Alfred was devoted to the writings of John Draper and devoured everything within his reach on sociology, especially everything relating to the labor problems. He had theories of his own on many lines of public welfare, but no taint of anarchy or class hatred distorts his ideals of justice for all. He always advocates constructive rather than destructive measures.
Occasionally Alfred refers to the poets. He enjoys Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lowell is an especial favorite; while delighting in the "Biglow Papers," he quotes with appreciation from Lowell's more serious poetry. The companionship of Thackeray, Dickens, and Scott brightened and mellowed many dark, hard hours for Alfred. "Sir Walter Scott's novels broke my taste for trashy stuff," he writes. Naturally, Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" absorbed and thrilled him. "Shall I ever forget Jean Valjean, the galley slave; or Cosette? While reading the story I thought such a character as the Bishop impossible. I was mistaken." Of Charles Reade he says: "One cannot help loving Reade. He has such a dashing, rollicking style. And then he hardly ever wrote except to denounce some wrong or sham." Even in fiction his preference follows the trend of his burning love and pity for the desolate and oppressed. How he would have worshipped Tolstoi!
Complaint or criticism of the hardships of convict life forms small part of the thirty letters written me by Alfred while in prison. He takes this stand: "I ought not to complain because I brought this punishment upon myself." "I am almost glad if anyone does wrong to me because I feel that it helps balance my account for the wrongs I have done others." Shall we never escape from that terrible idea of the moral necessity of expiation, even at the cost of another?
Nevertheless, Alfred feels the hardships he endures and knows how to present them. And he is not "speaking for the gallery" but to his one friend when he writes:
"Try to imagine yourself working all day on a stool, not allowed to stand even when your work can be better done that way. If you hear a noise you must not look up. You are within two feet of a companion but you must not speak. You sit on your stool all day long and work. Nothing but work. Outside my mind was a pleasure to me, in here it is a torture. It seems as if the minutes were hours, the hours days, the days centuries. A man in prison is supposed to be a machine. So long as he does ten hours' work a day--don't smile, don't talk, don't look up from his work, does work enough to suit the contractors and does it well and obeys the long number of unwritten rules he is all right. The trouble with the convicts is that they can't get it out of their heads that they are human beings and not machines. The present system may be good statesmanship. It is bad Christianity. But I doubt if it is good statesmanship to maintain a system that makes so many men kill themselves, go crazy, or if they do get out of the Shadow alive go out hating the State and their fellowmen. As a convict said to me, 'It's funny that in this age of enlightenment they have not found out that to brutalize a man will never reform him. I have not been led to reform by prison life. It has made me more bitter at times than I thought I ever could be. One cannot live in a prison without seeing and hearing things to make one's blood boil....'