Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/286

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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