This was in the days of zebra clothing, short hair, the lock-step, contract labor, and all around soul-murder.
I know, however, that there have been many changes since then; so that although your experience, while proving that the great and assinine waste of good material is still going on in the social mill, and therefore most heart-stirring, will never carry with it the soul-blighting memories of one who for fourteen years marched the lock-step.
Of course, now that you are free, you will be in for your knocks as an ex-con and all that, but why worry? You will still have the privilege of the free air with opportunity always before you. Of course you are bound to meet with that duty loving stiff who knowing of your having been in the social waste heap believes in advertising the fact. But again, why worry? If you feel that you can make good--why?
Some time I want to tell you about my old friend O'Hoolihan and the bird. He spent twenty-seven years in the place you just left and made one of the greatest sacrifices for a little robin redbreast that I ever knew a man to make--well, say for the benefit of a bird.
"The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there."
So wrote the poet of Reading Gaol, whose bitter expiation has left an enduring mark in literature. But the lines do not express the whole truth. The Prison System does its best to crush all that is strong and good, but you can not always destroy "that capability and god-like reason" in man. Out of the prison which man has made for his fellow-man, this human cesspool and breeding place of physical, mental and moral disease, emerge a few noble souls, reborn and purified.
All about me while I was in prison--that hard and brutal place of revenge, I felt the quiet strivings of mighty, purifying forces--the divine in man struggling for expression and development. Give these forces free play, and who knows what the result may be? The spirit of God can do wondrous things when not thwarted by the impious hand of man.
It will not be forgotten, I hope, the conversation Jack Murphy and I had about the formation of a Good Conduct League among the prisoners. My partner lost no time in getting the affair under way. On the very afternoon of our parting in the Warden's office he wrote me the following letter. It is made public with considerable reluctance, because it seems like violating a sacred confidence. On the other hand when I spoke to Jack about the matter his reply was characteristic. "Print it if you want to, Tom. Whatever I have said or written you can do anything you like with; and especially if you think it will help the League."