“Yes!” said the Colonel reflectively, “I’ve been almost everywhere in my time except in jail, and I’ve been in a great deal worse places than a first-class American jail with all the modern improvements. The fact is that philanthropic people have gone so far in improving the condition of prisoners that most of our prisons are rather better than most of our hotels. At any rate, they are less expensive and the guests are treated with more respect.
“I never could understand a craze that some people have for prisoners. For instance, in New York and Chicago the young ladies have a society for giving flowers to murderers. Whenever a man is convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged, the girls begin to heave flowers into his cell till he can’t turn round without upsetting a vase of roses or a big basinful of pansies and getting his feet wet. I once knew a murderer who told me that if anything could reconcile him to being hung it would be in getting rid of the floral tributes that the girls lavished on him. You see, he was one of the leading murderers in that section of country, and consequently he received about a cart-load of flowers every day.
“HEAVE FLOWERS INTO HIS CELL.”
“I had a neighbor when I lived in New Berlinopolisville who was President of the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Prisoners, and he was the craziest man on the subject that I ever met. His name was Hoskins—Colonel Uriah Hoskins. He was the author of the Hoskins Bill that attracted so much attention when it was before the legislature, though it never became law. The hill provided that every prisoner should have a sitting-room as well as a sleeping-room, and that it should be furnished with a piano, a banjo, a library, a typewriter, a wine-cooler, and a whist-table; that the prisoner should be permitted to hold two weekly receptions, to which everybody should be allowed to come, and that he should be taught any branch of study that he might care to take up, books and masters being, of course, supplied free. Colonel Hoskins used to insist that the only thing that made a man go wrong was the lack of kindness, and that the sure way to reform a criminal was to treat him with so much kindness that he would grow ashamed of being wicked, and would fall on everybody’s neck and devote the rest of his life to weeping tears of repentance and singing hymns of joy.
“While Colonel Hoskins was fond of all styles of criminals, burglars were his particular pets. According to him, a burglar was more deserving of kindness than any other man. ‘How would you like it,’ he used to say, ‘if you had to earn your living by breaking into houses in the middle of the night, instead of sleeping peacefully in your bed? Do you think you would be full of good thoughts after you had been bitten by the watch-dog and fired at by the man of the house, and earned nothing by your labor except a bad cold and the prospect of hydrophobia? There is nothing more brutal than the way in which society treats the burglar; and so long as society refuses to put him in the way of earning an easier and less dangerous living, he cannot be blamed if he continues to practise his midnight profession.’
“I must say this for Colonel Hoskins. He did not confine himself to talk, like many other philanthropists, but was always trying to carry out his principles. He really meant what he said about burglars, and there isn’t the least doubt that he had more sympathy for them than he had for the honest men of his acquaintance.
“When people asked him what he would do if he woke up in the night and found a burglar in his house, and whether or not he would shoot at him, he said that he would as soon think of shooting at his own wife, and that he would undertake to reform that burglar, then and there, by kindness alone. Once somebody said to Hoskins that he ought really to let the burglars know his feelings toward them, and Hoskins said that he would do it without delay.
“That same day he drew up a beautiful ‘Notice to Burglars,’ and had it printed in big letters and framed and hung up in the dining-room of his house. It read in this way: ‘Burglars are respectfully informed that the silverware is all plated, and that the proprietor of this house never keeps ready money on hand. Cake and wine will be found in the dining-room closet, and burglars are cordially invited to rest and refresh themselves. Please wipe your feet on the mat, and close the window when leaving the house.’
“Colonel Hoskins took a good deal of pride in that notice. He showed it to every one who called at the house, and said that if other people would follow his example and treat burglars like Christians and gentlemen, there would soon be an end of burglary, for the burglars would be so touched by the kindness of their treatment that they would abandon the business and become honored members of society—insurance presidents, or bank cashiers, or church treasurers. He didn’t say how the reformed burglars were to find employment in banks and insurance offices and such, but that was a matter of detail, and he always preferred to devise large and noble schemes, and leave the working details of them to other men.
“One morning Colonel Hoskins, who was an early riser, went down to the dining-room before breakfast, and was surprised to find that he had had a midnight visit from burglars. Two empty wine-bottles stood on the table, and all the cake was eaten, which showed that the burglars had accepted the invitation to refresh themselves. But they did not seem to have accepted it in quite the right spirit. All Hoskins’ spoons and forks lay in a heap in the middle of the floor, and every one was twisted or broken so as to be good for nothing. The window had been left open and the rain had ruined the curtains, and on a dirty piece of paper the burglars had scrawled with a lead-pencil the opinion that ‘Old Hoskins is the biggest fule and the gol-darndest skinflint in the country. You set out whiskey next time, or we’ll serve you out.’
“Hoskins was not in the least cast down by the rudeness of the burglars. ‘Poor fellows,’ he said, ‘they have been so used to bad treatment that they don’t altogether appreciate kindness at first. But they will learn.’ So he laid in some new spoons and forks and added a bottle of whiskey to the wine that he kept in the closet for the burglars, and was as confident as ever that the next gang that might break into his house would be melted into tears and repentance and would call him their best and dearest friend.
