Many a castle in the air I built for him. I thought I had surrounded him with every safeguard, and my heart is still sad for him; but I regret not my efforts on his behalf, neither do I count my labours lost, nor my time wasted, for I learned to know him, I learned to appreciate the awful power of his strange mania. Otherwise his life was gentle, and but for this curse he was a man. ‘I ask you to believe me when I say that I was sincere in my promises to you. I told you that I considered myself in honour bound to do right, and to justify the confidence you have shown in me. I am no hypocrite, but why cannot I be as your sons? Why there should be a power within me impelling me to do these things I don’t know; but I do know at times that I am utterly unable to resist it. Do you think there is any truth in fatalism? Is it my destiny? Is it any use my struggling against it?’ These words form a portion of the last letter received from him, and he puts me questions that I cannot answer. I did not save him, but I tried my best.
Perhaps my methods were wrong, but to me they seem right; for I hold that if a man cannot be saved by faith and hope, by friendship and respect, there is no social salvation for him. There is a large class of criminals of this kind, not all possessed of the same mania, but impelled by the same power. Day by day men of brain and energy are released from our prisons. They have skill, but not muscle; intelligence, but not brute force. What will save them? Not wood-chopping ten hours a day in a ‘labour home’; not envelope addressing at half a crown per thousand! not paper-sorting under unpleasant conditions; not pick and shovel in competition with the navvy; not even clerical work, where, because of their past, they do two men’s work for a boy’s pay. These will not, cannot, redeem long-time men. If the consecration of loving hearts fails, if the dedication to their service of home, intelligence, family life, and a man’s own self fails, if that divine inspiration that comes from human goodness fails, it is absurd to suppose that monotonous, ill-requited drudgery will succeed. Some kind people can, I believe, find a sort of gratification in making a profit or in getting cheap labour from men and women who are down. Thank God this cannot be laid to my charge, no, nor to my wife’s; for if the old ‘unfortunate,’ the hero of a hundred convictions, has lived with us and worked for us, we have paid her adequately. If the criminal who has spent a quarter of a century in prison has worked for us, we have paid him, and his labour has been as well requited as if his character was perfect and his past unsullied. Why should Christian people seek to get some advantage from unfortunate men and women who have fallen deeply into vice or sin? The return path to rectitude and citizenship is always a hard road to travel, and rightly so; but to make that road harder by imposing such heavy tolls upon the travellers is like unto casting out the devil by Beelzebub. I know a man at the present moment--a married man and a first-rate scholar, about thirty-five years of age--not long from prison who, because of his past and his helplessness, is earning ten shillings a week in a position to which he has been ‘recommended.’