THE FIRE-TENDER.The most discouraging symptom to me in our undoubted advance in the comforts and refinements of society is the facility with which men slip back into barbarism, if the artificial and external accidents of their lives are changed.We have always kept a fringe of barbarism on our shifting western frontier; and Ithink there never was a worse society than that in California and Nevada in their early days.
THE YOUNG LADY.That is because women were absent.
THE FIRE-TENDER.But women are not absent in London and New York, and they are conspicuous in the most exceptionable demonstrations of social anarchy.Certainly they were not wanting in Paris.Yes, there was a city widely accepted as the summit of our material civilization.No city was so beautiful, so luxurious, so safe, so well ordered for the comfort of living, and yet it needed only a month or two to make it a kind of pandemonium of savagery.Its citizens were the barbarians who destroyed its own monuments of civilization.I don't mean to say that there was no apology for what was done there in the deceit and fraud that preceded it, but I simply notice how ready the tiger was to appear, and how little restraint all the material civilization was to the beast.
THE MISTRESS.I can't deny your instances, and yet I somehow feel that pretty much all you have been saying is in effect untrue.Not one of you would be willing to change our civilization for any other.
In your estimate you take no account, it seems to me, of the growth of charity.
MANDEVILLE.And you might add a recognition of the value of human life.
THE MISTRESS.I don't believe there was ever before diffused everywhere such an element of good-will, and never before were women so much engaged in philanthropic work.
THE PARSON.It must be confessed that one of the best signs of the times is woman's charity for woman.That certainly never existed to the same extent in any other civilization.
MANDEVILLE.And there is another thing that distinguishes us, or is beginning to.That is, the notion that you can do something more with a criminal than punish him; and that society has not done its duty when it has built a sufficient number of schools for one class, or of decent jails for another.
HERBERT.It will be a long time before we get decent jails.
MANDEVILLE.But when we do they will begin to be places of education and training as much as of punishment and disgrace.The public will provide teachers in the prisons as it now does in the common schools.
THE FIRE-TENDER.The imperfections of our methods and means of selecting those in the community who ought to be in prison are so great, that extra care in dealing with them becomes us.We are beginning to learn that we cannot draw arbitrary lines with infal-lible justice.Perhaps half those who are convicted of crimes are as capable of reformation as half those transgressors who are not convicted, or who keep inside the statutory law.
HERBERT.Would you remove the odium of prison?
THE FIRE-TENDER.No; but I would have criminals believe, and society believe, that in going to prison a man or woman does not pass an absolute line and go into a fixed state.
THE PARSON.That is, you would not have judgment and retribution begin in this world.
OUR NEXT DOOR.Don't switch us off into theology.I hate to go up in a balloon, or see any one else go.
HERBERT.Don't you think there is too much leniency toward crime and criminals, taking the place of justice, in these days?