Since then I have visited most of the county jails, prisons and penitentiaries in which immigrants are likely to be found. Intelligent and humane wardens, of whom there are a few, have told me that more than half the alien prisoners are suffering innocently, from transgressing laws of which they were ignorant, and that their punishment is too often much more severe than necessary.
The following narration of several incidents which recently came under my observation will be pardoned, I hope, when their full import is seen.
Not long ago I went to lecture in a Kansas town,—one of those irreproachable communities in which it is good to bring up children because of the moral atmosphere. The town has a New England conscience with a Kansas attachment. It boasts of having been a station in the underground railway, and it maintains a most uncompromising attitude toward certain social delinquencies, especially the sale of liquor.
Upon my arrival I was cordially received by a committee, and one of its members told me that the jail was full of criminal foreigners—Greeks. What crimes they had committed he did not know.
Recalling my own experience, I made inquiries and found that six Greeks were in the county jail. They had been arrested in September (it was now March) charged with the heinous crime of having gone to the unregenerate State of Nebraska, where they purchased a barrel of beer which they drank on the Sabbath day in their camp by the railroad.
Possibly these Greeks were just ignorant foreigners and now harbor no sense of injustice suffered; possibly they still think this country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They may even be ready to obey its laws and reverence its institutions. I do not know how they feel, but I do know this: those Greeks were kept in prison for breaking a law of which they were ignorant, and even if they were aware of its existence and broke it knowingly, the punishment did not fit the crime.
They were kept as criminals and regarded as criminals; they were unvisited and uncomforted; and they were incarcerated at a time when their country called for her native sons to do battle against the Turk.
Some day the sense of injustice suffered may come to them, and they will ask themselves whether every man in Kansas who drinks beer is punished as they were. They will wonder why real criminals go free, or escape with nominal punishment. I venture to predict that in some great crisis, when this country needs men who respect her laws and love her institutions, these men, and multitudes of others who have suffered such injustices as they have, will fail her.
I pleaded for those imprisoned Greeks that night, and my plea was effective. The just judge who condemned them pardoned them; but so just was he that the fine of one hundred dollars each, not yet paid, was left hanging over them, and to their credit be it said, they remained in that town and paid every cent of it. This judge no doubt knows his New Testament; he certainly made the Greeks pay the “uttermost farthing” before his outraged sense of justice was appeased.
Those Greeks spent, together, over three years in jail, forfeited more than fifteen hundred dollars in wages, and lost in bodily health and self-respect beyond calculation.