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It is not so much a prison or penitentiary as a human pound, where every variety of waif and stray turns up and sojourns for a while; murderers, pickpockets, political scapegoats, confidence men, old professionals, first-time offenders, even suspects afterwards to be proved innocent.
The "Subterranean Brotherhood" are our brothers they are ourselves, unjustly and vainly condemned to serve as scapegoats for the rest.
Of all the inmates of the jail, these men are the veritable and incorrigible and unpardonable criminals; for they were not driven to crime by passion, hunger, drink or ignorance, they have not been reduced to the state of desperate pariahs, outcasts and scapegoats of the race, but they willingly embrace the function entrusted to them the Government license to steal, bully, torture and murder with a grotesque sanctimonious leer for the public, and for the convicts what!
They would have agreed with great satisfaction, as we have said, to inflict condign and capital punishment upon the heads of the sect; and they would have had no objection, if driven to do something, to get hold of some strangers or slaves, who might be a sort of scapegoats for the rest; but it was impossible, when they once began to persecute, to make distinctions, and not a few of them had relations who were Christians, or at least were on that border-land which the mob might mistake for the domain of Christianity—Marcionites, Tertullianists, Montanists, or Gnostics.
But you know dozens, hundreds of madmen are walking about in freedom because your ignorance is incapable of distinguishing them from the sane. Why am I and these poor wretches to be shut up here like scapegoats for all the rest? You, your assistant, the superintendent, and all your hospital rabble, are immeasurably inferior to every one of us morally; why then are we shut up and you not?
It is this state of things that explains the curious cruelty of early agricultural doings, the human sacrifices, the scapegoats, the tearing in pieces of living animals, and perhaps of living men, the steeping of the fields in blood. Like most cruelty it has its roots in terror, terror of the breach of Tabu the Forbidden Thing. I will not dwell on this side of the picture: it is well enough known.
They were the years of the civil war between the English at home and the English in the American colonies. George III. and Lord North have been made scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively, their own. They were only the organs and representatives of all the lurking ignorance and arbitrary humours of the entire community.
They're spoilt, and why shouldn't we be?" Lewisham having selected the bishops as scapegoats for his turpitude, was inclined to ascribe even the nail in his boot to their agency. Mrs. Lewisham looked puzzled. She realised his drift. "You're not," she said, and dropped her voice, "an infidel?" Lewisham nodded gloomily. "Aren't you?" he said. "Oh no," said Mrs. Lewisham.
The trial at Grodno and the ritual murder accusations which simultaneously cropped up in the Kingdom of Poland made the Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs realize that there was in the Western region a dangerous tendency of making the Jews the scapegoats for every mysterious murder case and of fabricating lawsuits of the medieval variety by bringing popular superstition into play.
Well, ma'am, there always were scapegoats, and always will be; we find it comes round pretty square in the end. 'And I may be the scapegoat, Emmy! It is perfectly possible. The grocer, the pork-butcher, drysalter, stationer, tea-merchant, et caetera they sit on me. I have studied the faces of the juries, and Mr. Braddock tells me of their composition.
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