And such things have gone on, and are going on to-day; but nobody cares. XXII And yet somebody after all did care about all those miserable souls who are immured in the terrible prisons which society maintains as monuments to the strange and implacable hatred in the breast of mankind; perhaps, in the last chapter of these vagrant memories, I allowed to creep into my utterance some of the old bitterness which now and then would taint our efforts, do what we might. And that is not at all the note I would adopt, though it used at times to be very difficult not to do so; one cannot, day after day, beat against the old and solid and impregnable wall of human institutions without becoming sore and sick in one’s soul. And there is no institution which society so cherishes as she does her penal institutions, and most sacrosanct of these are the ax, the guillotine, the garrote, the gibbet, the electric chair. We tried at each session of the legislature to secure the passage of a bill abolishing capital punishment, but the good people, those who felt that they held in their keeping the morals of the state, always opposed it and defeated it. Beloved and sacred institution! No wonder the ship-wrecked sailor, cast upon an unknown shore, on looking up and beholding a gallows, fell on his knees and said; “Thank God, I’m in a Christian land!” Travelers visit prisons and places of execution, those historic spots where humanity made red blots on its pathway in the notion that it was doing justice, and always they sigh and shake their heads, beholding in those events only a supreme folly and a supreme cruelty. All the executions, all the imprisonments of the past are seen to have been mistakes made by savages; there is not one for which to-day a word is uttered in excuse. All the Golgothas of the world have become Calvaries, where men go in pity and in tears in the hope that their regret may somehow work a retroactive expiation of the guilt of their cruel ancestors--and they rise from their knees and go forth and acquiesce in brutalities that are to-day different only in the slightest of degrees from those they bemoan. And so all the other executions of death sentences, on subjects less distinguished, with no glimmer of the halo of romance, no meed of martyrdom to illumine them, are seen to have been huge and grotesque mistakes of a humanity that at times gives itself over to the elemental savage lust of the blood of its fellows. I do not say, of course, that there was any similarity between the offenses of those whom Jones and I were concerned about in those days and those striking figures who illustrate the history of the world and mark the slow spiral path of the progress of mankind; these were the commonest of common criminals, poor, mistaken, misshapen beings, somehow marred in the making.