Читать книгу The New York Tombs Inside and Out! - John Josiah Munro - Страница 13

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If the stones and iron grating of this dismal old prison, now no more, which for two-thirds of a century stood with its back toward Elm Street, and its front entrance facing Centre Street, could only speak out its experience and tell its woes, what a heart-rending story of crime it would tell; what bitterness of soul, dashed prospects, guilty consciences that presage horrors, together with the breath of a fetid atmosphere, where like hades, the smoke of their torment rises continually! It would also be a story of blood and tears!

For over sixty-five years the “old Tombs” prison has been the scene of so many tragedies and the grave of innumerable buried hopes, once most promising, but long since crushed under the iron heel of fate! And these realms of darkness, cold, damp and forbidding cells, clammy and foul with the sweat and tears of a past generation, remind us of the cruel dungeons underneath the Mamertine prison of the Caesars!

When we think of the number of cold-blooded murderers, the burglars, highwaymen, forgers, swindlers, gold-brick men, green-goods operators and hundreds of others possessing dark criminal records, that have lain here for many months, coming from every State and part of the globe, our blood curdles within.

What hideous characters have domiciled in this prison during these two generations, who afterwards paid the penalty of the law for their bloody deeds! Think also of the conglomeration of forces that actuated and bore them into their doom like driftwood going over a Niagara as merciless as fate would have them!

Men and women that came from noble sires, scholars and specialists with trained minds that would have shone in any department of life, lawyers, teachers, business men, bankers, brokers and even men of letters, all under the cruel hand of fate, succumbed to the tempter in a weak moment and fell; alas! some never to rise again.

“Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years,

I am so weary of toil and tears.”

But, alas, it is too late. The die is cast forever!

Our young men and women should learn ere it is too late, or even before they launch forth on a career of crime, that we cannot break the divine law without punishment. “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,” is a law that is as true in the moral world as it is in the realm of nature. Our large cities are full of the whirlpools of vice that carry multitudes swiftly over the rapids of destruction into the maelstrom of eternal death.