WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE "DAGO"? i 73 



the prison should be clean enough and well enough drained, and 

 wholesome enough to prevent the criminals within their active 

 work of evil restrained from negatively breeding infection among 

 the honest people they no longer affirmatively and independently 

 rob, disturb, and destroy. There ought to be no hesitation about 

 going quite as far as this. The question is, How much further 

 with an honest regard for the rights of the non-law-breaker 

 may we proceed ? A prison is not supposed to be a nice, cozy place 

 to live in. It should not be a desirable place even to the class of 

 people which criminals are bred from. Neither the criminal 

 classes nor the classes from which criminals come live and dress 

 warmly ; their shoes are not dry, their bodies are not well kept and 

 sleek and cleanly ; their tables are not regularly or sumptuously 

 or even wholesomely spread. Poverty certainly should not be 

 allowed to aggravate or in any way influence the penalty for 

 crime : but it would seem as if, in the enforcement of the pen- 

 alty, it can not be entirely left out of the estimates taken by our 

 law-makers , and this for certain reasons, of which the following 

 are a few : 



There is just now seeking these shores, in extraordinary num- 

 bers, a class of laborers who live more meanly than the imagina- 

 tion of the general public, in well-paid and well-fed America, can 

 conceive. Every one who has visited the northern shore of the 

 Mediterranean, in Italy, is familiar with the class called lazzaroni. 

 It may be actually said that this class does not live in houses at 

 all, does not know what a house means : except for shelter against 

 inclement weather ; that it has no use for roofs at all. Water, 

 except as it falls from the heavens, it appears to know not in any 

 external sense ; and during the long summers and mild winters a 

 wall or an alley is quite as convenient as, and much more available 

 a shelter than, a roof. A gang of these people, " dagoes " as they 

 are nicknamed (a corruption of hidalgos, which, though a Span- 

 ish and not an Italian word, once came to be sneeringly applied 

 to a foreigner of Latin Europe out of his element), employed in 

 building an American railroad, will find it necessary, in the new 

 climate, to be provided with quarters of some sort ; will herd to- 

 gether as tightly as they can dispose themselves, in anything 

 which is covered by a roof, and every office of nature will be per- 

 formed together in the same tumbled quarters. I once happened 

 to witness the following incident: A small circus, with a few 

 lions and tigers, exhibiting in a small town, near by where a rail- 

 road was being constructed, fed, as a part of its programme, these 

 wild beasts. The bones which the beasts gnawed were left on the 

 ground when the circus departed between two days. And the 

 "dagoes" collected these bones and boiled them for their soup! 

 What terrors have jails and prisons for such human beings ? 



