n the convict chain-gang and forced to work
along the roads. Street-begging was prohibited by drastic laws; poverty
was substantially a crime. The moment a propertyless person stole, the
assumption at once was that he was _prima facie_ a criminal; but let the
powerful propertied man steal and government at once refused to see the
criminal _intent_; if he were prosecuted, the usual outcome was that he
never went to jail. Hundreds of specific instances could be given to
prove this. One of the most noted of these was that of Samuel Swartwout,
who was Collector of the Port of New York for a considerable period and
who, at the same time, was a financier and large land-speculation
promoter. It came out in 1838 that he had stolen the enormous sum of
$1,222,705.69 from the Government,[55] which money he had used in his
schemes. He was a fugitive from justice for a time, but upon his return
was looked upon extenuatingly as the "victim of circumstances" and he
never languished in jail.

Money was the standard of everything. The propertied person could commit
any kind of crime, short of murder, and could at once get free on bail.
But what happened to the accused who was poor? Here is a contemporaneous
description of one of the prisons of the period:

"In Bridewell, white females of every grade of character, from the
innocent who is in the end acquitted, down to the basest wretch
that ever disgraced the refuges of prostitution, are crowded into
the same abandoned abode. With the white male prisons, the case is
little altered.... And so it is with the colored prisoners of both
sexes. Hundreds are taken up and sent to these places, who, after
remaining frequently several weeks, are found to be innocent of
the crime alleged and are then let loose upon the community."[56]

"Let loose upon the community." Does not this clause in itself convey
volumes of significance of the attitude of the propertied interests,
even when banded together in a pseudo "charitable" enterprise, toward
the poverty-stricken? While thus the charitable societies were holding
up the destitute to scorn and contumely as outcasts and were loftily
lecturing down to the poor on the evils of intemperance and
gambling--practices which were astoundingly prevalent among the rich--at
no time did they make any attempt to alter laws so glaringly unjust that
they practically made poverty a distinct crime, subject to long terms of
impri