It may be that in these little incidents I give the impression that he was a trifler, but that is not the case. He knew, of course, that so far as doing any good whatever in the world is concerned, our whole penal system is a farce at which one might laugh if it did not cause so many tears to be shed in the world. But he did try to be kind to the inmates, and by the operation of the parole system succeeded to an extent commensurate with that attained by Dr. Cooley of Cleveland. Of course it was all done under the supervision of Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, who rightly characterized our whole penal system when he said: “Whenever you send one to prison you send four or five; you send a man’s wife and his mother, and his sister and his children, who are all innocent, and you never do him any good.” But the workhouse, though under Mr. Mooney’s direction, was not connected with the police department, except in the archaic minds of those who thought if we were only harsh and hard enough in our use of both, we could drive evil, or at least the appearance of evil, out of the city, and leave it, standing like a rock of morality, in the weltering waste of immorality all about us. XLVII In no respect has the utter impotence of medieval machinery in suppressing vice been more definitely proved than in the great failure of society in dealing with what is called the social evil. Whenever my mind runs on this subject, as anyone’s mind must in the present recrudescence of that Puritanism which never had its mind on anything else, I invariably think of Golden Rule Jones and the incidents in that impossible warfare which worried him into a premature grave. He was an odd man, born so far out of his time that the sins of others never troubled his conscience. He was so great, and knew so much of life, more perhaps than he did of history, on every page of which he would have found the confirmations of the opinions life had taught him, that he divined all lewdness, all obscenity to be subjective and not objective, so that he found less to abhor in the sins of the vicious than in the state of mind of their indefatigable accusers and pursuers. And he had his own way of meeting their complaints. Once a committee of ladies and gentlemen called upon him with the demand that he obliterate the social evil, off-hand and instantly. They were simple, brief and to the point. They informed him that the laws providing for chastity were being broken, that there were prostitutes in the city, and in short, urged him to put a stop to it. “But what am I to do?” he inquired. “These women are here.” “Have the police,” they said, a new, simple and happy device suddenly occurring to them, “drive them out of town and close up their houses!” They sat and looked at him, triumphantly. “But where shall I have the police drive them? Over to Detroit or to Cleveland, or merely out into the country? They have to go somewhere, you know.”