A criminal who is trying to reform is generally a very helpless being. He was not, to begin with, the strongest man mentally, and after confinement is still less so. He is preoccupied, suspicious and a dreamer, and when he gets a glimpse of himself in all his naked realities, is apt to become depressed and discouraged. He is easily led, and certainly no man needs a good friend as much as the ex-convict. He is distrusted by everybody, is apt to be "piped off" wherever he goes, and finds it hard to get work which he can do. There are hundreds of men in our prisons to-day who, if they could find somebody who would trust them and take a genuine interest in them, would reform and become respectable citizens. That is where the Tammany politician, whom I have called Senator Wet Coin is a better man than the majority of reformers. When a man goes to him and says he wants to square it he takes him by the hand, trusts and helps him. Wet Coin does not hand him a soup ticket and a tract nor does he hold on tight to his own watch chain fearing for his red super, hastily bidding the ex-gun to be with Jesus.
EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT.
The life of the thief is at an end; and the life of the man and good citizen has begun. For I am convinced that Jim is strictly on the level, and will remain so. The only thing yet lacking to make his reform sure is a job. I, and those of my friends who are interested, have as yet failed to find anything for him to do that is, under the circumstances, desirable. The story of my disappointments in this respect is a long one, and I shall not tell it. I have learned to think that patience is the greatest of the virtues; and of this virtue an ex-gun needs an enormous amount. If Jim and his friends prove good in this way, the job will come. But waiting is hard, for Jim is nervous, in bad health, with an old mother to look after, and with new ambitions which make keen his sense of time lost.
One word about his character: I sometimes think of my friend the ex-thief as "Light-fingered Jim"; and in that name there lingers a note of vague apology. As he told his story to me, I saw everywhere the mark of the natural rogue, of the man grown with a roguish boy's brain. The humor of much of his tale seemed to me strong. I was never able to look upon him as a deliberate malefactor. He constantly impressed me as gentle and imaginative, impressionable and easily influenced, but not naturally vicious or vindictive. If I am right, his reform is nothing more or less than the coming to years of sober maturity. He is now thirty-five years old, and as he himself puts it: "Some men acquire wisdom at twenty-one, others at thirty-five, and some never."
FOOTNOTES
[A] Summer of 1902
[B] Sic. (Editor's Note.)
EVERYMAN
The XVth Century morality play, with reproductions of old wood cuts. $1.00, postage paid or at your bookseller's. The first book to bear the imprint of Fox, Duffield & Company.