"They will all cheat, and lie, and shirk, if they can."
That might be so generally; but I knew that I had women who would rather work reasonably than be idle, because time passed faster when they were employed, if from no other motive.
If they would all lie, and cheat, and shirk, the discipline that was applied to them did not work any reformation in their characters.
The treatment meted out to them was hard, unremitting toil, enforced by harsh words and punishment.
Implicit obedience to arbitrary rules was exacted, with no reasons given why they were enforced, and no explanations for their necessity. The hard work, the solitary cell, the meagre food, the damp stone prison, the narrow cells, and the crawling vermin, all went in revision before me.
Can such discipline soften the heart, and turn its stern purposes to commit crime into the ways of virtue? Must not the hearts of these poor things inevitably grow harder under such influences, till they become the human fiends which they sometimes manifest themselves?
I looked along the whitewashed floor. Rats and mice were running fearlessly about, holding gay revel over the crumbs that had been scattered to them by the prisoners in their rooms.
I looked up at the cells. Human faces stared down upon me, through the bars, made ghastly by the flickering gas-light. There were human hearts, alive with all human emotions, beating beneath those horrid faces.
Directly in front of me, with no light, save one narrow, stinted ray, which glimmered through the key-hole, with no bed but the stone floor, no seat but the wooden bucket, nothing to lean against but the bare brick walls, lay a girl "in solitary."
No human being has life enough to stir up those cold stones to warmth, no change can soften them to comfort. Whichever way she turns, the hard, chilling granite is her resting-place. She lies there with no covering but her usual clothing, and that has been dealt out to her with the spare hand of public rigor. No discretionary mercy has interposed to provide a plank or a blanket to break the chill.