Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 September 1901 — Robbers in and Out of Jail. [ARTICLE]

Robbers in and Out of Jail.

In Chicago, as in several other cities, some good people arrange for occasional meetings In the county jail, at which a speaker discourses to the prisoners on their situation and moralizes for their instruction. It la a pleasant event for the speaker, at any rate, since the audience cannot get away, and the platitudes which propriety demands on such occasions require no thought, but may indeed bo culled from any old copy book or volume of moral maxims. Some time ago the committee having this function in charge made a mistake. It asked a man that actually thought to talk. Now a man that actually thinks is rather a dangerous character anywhere, but if he gets into a Jail in the present state of society and reflects on what lie sees there and then speaks frankly what is in his mind he is apt to say things more pleasing to those inside the walls than to those that put them there. So it was with this Chicago man —Clarence Darrow, a lawyer who has a bit of a reputation for plain speaking. He wasn't particularly complimentary to his audience, for he remarked that if he met some of them on the street he would be pretty apt to get his pocket picked or be held up, but, said he: “When I get outside pretty nearly everybody holds me up.” This rather startling statement he supported by saying that the gas company holds him up by charging a dollar for something worth twenty-five cents. If to escape this highwayman he turns to burning oil Mr. Rockefeller holds him up, “and then uses a certain portion of his money to build universities and support churches which are engaged in telling us how to be good." Nor are these spoliations all. As the instructor in ethics truly said: “When I ride on the street car I am held up—l pay five cents for a ride that is worth two and a half cents or three cents, simply because a body of men has bribed the city council and the legislature so that all* the rest have to pay tribute to them and cannot help it.”