“Then you think that if the right men were trusted they could take care of the bad ones?” I ask.
“Sure!” replies my enthusiastic partner.
“Well, now let’s see about this thing,” I say, becoming more and more interested as the great possibilities of the plan present themselves to my mind. “Suppose it is Sunday afternoon and Superintendent Riley has given permission to use the yard. You can’t have the officers coming back and spoiling their day off. How would you manage?”
“Why, just let the League fellows manage themselves,” is Jack’s answer.
“Yes, but how?” I persist. “You’d probably have an occasional fight of some sort, and you’d have to have some means of enforcing discipline. Could each company have a convict officer, a lieutenant to assist the regular captain?”
Jack looks grave. “That would be too much like Elmira,” he says. “I’m afraid the fellows wouldn’t fall for it. You know they just hate those Elmira officers; they’re nothing but stool-pigeons.”
Right here is where my Junior Republic experience comes to our aid.
“Yes,” I say, “but we wouldn’t have any Elmira stool-pigeons. Down there the inmate officers are appointed by the prison authorities, aren’t they? Well, here we’d have the members of the League elect their own officers.”
Jack stares at me a moment, and then his quick mind grasps the point. “That’s it, that’s it,” he assents, eagerly, “we’ve got it now. Of course if the men elect their own officers they won’t be stool-pigeons.”
“Certainly not, they can’t be,” I rejoin, feeling now on familiar and secure ground, “for if the men elect them, they will be representatives of the men and bound to feel themselves responsible to the men. They may turn out to be poor officers—dictatorial, or weak, or incompetent—but they will not be stool-pigeons. Then you can guard against it still further by providing that whenever the men of a company lose faith in their officer he can be recalled and a new one elected.”