I was mistaken; the public took the thing resignedly to say the least. And though I consented to no individual animosities—for individuals in such transactions are but creatures of their trade, subdued to what they work in, like the dyer's hand—I could not so easily absolve the impersonal master. The fault inhered of course not in any grudge of the community against us, but in the prevalent civic neglect (in which, in my time, I had participated with the rest) of duties to the state, theoretically impersonal, but which cannot proceed otherwise than on personal accounts.
Man is frail; but, next to sincere religious conviction, no principle exists so strong to control him as noblesse oblige—the impulse to keep faith and to deal honestly imposed not by his individual conscience alone, but by the pure traditions of his inheritance. The man who has the honor of his forefathers to preserve—an honor which may be a part of the nation's honor—is a hundred-fold better fortified against base action than is the son of thieves, or even of nobodies. The latter may find heroism enough to resist temptation, but the former is not tempted; he dismisses the thing at the start as preposterous. It is no credit to him to put such temptation aside, but it is black infamy and treachery to make terms with it. If he do make terms with it, no punishment can be too severe—though I take leave to say that the external penalties which state or nation can inflict are trivial compared with those deadly ones which torture him from within; but before crediting him with having yielded, the state or nation should not merely assume his innocence—a stipulation which our law indeed makes, but which is notoriously disregarded by prosecuting attorneys—but should weigh and sift with the most anxious and jealous scrutiny anything and everything which might appear inconsistent therewith. A son of a thief who steals does but follow his inborn instinct; but a thief whose ancestors were gentlemen is a monster, and monsters are rare.
In England and the other older countries, the principle of noblesse oblige still has weight with the public as well as with the individual; here, the welter of democracy, which has not evolved into distinct human form, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see a scoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate the public mania for success in the form of concrete wealth which multiplies inducements to crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish acceptance of such inducements, with the result that while in its practical life it rushes in one direction, it erects in its courts a fantastic counsel of perfection which points in a direction precisely opposite. Our law tends not merely to the penalizing of real crimes, but to the manufacture of artificial ones; and the simple standard of natural or intuitive morals is bewilderingly complicated with a régimen of patent nostrums, conceived in error and administered in folly.
Sitting in the car window with my friend, I revolved these things, while the sunny landscape wheeled past outside, and our guardians chewed gum in the adjoining section. After all was said and done, amid whatever was strange and improbable, he and I were going to the penitentiary in the guise of common swindlers. A pioneer on the western plains, in the old days, riding homeward after several hours' absence, found his cabin a charred ruin, his property destroyed, his wife lying outraged with her throat cut, his children huddled among the débris with their brains dashed out. Sitting on his bronco, he contemplated the immeasurable horror of the catastrophe, and finally muttered, "This is ridiculous!"
"This is ridiculous!" I remarked to my companion; and he consented with a smile; when language goes bankrupt, the simple phrase is least inadequate. "We may as well have lunch," he said; and we rose and journeyed to the rear of the train, sedulously attended by our deputies. The spontaneous routine of the physical life is often a valuable support to the spiritual, reminding the latter that we exist from one moment to another, and do wisely to be economical of forecasts or retrospects. We journeyed back, through innocent scenes of traveling life, to the smoking compartment, which happened to be vacant; and under the consoling influence of tobacco our elder companion sought to lighten the shadows of destiny.
"You gentlemen," he said, uttering smoke enjoyingly through mouth and nostrils, "don't need to worry none. It's like this: the judge figured to let you off easy. He's bound, of course, to play up to the statute by handin' you your bit, but, to start with, he cuts it down all he can, and then what does he do but date you back four months to the openin' of the trial! All right! After four months you're eligible for parole on a year and a day's sentence, ain't yer? Your trial began on November 25th, and to-day is the 24th of March. That means, don't it, that you make your application the very next thing after they gets you on the penitentiary register to-morrer! Why, look-a-here," he continued, warming to his theme, and becoming, like Gladstone as depicted by Beaconsfield, intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, "it wouldn't surprise me, not a bit, sir, if you and your mate was to slip back with us on the train to-morrer evenin', and the whole bunch of us be back in little old New York along about Wednesday! That's right! An' what I says is, that ain't no punishment—that's no more'n takin' a pleasure trip down South, at the suitable time o' year! An' I guess I been on the job long enough to know what I'm talkin' about!"
We guessed he knew that he was talking benevolent fictions; and yet there was plausibility in his argument. The law did not allow parole on sentences of a year or under, but on anything over one year, a convict was eligible, and our sentence of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonth therefore brought us within this provision. In imposing that extra day, the judge could hardly have been motived by anything except the intention to open this door to us; and although the regular meeting of the parole board at the prison was not due just then, we were informed that an extra meeting might be summoned at any time. The board consisted of the warden of the prison, the doctor, and the official who presided at all parole board meetings at the various federal penitentiaries throughout the country,—Robert LaDow. The law declares that a majority of the board decides the applications that come before it; and as two members of the board make a quorum, it seemed obvious that the warden and the doctor of Atlanta Penitentiary would serve our turn—if they wanted to. Mr. LaDow, of course, might be appealed to by telegraph if expedient.
Turning the thing over, therefore, with the cozening rogue in front of us drawing our attention to the buttered side as often as it appeared, we could hardly avoid the conclusion that there was a possibility of his being right. We might be required to remain in Atlanta barely long enough to don a suit of prison clothing and to have our bertillons made, and forthwith make a triumphal return home, with our scarlet sins washed white as snow. Of such an imprisonment it might be said, as wrote the poet of the baby that died at birth,
"If it so soon was to be done for,
One wonders what it was begun for,"
but it would not be the first thing that we had noticed in Federal administration of justice which might have been similarly criticized.