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lockup system in England. His enthusiasm was only moderate about the jails in Australia — he felt that Australians had made no great strides in this field because their jails' most frequent occupants, aborigines, were unused to creature comforts and, provided with the luxury of food and beds, might get a distorted notion of punishment. In the last analysis, Fields, perhaps through municipal pride, thought that Philadelphia's jails stood up with the best. His face would become animated as he recalled the gentility of his keepers, the thick bean soup, and the scrubbed burlap racks. "When you get right down to it, there's nothing like Philadelphia," he would say, with a Rotary Club ring in his voice.
The principal reason for his incarcerations was gallantry. Fields would steer a girl into an inexpensive saloon, and when some friendly client gave her a harmless pinch, he would swing. The proprietors of saloons tend to favor their steady patrons, and Fields came off badly in the arraignments. He was thus jailed in London, and bailed out shortly. A similar case in Australia landed him in jail. "I was defending a dame whose virtue was impugned," went Fields' version as reported in an American newspaper, "and I may have been a little hasty." He was jailed in Germany for throwing what he described as "an overripe bockwurst" on the floor of a cafe. They locked him up in London for socking a bobby. "He pushed me into the gutter," said Fields, without further explanation. He had an inflexible feeling for fair play, no doubt because of the unfair drubbings he had collected along the route. It was impossible for him to watch a fight without getting into it. In Paris, a French acrobat of his acquaintance, a man who worked with small, quiet props, was set upon, for reasons unknown to Fields, by three gendarmes, an alignment that struck Fields as thoughtless. Without making inquiries, he pitched into the scrap; he knocked out two of the gendarmes and, with the acrobat, assisted the third over the railing of a sub
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