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The Convicts' Parole
(Edison)
By EDWIN M. LA ROCHE
The symphonic hum of machinery, running at high speed, passed thru the open, grated windows and drifted across the hot courtyard to the warden's office. The new Singer " heads, '* installed the past month, were working beautifully. Close at hand, in the loft above the cells, their strokes thru cloth sounded like the drumming of a thousand desperate woodpeckers. At a little distance, the million little taps blended into one smooth, mounting roar. It was as if some monster stood at the windows, and plucked running chords from the iron bars.
The call of the new machines wafted across as sweet music to MacMurdo. With a fine Scotch ear for the sound of machinery, the increased speed of the power sewing-machines appealed strongly to his canny temperament. No clattering and dissonance, no sudden stoppage of a long bench of heads to locate defects, and the resulting pull at his patience. The prison sweat-shop was a poem ! a model plant! a song without words!
And the dollars — he must not for
get that ; the final analysis of mechanical music. • Speed ! speed ! Efficiency ! efficiency ! A full dormitory ; no labor laws; no unions; no employers' liability; no rent — God bless the State! No deterioration of plant; no overhead charges; no strikes, nor stockholders ; no fuel ; no advertising bills ; no pensions, and all that rot. All this labor was penned in there — safeguarded, inert, and the State had turned it over to him to job out at so much a head. Can you blame his cigar smoke for forming dollar signs across the beam of sunlight in the office? No such opportunity, in contradiction to all the rules of business, had come forward, pushed into his hands, since slave labor built the Pyramids for the whims of dying kings, and, later, eased the soil of our own dying aristocracy. He was only human, and he took it; took it in wonder and contempt.
The office door opened and shut again noiselessly. Only the smoke in the beam of light took notice of it by whirling like the skirts of a dancing dervish. MacMurdo unclenched his
THE CONTRACTOR COMES TO INSPECT THE NEW MACHINES AT THE PRISON
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