understood as asserting that all keepers are
brutal, or even a majority of them. I hope and believe that by far the
greater number of the officers serving in our prisons are naturally
honorable and kindly men, but so were the slave-owners before the Civil
War. And just as it was perfectly fair to judge of the right and wrong of
slavery not by any question of the fair treatment of the majority of
slaves, but by the hideous possibilities which frequently became no less
hideous facts, so we must recognize, in dealing with our Prison System,
that many really well-meaning men will operate a system in which the
brutality of an officer goes unpunished, often in a brutal manner.

The reason of this is not far to seek--a reason which also obtained in the
slave system. The most common and powerful impulse that drives an
ordinary, well-meaning man to brutality is fear. Raise the cry of "Fire"
in a crowded place, and many an excellent person will discard in the
frantic moment every vestige of civilization. The elemental brute will
emerge, and he will trample down women and children, will perform almost
any crime in the calendar in his mad rush for safety. The truth of this
has been demonstrated many times.

In prison, where each officer believes that his life is in constant
danger, the keeper tends to become callous, the sense of that danger
blunts his higher qualities. He comes to regard with mingled contempt and
fear those dumb, gray creatures over whom he has such irresponsible
power--creatures who can at any moment rise in revolt and give him the
death blow. And as they undoubtedly possess that power, he is always
fearful that they may use it, for are they not dangerous "criminals"? And
undoubtedly there is basis for his fear, for some of those men are
dangerous, rendered more so by the nerve-racking System.

I can conceive no more terribly disintegrating moral experience than that
of being a keeper over convicts. However much I pity the prisoners, I
think that spiritually their position is far preferable to that of their
guards. These latter are placed in an impossible position; for they are
not to blame for the System under which their finer qualities have so few
chances of being exercised.

But I have been betrayed into rather more of a discussion than I intended,
a discussion out of place in this chronicle of facts. I have inserted so
much by way of explanation both of what I have narrated in the foregoing
chapter and o