Rock Island Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1893-1920, 1895-12-07

an enormous crowd assembled in Milbay
pier to await the return of the steam
tender with the mail in order to get q
sight OF the prisoner, and so great was
the crowd that it was with some diff
Guilty that Bidwell and his escort man
aged to reach cabs and were driven to
the Duke Of Cornwall hotel adjoining
the railway station. They left by the
1915 train for London. Acrowd of go
600 persons were present to see them of
and cheered Bidwell heartily.
"Bidwell will be taken before the
lord mayor in the justice room at the
Mansion House this morning."
Accompanied by my escort Of six, I
arrived in London one bright morning
just as the mighty masses of that great
Babylon We're thronging in their thou
sands toward EPSON Downs, where on
that day the Derby, that pivotal event
in the English year, was to be run. All
London was astir and had put on holt
day attire, while I, now q poor weed
drifting 10 rot on Lethe's wharf, was
on my way to Newgate.
Newgatel Then it had come to this!
The Primrose Way wherein had walk
ed and lived delicately at the expense Of
honor ended here.
Whatsoever man soweth, that shall
he also reap" was written by one Paul
The wisdom Of many was here and con-
densed i'll the wit of one, and one with
shrewdest insight into things and q
practical knowledge of human history.
was prisoner in Newgate. The
very name casts a chill; so, too, does a
sight of that granite fortress rising there
in the heart of mighty London. Amid
all the throbbing life Of that great Baby
Ion it stands-chill and grim-and has
stood a prison fortress for 500 years.
Through all those linked centuries how
many thousands of the miserable and
heartbroken Of every generation have
been garnered within its cold embrace |!
What sights and sounds those old walls
have seen and heard! As I paced its
gloomy corridors that first night pictures
of its past rose before me SO grim and
terrible that I turned shuddering from
them only to remember that 1, too, had
Joined the long unending procession ever
flowing through its gates which had
heaped its walls to the top with one
inky sea of misery.
In the cruel days of old many n saw
age sentence had fallen from the lips of
merciless judges, but none more terrible
than the one which was to fall ON us
from the lips of theiflerocious imitator.
Justice Archibald
found my three friends already pris-
oners there, and sad party we were
When we said goodby that night ON the
wharf at Calais, where we sat star gaz-
ing and philosophizing, we little antici-
pated this reunion.
What a rude surprise it was to find
how things We're conducted in this same
Newgate! I took it for granted-since
the law regarded us as innocent until
we We're tried and convicted-that we
could have any reasonable favor granted
us there which was consistent with our
safe keeping. But, no. The system of the
convict prison was enforced here and
with the same iron rigor. Strict silence
was the rule, along with the absolute
exclusion CT newspapers and all news of
the outside world. The rules forbid any
h delicacy or books being furnished by
ones friends from the outside. This
iron system is as cruel as unphilosoph-
ical, for, pending trial, the inmates are
more or less living in a perfect agony
of mind, which drives many into insan-
ity or to the verge of insanity, as it did
me- How, then, can one find oblivion
or raze out the written troubles of the
brain save in absorption in books?
If had the pen Of Victor Hugo, what
a picture I would draw of a mind con-
sciously going down into the fearful
abyss of insanity and making mighty
struggles against it, yet looking OH the
cold walls shutting one in and weighing
down the spirit. feeling that the strug-
gle is Intellectual, the fight all in vain,
for the dead, blank walls are staring
coldly ON you without giving one reflex
message, bearing ON their gray surface
no thought, no response of mind, for
they have been looked over with anxious
care to discover if any other mind had
recorded there some thought which
would awake thought in ones own and
help to shake off the fearful burden
pressing one to earth. AS fact, a man
SO situated dosage, must-make an
effort to leave some visible impress OF
his mind as a message to his kind. 1t is
a natural law, and the instinct is part of
ones being. 1t is passion of mind, q
longing to be united to the spiritual
mass Of minds from which the isolated
one is suffering an unnatural divorce by
hideous material walls.
1t is this law which makes the savage
place his totem on the rocks, and it is,
thanks to the same instinct, that this
very day our savants are finding beneath
the foundations Of the temples and pal.
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