to him, and comforts a tortured prisoner with pious exhortations to be patient and submit:[1]
"Item. An occasion for twaddling had come, and this good
soul seized it, and twaddled into a man's ear who was fainting on
the rack."
Later a sarcastic contrast is drawn between the dinner
the official enjoys at home and the convict's gruel he had
just ordered diluted.[2]
The first chaplain, well meaning and gentle, is also a failure, through simple inanity:[3]
"Yet Mr. Jones was not a hypocrite nor a monster; he was
only a commonplace man—a thing moulded by circumstances
instead of moulding them. * * * But at the head of a struggling
nation, or in the command of an army in time of war, or at
the head of the religious department of a jail, fighting against
human wolves, tigers, and foxes, to be commonplace is an iniquity
and leads to crime."
On the enlightened officialdom that permits all this,
Reade is one with Dickens. When an urgent appeal for
investigation is sent to headquarters, the reply is returned
that the inspector would reach that place in his normal
circuit in six weeks:[4]
"'Six weeks is not long to wait for help in a matter of life and
death,' thought the eighty-pounders, the clerks who execute
England."
Most unpardonable of all are such cases as Carter,—[5]
