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The past year was suitably finished up by providing a special feast to which only ex-convicts were admitted. No less than 150 accepted the invitation. About this branch of our work a leading daily paper, the Ceylon Independent, writes as follows.
Joseph Petrosino, the able and fearless officer of New York police who was murdered in Palermo while in the service of the country of his adoption, was, while he lived, our greatest guaranty of protection against the Italian criminal. But Petrosino is gone. The fear of him no longer will deter Italian ex-convicts from seeking asylum in the United States.
What the Army desires, however, is that the Government should subsidize this work in order to enable it to support the ex-convicts until it can find opportunity to place them in positions where they can earn their own bread.
The men he employed were for the most part drawn from the dregs sheep-stealers, cattle-thieves, smugglers, many of them ex-convicts a fierce, unruly lot, hating all law and order, yet submitting for the sake of that same precious yellow dust that they ground from the foundation stones of the world. Personally, Fortescue was known but to the very few, but his methods were known to all.
I can never forget my thrills the first night I took part in a concerted raid, when we assembled on board the Annie rough men, big and unafraid, and weazened wharf-rats, some of them ex-convicts, all of them enemies of the law and meriting jail, in sea-boots and sea-gear, talking in gruff low voices, and "Big" George with revolvers strapped about his waist to show that he meant business.
One of the ex-convicts volunteered to catch him with his hand wrapped up in a cloth, but from the way he went about it I saw he was nervous and would let the thing go, so I would mot allow him to make the attempt.
"I wish some doctor would examine me and tell me what is the matter with me," he remarked to me once. "Maybe I'm crazy!" After all, the world, in its way, is as hard a place for ex-convicts as a jail; more cruel, perhaps, inasmuch as it seems to offer hopes that jails deny. But can a world be called civilized that is satisfied with that arraignment?
It is a well-known fact that in our prisons there is a goodly number of ex-soldiers; while on the other hand, the army and navy are to a great extent supplied with ex-convicts. Of all the evil results, I have just described, none seems to me so detrimental to human integrity as the spirit patriotism has produced in the case of Private William Buwalda.
Only convicts and ex-convicts dissent; for they know what they dissent from. As an unidentified friend wrote to me of late, "No thief ere felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law"; but the thief had reason on his side. And it may yet come to pass that his reasons may be listened to.
Many of them are ex-convicts and can never leave Siberia. If their cruelty to horses is any criterion of their cruelty to their fellow men, I can't help thinking they deserve their punishment. I won't dare to mail this letter until I get out of Russia for they are so cranky about their blessed old country. They would not even let me have a little flag to send to the boys at home!
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