"Civilized savages! To have them _here!_"
"It don't hurt 'em," said the officer beside us. "They're incurables. They won't any of 'em remember what they saw for ten minutes. People don't understand crazy folks and idiots. They're the easiest cowed people in the world. Long as they know they're watched, they'll do whatever you tell them--this kind will. They're harmless."
"But why have them here?" I insisted. "If they are to be poisoned, why not do it more quickly and--"
"Poisoned!" he exclaimed, astonished. "Why, if one of the attendants was caught even striking one, he'd be dismissed quick. They get treated well. Only it is hard to keep attendants. We can't get 'em to stay here more than a month or so--just till they get paid. We have to go to the raw immigrants to get them even then. Nobody else will come."
"Naturally," remarked the gentleman beside me.
"Yes, it's kind of natural. This kind of folks are hard to work with, and the men attendants get only about seventeen to twenty dollars a month, and the women from ten to twelve dollars."
"So the attendants of these helpless creatures are raw immigrants," I said; "who, perhaps, do not speak English, who are constantly changing. The water they get is from driven wells, the sights and exercise are obtained from and in and by the dead trenches. The air they breathe is like this, night and day, you say, and no one ever leaves alive when once sent here."
"Who does the work--the digging, the burying, the handling of the dead, the carting, and the work for the insane?"
"Medium term prisoners. All these are from one to six months men," waving his hand over the men working below us in the horrible trench.
"Do you think they leave here with an admiration for our system of caring for the city's dead--whether the death be social, mental, or physical? Do they go back with a desire to reform and become like those who devise and conduct this sort of thing?"
"Why, it's just a picnic for them to come up here. You can't hardly keep 'em away with a club. Of course, the same ones don't work right _here_ long; but when a fellow gets sent up to _any_ of these places, he comes over and over until he gets ambitious to go to Sing Sing and be higher toned."