Truly if there be something inarticulate among us,yet uttered but pressing towards utterance,which is much wiser than anything we have lately articulated or brought into word or action,our outlooks are rather lamentable.The great majority of the powerful and active-minded,sunk in egoistic scepticisms,busied in chase of lucre,pleasure,and mere vulgar objects,looking with indifference on the world's woes,and passing carelessly by on the other side;and the select miity,of whom better might have been expected,bending all their strength to cure them by methods which can only make bad worse,and in the end render cure hopeless.A blind loquacious pruriency of indiscriminate Philanthropism substituting itself,with much self-laudation,for the silent divinely awful sense of Right and Wrong;--testifying too clearly that here is longer a divine sense of Right and Wrong;that,in the smoke of this universal,and alas inevitable and indispensable revolutionary fire,and burning up of worn-out rags of which the world is full,our life-atmosphere has (for the time)become one vile London fog,and the eternal loadstars are gone out for us!Gone out;--yet very visible if you can get above the fog;still there in their place,and quite the same as they always were!To whoever does still k of loadstars,the proceedings,which expand themselves daily,of these sublime philanthropic associations,and "universal sluggard-and-scoundrel protection-societies,"are a perpetual affliction.With their emancipations and abolition principles,and reigns of brotherhood and new methods of love,they have done great things in the White and in the Black World,during late years;and are preparing for greater.
In the interest of human reform,if there is ever to be any reform,and return to prosperity or to the possibility of prospering,it is urgent that the sense of all this (and it is mostly sense,but quite)should be sent about its business straightway,and forbidden to deceive the well-meaning souls among us any more.Reform,if we will understand that divine word,can begin till then.One day,I do k,this,as is the doom of all sense,will be drummed out of the world,with due placard stuck on its back,and the populace flinging dead cats at it:but whether soon or ,is by means so certain.
I rather guess,at present,quite soon.Fraternity,in other countries,has gone on,till it found itself unexpectedly manipulating guillotines by its chosen Robespierres,and become a fraternity like Cain's.Much to its amazement!For in fact it is all sense;there is an infinitesimal fraction of sense in it withal;which is so difficult to disengage;--which must be disengaged,and laid hold of,before Fraternity can vanish.
But to our subject,--the Model Prison,and the strange theory of life in action there.That,for the present,is my share in the wide adventure of Philanthropism;the world's share,and how and when it is to be liquidated and ended,rests with the Supreme Destinies.
Several months ago,some friends took me with them to see one of the London Prisons;a Prison of the exemplary or model kind.An immense circuit of buildings;cut out,girt with a high ring-wall,from the lanes and streets of the quarter,which is a dim and crowded one.Gateway as to a fortified place;then a spacious court,like the square of a city;broad staircases,passages to interior courts;fronts of stately architecture all round.It lodges some thousand or twelve hundred prisoners,besides the officers of the establishment.Surely one of the most perfect buildings,within the compass of London.We looked at the apartments,sleeping-cells,dining-rooms,working-rooms,general courts or special and private:excellent all,the ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity;in my life I never saw so clean a building;probably Duke in England lives in a mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness.
The bread,the cocoa,soup,meat,all the various sorts of food,in their respective cooking-places,we tasted:found them of excellence superlative.The prisoners sat at work,light work,picking oakum,and the like,in airy apartments with glass roofs,of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation;silent,or at least conversing only by secret signs:others were out,taking their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts:methodic composure,cleanliness,peace,substantial wholesome comfort reigned everywhere supreme.The women in other apartments,some able murderesses among them,all in the like state of methodic composure and substantial wholesome comfort,sat sewing:in long ranges of wash-houses,drying-houses and whatever pertains to the getting-up of clean linen,were certain others,with all conceivable mechanical furtherances,too arduously working.
The able murderesses were,though with great precautions of privacy,pointed out to us;and we were requested to look openly at them,or seem to ice them at all,as it was found to "cherish their vanity"when visitors looked at them.Schools too were there;intelligent teachers of both ***es,studiously instructing the still igant of these thieves.