Читать книгу The New York Tombs Inside and Out!. Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison онлайн

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Another college graduate whom I have known, and who had a national reputation for crookedness, was born in western New York. At his father’s death he inherited $600,000. After he had graduated from Columbia Law School, he went West and became a land and grain speculator. He afterwards opened a bank and was made president. Then he was elected mayor of the city and state senator; he ran for Congress, but was defeated. He was an expert gambler, and he told me that he more than once lost $40,000 in one night, in the Tenderloin. Having been a banker himself for several years, he knew how to “work” banks for all they are worth by the use of forged checks. He was arrested five or six times, but only convicted twice, and was then able to cheat the prison by a technicality.

No person is so much exposed to crime as the mental and industrial illiterate, and it will always be so till the end of time. But education that does not elevate, purify and generate high ideas in man is nothing short of a curse to the individual. Furthermore, the educated crook can do vastly more harm in the world than the ignorant crook, and is much more dangerous when at large. It does not necessarily follow, therefore, that the more educated the man is the better the citizen, nor that he is less liable to crime. The fact is well admitted that in nearly all the northern and western cities the prison inmates are able to read and write, and scores are classed as really educated. Among the young men that go to Elmira Reformatory only six to nine per cent. are classified as illiterate, and the number of illiterates admitted to Sing Sing is said to be nine per cent., a very small proportion when we think of the large number of persons who are sent there.