Thomas Holmes

“ I see women with bruised and battered faces, I see their cuts and wounds and putrefying sores, I hear stories of devilish cruelty, and I hear the poor bruised women pleading that their husbands may not be punished for their cruelty. ‘Don’t send him to prison! Don’t send him to prison! He is a good husband when he is sober!’ I hear the words again and again. I see more women with poor, thin clothing. I look into their faces, and I see sorrow writ large and rings of care around their eyes, and in their hearts a weight of agony that makes them ready to curse God and die. ”

“ Education is powerless, culture is powerless, refinement is powerless, good desires are powerless, self-respect is powerless, before this omnipotent craving. As I sit writing, all of these men whom I have ever met seem to crowd round me, and they are all educated men—University men and business men, clergymen and ministers of religion, artists and literary men, men of historic family and doctors of repute—I see them all again in their hopeless misery. I listen to their appeals for help, and I feel again the dint of pity as I look into their faces. ”

“ From police court to prison, from prison to the streets, thence again to the court, was the regular order of her life. Her quips and cranks, ready wit, and cool assurance, made her dear to reporters, and Jane became national property.
Vain to an extraordinary extent, she dearly prized the notoriety that a police court afforded her. To her the hum of amused wonder and scarcely suppressed laughter when ‘No. 12, Jane Cakebread, your worship,’ was announced by the gaoler was the very breath of life, and proved ample compensation for the discomfort of the cells. ”

“ No thrilling joy is hers; her heart and pulses never bound with it, for the sufferings of those years cannot be forgotten, the effects of them cannot be wiped out, but she has home comfort, if nothing more; for with the absence of drink there is the absence of cruelty. And after the darkness and storms of the mid-day of her life, I humbly hope there may be the quiet after-glow of the evening; and when time has laid its healing touch upon her poor, sore heart, the heart that yearned for love and sympathy may in some measure be compensated, and a chastened happiness be her lot. ”

“ The desire to increase happiness increases by giving happiness. I am not content, neither do I want to be content. Did not old Augustine say, ‘The man that says “Enough!” that man’s soul is lost?’ I have tasted the delight of making some of the poorest and most miserable glad, and I long to see more fully the realization of my hopes. I am told by some worthy people that I am ‘spoiling’ these women. I want to. ‘You will make them dissatisfied with their own homes.’ I hope I may, for the apathetic content of the poor with their dirt and misery constitutes the greatest danger. ”

“ The marvel is that they are as good as they are, for of many it may be said, ‘Hope is not for them.’ And yet to go on, month after month, year after year, with their self-imposed duties, with their hard, onerous, and ill-requited toil, uncheered and uninspired by hope, makes the marvel the greater and their lives the more noble. Some, as I have shown, become apathetic, and work on as machines, but still on and on with their drudgery they go, until welcome and well-earned death comes to them. ”

“ I cannot conceive how it can be wrong for a man to earn his own living while in prison. Neither can I conceive the wisdom of allowing to great trading organizations rights and privileges which we would withhold from the State. But I can see the absurdity of keeping a man in prison for years, during those years giving him unremunerative work, and handing him over when released to some society, to continue working for nothing. The cheapness of his labour when at liberty is the danger, not the work he may do in prison. ”

“ No friends in London; to go day after day to meet with abject poverty, hopeless misery, and unspeakable sorrows; to have a full heart and empty hands. I have said many a time to myself: ‘Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.’ It was deep—too deep. I wonder how it is that folk undoubtedly good think that poor humanity can be warmed, fed, and comforted with tracts, or be saved with goody stories. Poor humanity doesn’t much care for advice gratis, though some folk seem sent into the world on purpose to bestow it. ”

“ For all these things will be made in light and cleanliness, and the brand of shame will be no longer upon them. Then the pioneers of the Empire at the ends of the earth will be no longer sad when their hearts, touched by remembrance, vibrate to the magnet of their soul, their old country and home. For in the circuit of the sun gladness and joy shall be felt in the knowledge that the poorest of the poor in the world’s greatest city have a chance for health and virtue, for peace and comfort. ”

“ I want to be a happy woman, but my life has been so hard, so very hard. I am feeling stronger, but I cannot lose the horror of what I have done; but do believe me, for I am grateful to the magistrate and you for the great kindness shown to me.
‘Yours gratefully.’
Fifteen years of hopeless, unending toil and of practical starvation are enough to quench the hope that is said to ‘spring eternal in the human heart,’ and without hope there can be no faith. ”

“ Let him know that better food, better and more abundant literature (not too ‘goody’) , some social recreation and some relaxation from dead monotony, will be his reward. Let him know that more interesting work awaits him. Let him know that he shall have a chance of seeing the likeness of his own face, of hearing his own voice, of being fed as a human being, and, my life for it, you shall inspire many a man to hope. Hope takes to herself many virtues, for with hope all things are possible for good, but without that saving grace all things are possible for evil. ”

“ So in the remaining chapters of this book I want to tell of humanity, of its good and evil, of its struggles and its failures, of its glory and of its shame—yea, and also of its sufferings and its wrongs. Down, low down, for years I have been groping among it, sometimes blindly, and sometimes with a ray of light, making here and there some rough places plain, and untying now and again some tangled knot; but more often baffled and defeated, yet always learning and ever seeing some new point for good or evil among them. ”

“ Why may not the husband summon the wife? If a wife commits a certain offence once, though in every other respects she may be a decent woman, the law is outraged and society scandalized, so much so, that the husband is entitled to cast her off. But a lifetime of wifely drunkenness, of horrible dirt, of insensate waste and utter neglect, are at present not worth a moment’s consideration. These are the women who ought to be the inmates of our inebriate reformatories, and numbers of husbands would be only too glad to pay reasonable sums for their detention and treatment. ”

