But he was most in his element when the police judge was absent, as he was now and then. In that exigency the law gave Jones, as mayor, the power to appoint the acting police judge; and when Jones did not go down and sit as magistrate himself, he appointed me; and we always found some reason or other for letting all the culprits go. The foundations of society were shaken of course, and the editorials and sermons were heavy with all the predictions of disaster; one might have supposed that the whole wonderful and beautiful fabric of civilization which man had been so long in rearing was to fall forever into the awful abyss because a few miserable outcasts had not been put in prison. But nothing happened after all; the poor _misérables_ were back again in a few days, and made to resume their hopeless rounds through the prison doors; but the policemen of Toledo had their clubs taken away from them, and they became human, and learned to help people, and not to hurt them if they could avoid it; and that police judge who once fined Jones became in time one of the leaders in our city of the new social movement that has marked the last decade in America. I learned to know a good many people in that underworld, many of whom were professed criminals, and there were some remarkable characters among them. I learned that, just as Jones had said, they were all people, just folks, and that they had so much more good than bad in them, that if some way could be devised whereby they might have a little better opportunity to develop the good, there was hope for all of them. Of course, in any effort to help them,--and our efforts were not always perhaps wholly wise,--we encountered that most formidable and fundamental obstacle to prison reform, the desire in the human breast for revenge, the savage hatred which is perhaps some obscure instinct of protection against the anti-social members of society: it stands forever in the way of all prison reform, and of ameliorations of the lot of the poor. It is that which keeps the barbarity of capital punishment alive in the world; it is that which makes every prison in the land a hell, where from time to time the most revolting atrocities are practiced. Out of those experiences, out of the contemplation of the misery, the pathos, the hopelessness of the condition of those victims, I wrote “The Turn of the Balance.” I was very careful of my facts; I was purposely conservative, and, forgetting the advice of Goethe, softened things down; as for instance, where I had known of cases in which prisoners had been hung up in the bull-rings for thirty days,--being lowered to the floor each night of course,--I put it down as eight days, and so on. And the wise and virtuous judges and the preachers and the respectable people all said it was untrue, that such things could not be. Since then there have been investigations of prisons in most of the states, with revelations of conditions far worse than any I tried to portray.