What life meant to Johnson afterward I do not know; but I do know that he found home and protection with relatives on a farm, and the letters that he wrote me indicated that he took his place among them not as an ex-convict so much as a man ready to work for his living and entitled to respect. Being friendly he no doubt found friends; and though he was a man near fifty, perhaps the long-buried spirit of youth came to life again in the light of freedom. At all events, once more the blue skies were above him and he drew again the blessed breath of liberty. Although he never realized his dream of helping me to help others, I never doubted the sincerity of his desire to do so.
CHAPTER IX
Mr. William Ordway Partridge, in "Art for America," says to us: "Let us learn to look upon every child face that comes before us as a possible Shakespeare or Michael Angelo or Beethoven. The artistic world is rejoicing over the discovery in Greece of some beautiful fragments of sculpture hidden far beneath the débris of centuries; shall we not rejoice more richly when we are able to dig down beneath the surface of the commonest child that comes to us from our great cities, and discover and develop that faculty in him which is to make him fit to live in usefulness with his fellow men? Seeking for these qualities in the child we shall best conserve, as is done in physical nature, the highest type, until we have raised all human life to a higher level."
I hope that some day Mr. Partridge will write a plea for elementary art classes in our prisons. For in every prison there are gifted men and boys whose special talents might be so trained and developed as to change the channel of their lives. What chances our prisons have with these wards of the state, to discover and develop the individual powers that might make their owners self-respecting and self-supporting men!
We are doing this in our institutions for the feeble-minded and with interesting results, but in our prisons the genius of a Michael Angelo might be stifled—the musical gift of a Chopin doomed to eternal silence.
Mr. Partridge's belief in the latent possibilities in our common children went to my heart, because I had known Anton Zabrinski; and yet I can never think of Anton Zabrinski as a common child.
The story of his life is brief; but his few years enclosed the circle of childhood, youth, aspiration, hope, horror, tragedy, pain, and death; and all the beautiful possibilities of his outward life were blighted.
Anton's home was in the west side of Chicago, in that region where successive unpronounceable names above doors and across windows assure one that Poland is not lost but scattered.