“ One thing to me seems certain and palpable: working men cannot have home happiness and home culture and the public-house. The two are in direct antagonism. It is for them to make the choice. Will they make a wise choice? I doubt it, for has it not been said, ‘They who drink beer, think beer’?
Nor is it the children of the poorest who leave home at an early age; for the poor widow, who is left to fight life’s battle with three or four children, manages, as a rule, to keep those children round her, and her struggles for them are heroic. ”

“ Men may be the more credulous; if so, they have more faith and hope. I can see through no one. I do not want to. I am not worse than the average male, but I would not like anyone to see through me; and quite certain am I that I would not like to rake anyone fore and aft with mental rays. Many a time I have shut my eyes that I might not see, for I have learned to be pitiful. And this is the great lesson to be learned in a London police court. ”

“ He not only knew it was wrong and a crime, but he also knew it was folly, and could not pay. He looked at me for a moment, and then said: ‘You have seen the power of drink; you know the fascination of gambling. Bring drink, gambling, horse-racing, and roll them into one, and they do not equal the fascination of burglary. The silence of the night, every sense on the alert, the element of danger, the chances of failure and success, all combine to make burglary a fascination. Why do some men get drunk? Because they must. ”

“ Then a field for the study of human nature is opened up, and nowhere in the wide world is there a field equal to it. Does anyone want to study the drink question?—here’s the chance; the social evil?—here’s the opportunity; causes of crime?—here they may be found. Every vice and every virtue, and every source of strength and every cause of weakness incidental to humanity are found here. Every phase of every social problem has its place here. The joys and pleasures of life, the sorrows and difficulties of life, the comedy and fun of life, the tragedy and despair of life, are illustrated here. ”

“ I hear the accents of sorrow and the burst of angry sound. I hear the devil-may-care laugh and the contemptuous expression. I hear the sighs and groans and bitter plaints. I see men shorn of all glory. I see womanhood clothed in shame. I see Vice rampant. I see Misery crawling. I see the long procession of the drink- or vice-stricken as they tramped down to the place of wrecked lives and slain souls. I see some going cursing to destruction. I see some going jesting to destruction. I see some going down with open eyes and passive will. ”

“ Ten thousand applicants, eight thousand prisoners, and ten thousand summonses, would probably be a fair average of the humanity that tramps through a London police court in one year. And every social problem, every legal problem, every psychological problem, has its place among that heterogeneous mass. Among this tangled and perplexed humanity I have lived and moved for many years. I have seen it in the prisoners’ rooms, the dock, and the cells. ”

“ So Kate did not go back to prison, but in the country, many miles from London, she found a resting-place. Twelve months she stayed there, and those who had charge of her speak well of her; but they needed patience, for the passage from evil to good, from drink and lust to sobriety and cleanliness, is not an easy one; the old instincts will not die at once, and as a tiger lusts for blood or a caged beast for liberty, even so it must have been with Kate. ”

“ For years, her hope was to see him, and to her doom she went with that hope unfulfilled. If he is ‘respectable,’ I at least hope he is not hard or bitter, and that he lets the knowledge that she had a passionate love for him draw a thick veil over the main part of her sad life.
But it is not only for their own flesh and blood that these poor outcasts care. ‘Unfortunates’ as they are, a divine pity for those who are more unfortunate still is ever one of their distinguishing traits, though it may be a comparative stranger that calls it into play. They have their own way of doing things ”

“ I do not know any magistrate in whose hands the interests of a prisoner, guilty or innocent, are not absolutely safe. It is, in fact, no uncommon thing for a magistrate to protect a prisoner against himself and against his own or the prosecuting solicitor. To hold the balance of justice evenly day after day in all sorts of charges is not an easy task, but it is done; and the fact that very few of their decisions or 34 sentences are annulled or revoked shows that the manner in which justice is administered in our police courts is beyond question. ”

“ Sometimes these fellows have neither the grace nor the sense to see that these poor women are perjuring themselves for their sakes, and so, with that instinctive chivalry so characteristic of them, they proceed to cross-examine in order to show that the blame was the wife’s, and that the punishment she received was but fair and reasonable—in fact, the legitimate outcome of her conduct. This often raises the last bit of spirit the wretched woman has left in her, for even the worm will turn, and then the truth comes out, and the slave-owner goes to prison. ”

“ Fifteen years I had been blundering among poor humanity, hoping and fearing, racking my brains, never knowing when to give in, though often lifeless from the expenditure of nervous energy. Fifteen years I had been realizing that I could only move others to the extent I felt for them, and that there is no healing without loss of virtue. What if the professor were right? It troubled me, for I thought of the poor, the unfortunate, the downcast, and the heterogeneous mass of humanity one meets with in our London police courts. ”

“ In a week’s time there was a parish funeral from that court, attended by an old woman of sixty-five and a girl of fourteen. Brave old woman! the five pounds you so hardly earned shall be appraised at its proper value by Him who noted the widow’s mite. You can go back to the workhouse, and there die, cheered, comforted, and strengthened by the knowledge that you enabled your daughter to die outside, and the memory of that shall come to you as an angel’s smile when the time comes for you to join your daughter. ”

“ The attempt to deter men from crime by squeezing all of them into the same mould while they are in prison is a dismal and disastrous failure; it deters them not. The attempt to redeem them when at liberty by pressing them into another mould in any institution is equally certain to result in failure. Destroy a man’s individuality and you destroy the man.
With a wise prison system and properly qualified prison officials, societies for the aid of discharged prisoners would be unnecessary, for their occupation would be gone. ”