served him, had he ever chosen to write of those experiences that are less implicit in human nature, and more explicit in the superficial aspects of public careers, as an example of his own pagan theory of the contrariety of human affairs and the spite of the Ironic Spirits.

I was reading, too, the novels of Mr. William Dean Howells, as I always have been whenever there was a moment to spare, and it was with a shock of peculiar delight and a sense of corroboration almost authoritative that I learned that Mr. Howells also had given voice to those very same profound and troubling convictions which Charlie R—— had set me on the track of two years before.

XIII

It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except inferentially, that I learned this, but among some musty documents the worms were eating up away down in the foundations of the State House.

My work in the office of the secretary of state involved the care of the state’s archives. The oldest of these were stored in a vault in the cellar of the huge pile, and the discovery had just been made that some kind of insect, which the state entomologist knew all about, was riddling those records with little holes,—piercing them through and through. In consequence a new vault was prepared, and steel filing cases were set up in it, and the records removed to this safer sanctuary.

It was a tedious and stupid task, until we came one day to file what were called the papers in the anarchist case. Officially they related to the application for the commutation of the sentences of the four men, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Parsons, who had been hanged, and for the pardon of the three who were then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet, Fielden and Schwab for life, and old Oscar Neebe for fifteen years. Fielden and Schwab had been sentenced to death with the four who had been killed, but Governor Oglesby had commuted their sentences to imprisonment for life; Neebe’s original sentence had been for the fifteen years he was then serving. The papers consisted of communications to the governor, great petitions, and letters and telegrams, many sent in mercy, and some in the spirit of reason, asking for clemency, many in a wild hysteria of fear, and the hideous hate that is born of fear, begging the governor to let “justice” take its course.