A Life for a Life, Volume 3 (of 3)Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock
General
A Life for a Life, Volume 3 (of 3)
Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock
Fiction
This great prison is, you know, a model of its kind, on the solitary,
sanitary, and moral improvement system; excellent, no doubt, compared
with that which preceded it. The prisoners are numerous,-and as soon as
many of them get out they take the greatest pains to get in again; such
are the comforts of gaol life contrasted with that outside. Yet they
seem to me often like a herd of brute beasts, fed and stalled by rule
in the manner best to preserve their health, and keep them from injuring
their neighbours; their bodies well looked after, but their souls--they
might scarcely have any! They are simply Nos. 1, 2, 3, and so on, with
nothing of human individuality or responsibility about them. Even their
faces grow to the same pattern, dull, fat, clean, and stolid. During the
exercising hour, I sometimes stand and watch them, each pacing his small
bricked circle, and rarely catch one countenance which has a ray of
expression or intelligence.
Good as many of its results are, I have my doubts as to this solitary
system; but they are expressed on paper in the M.S. you asked for, my
kind little lady! so I will not repeat them here.
Yet it will be a change of thought from your sister's sick-room for you
to think of me in mine--not a sick-room though, thank God! This is a
most healthy region: the sea-wind sweeps round the prison-walls, and
shakes the roses in the governor's garden till one can hardly believe it
is so dreary a place inside. Dreary enough sometimes to make one believe
in that reformer who offered to convert some depraved region into a
perfect Utopia, provided the males above the age of fourteen were all
summarily hanged.
Do you smile, my love, at this compliment to your sex at the expense of
mine? Yet I see wretches here, whom I cannot hardly believe share the
same common womanhood as my Theodora. Think over carefully what I asked
you about Lydia Cartwright; it is seldom suddenly, but step by step,
that this degradation comes. And at every step there is hope; at least,
such is my experience.
Do not suppose, from this description, that I am disheartened at my
work here; besides rules and regulations, there is still much room for
personal influence, especially in hospital. When a man is sick or dying,
unconsciously his heart is humanized--he thinks of God. From this simple
cause, my calling has a great advantage over all others; and it is much
to have physical agencies on one's side, as I do not get them in the
streets and towns. To-day, looking up from a clean, tidy, airy cell,
where the occupant had at least a chance of learning to read if he
chose; and, seeing through the window the patch of bright blue sky,
fresh and pure as ever sky was, I thought of two lines you once repeated
to me out of your dear head, so full of poetry:=
````"God's in His heaven;
`````All's right with the world."=
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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