“A week or two later Mrs. Hoskins was awakened by a noise in the dining-room, and after waking up her husband told him that there were burglars in the house, and that he must get out of the back window and go for the police. He told her that he was sorry to see her manifest such an unchristian spirit, and he would show her how burglars ought to be treated. There was not the least doubt that there were burglars in the house, and they were making a good deal more noise than was strictly consistent with the prospect of rising in their profession, for no able burglar ever makes any unnecessary noise while engaged in business, unless, of course, he falls over a coal-scuttle, and then he naturally uses language. St. Paul himself would probably say something pretty strong in similar circumstances. Hoskins was sincerely delighted to have the opportunity to meet his burglarious friends, and he lost no time in dressing and descending to the dining-room.
“He wore his slippers, and the burglars—there were two of them—did not hear him until he was fairly in the dining room. They were seated at the table, with their feet on the damask table-cloth, and the bottle of whiskey was nearly empty. The Colonel was much pleased to see that they had not damaged his silverware, and he was just about to thank them when they saw him. They started up, and one of them caught him by the throat, while the other held a pistol to his head and promised to blow out his brains if he made the slightest noise. Then they tied him hand and foot, gagged him, and laid him on the floor, and then sat down to finish the whiskey.
“Both the burglars were partly drunk, which accounted for the unprofessional noise they had been making. They talked in rather a low tone, but Hoskins could hear everything they said, and it was not particularly encouraging to a gagged and bound philanthropist. They agreed that he was a fool, and a stingy fool, or else he would have kept money in the house, and would have set out lemons and sugar as well as plain whiskey. They said that any man who treated poor working-men in that way wasn’t fit to live, and that Hoskins would have to be killed, even if it was not necessary—as it plainly was in this case—to kill him in order to prevent him from appearing at any future time as a witness against them. They admitted that the whiskey was not bad of its kind, but they were of the opinion that Hoskins had left it in their way so that they might get drunk and be caught by the police.
“Colonel Hoskins listened to this conversation with horror, and the prospect that the drunken rascals would be as good as their word, and kill him before they left the house, was only a little more painful than the conviction that his method, appealing to the better nature of burglars, had failed for the second time. When the whiskey was exhausted the men rose up and looked at Hoskins, and a happy thought struck one of them. ‘Thishyer idiot,’ he said, ‘may not have any money in the house, but he’s bound to have some in the bank, and he’s going to write us a check for a thousand dollars, provided we let him off and don’t kick his brains out this time.’ The other burglar, who was in that benevolent frame of mind that Irish whiskey and conscious virtue sometimes produce, agreed to the suggestion, and Hoskins was therefore unbound and seated at the table, and told to draw a check at once if he had the least regard for his life. As he was gagged he could not explain to the burglars the kind feelings that he still had toward them, and the fact that they could not draw the money on the check without being captured by the police. So he simply signed the check, and groaned to think that the poor burglars were so slow to be reformed in the way that he had hoped they would be.
“TIED HIM IN A CHAIR.”
“When this business was over, the burglars tied Hoskins’ wrists together again and then tied him in a chair. Then they set to work to do all the damage they could do without making too much noise. They tore the curtains and hacked the piano with knives, and poured a jug of golden syrup over the carpet. Then they plastered Colonel Hoskins’ face with raspberry jam and emptied a sack of flour over his head, and went away, telling him that if he ever again ventured to trifle with the feelings of poor but self-respecting men, they would put him to death by slow tortures.
“Hoskins sat in the chair for a couple of hours, till his wife timidly crept downstairs and released him. It took him a good hour to get the jam and the flour out of his hair and whiskers, and as Mrs. Hoskins said that he was in no state to enter a decent bedroom and made him wash at the pump in the back yard, he found it a rather cold operation. Perhaps it was the remarks that Mrs. Hoskins addressed to him during the operation that irritated him, for she intimated very plainly that he was no better than a professional idiot, and when a man’s hair is stuck together with jam, remarks of this sort from the wife of his bosom seem to be lacking in tenderness. However that may be, Colonel Hoskins had no sooner got himself into what his wife condescended to call a state of comparative decency, than he took down his ‘Notice to Burglars’ and tore it into a thousand pieces. That day he had an electric burglar-alarm put into his house, he bought the savagest dog that he could find, and he stopped the payment of the check, which, however, was never presented. He continued to be the President of the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Prisoners, but he steadily refused to ameliorate a single prisoner convicted of burglary, and while he was always a lunatic in regard to other criminals, he openly maintained that a burglar was the worst of men and that kindness was utterly thrown away upon him. He never had any more burglars in his house, though the dog now and then lunched off warm leg when some stranger to that part of the country ventured into the Hoskins premises at night. Hoskins was very fond of the animal, which was quite right, but his practice of leaving a bottle of whiskey, with an ounce of strychnine in it, on the dining-room table every night, in case a burglar should succeed in getting into the house, was, in my opinion, going a little too far. Antimonial wine would have been much more humane and sufficiently effective. But there is no man who is more severe than a philanthropist who has been turned sour.”
