But I have been betrayed into rather more of a discussion than I intended, a discussion out of place in this chronicle of facts. I have inserted so much by way of explanation both of what I have narrated in the foregoing chapter and of what I shall have to tell in those that are to come.
Since the above was written I have run across a passage in a book on English prisons which confirms so strikingly one of the statements just expressed that room must be made for it. “The real atmosphere of Dartmoor,” says the author, Mr. Albert Paterson, writing of Dartmoor Prison, “so far as the men responsible for its well-being and discipline are concerned, is that of a handful of whites on the American frontier among ten times their number of Apache Indians. ‘We stand on a volcano,’ an officer said to the writer in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘If our convicts here had opportunity to combine and could trust one another, the place would be wrecked in an hour.’”
Aside from the author’s ridiculously belated simile of the American frontier, we have here an accurate and forcible statement of the prison keeper’s constant nervous apprehension of danger and the necessity of being prepared at any moment to sell his life as dearly as possible. And, of course, this feeling of the keeper increases his severity and the severity increases the danger, and so we have the vicious circle complete.
I am not now in any way disputing the necessity of a keeper being constantly on his guard, I am not saying whether this view of things is right or wrong, and when I use the word fear I do not mean cowardice—a very different thing, for a brave man can feel fear. I am simply trying to point out that in prison, as elsewhere, when men are dominated by fear, brutality is the inevitable result.
CHAPTER X
THURSDAY
In my cell, Thursday evening, October 2.
This morning is cloudy and dark; it has been raining heavily during the night, and the atmosphere is damp and oppressive. Oppressive too is the feeling left by the unexplained occurrences of last evening.