Return to Home & Friends Speech – Moses Harman, 12/1906

Republished from our predecessor publication Lucifer the Light Bearer

Tonight I feel much as I suppose a returning soldier feels who, while in the discharge of his duty as picket
or advance guard of the “corps of observation,” has been captured, carried into captivity, and there suffered
the abuses, the privations, the indignities, and the tortures incident to prison life in an enemy’s country,
and who, by some turn of affairs, has succeeded in making his escape to freedom and friends once more.
The parallel is not perfect, I know, but it will serve passably well to illustrate how I feel standing before this
audience, all of whom seem to welcome me home again from my ten months’ imprisonment at the instigation
of the cohorts of reaction—the champions and defenders of medieval superstition, medieval ignorance,
medieval supernaturalism, medieval dominance of thought and action by what was formerly known as the
“Holy Inquisition,” that for a thousand years imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned those who demanded
and asserted their right to think and act for themselves in matters of religion and morality. The battle for
freedom of thought and of non-invasive action in matters of religious beliefs and religious worship has
been mainly won—not wholly won, as witness the late trial of Dr. Crapsey for heresy, and many others
that might be named—but the conflict for freedom of thought and of non-invasive action in matters of
morality is still on, still waged by the enemies of equal rights for all and special privileges for none, still
waged with a virulence almost unknown in any previous age of the world. Under the specious, misleading
names of “obscenity” and “free love,” the modern postal inquisition seems to have undertaken the task
of suppressing freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press on the most important
of all subjects of human investigation—that pertaining to the improvement of the race through a better
knowledge of sexology, a better knowledge of eugenics, of prenatal influences, a better knowledge of
what is required to practicalize the greatest of all human rights: the right to be born well, if born at all.
But I am not here to make a speech, or to try to make a speech, tonight. I promised the good friends
who have put me on the program, without my asking it, for this evening, to be very brief and to make
my talk relate mainly to my prison experiences. As a starter, as a sort of text for what I propose to say,
I will read a few verses written many years ago by William Ernest Henley:

“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head, though bloody, is unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll;
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

While this little poem has been a source of incalculable consolation to me during my four incarcerations in
government Bastilles, I do not altogether agree with the writer thereof. His words do not altogether fit me.
Let us analyze these verses a little. First: “Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the pit from pole to
pole.” I did not live in darkness, either mental or literal, while in prison. Always I felt that “stone walls do
not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” I was not in a dungeon, either literally or figuratively, during all
my prison experiences. I was not put into what is called the dark hole, though more than once seriously
threatened therewith. [Here there is a break in the manuscript where my father told of several instances in
which the punishment was threatened. The first occurred on entering the prison at Joliet. He did not want
to be vaccinated, as he believed it would injure his health. He was roughly told by the surgeon that “We
have a place up on the hill for just such fellows as you,” referring to the prison graveyard. He was threatened
with the dark cell if he did not yield, and was actually vaccinated by force. He was put to work breaking stone,
unsheltered from sun and storm, and required to work all day, though physically not strong enough for such
labor. I shall never forget his hands when I saw him after he had worked at the stone pile for about a month.
They were cracked and calloused, and sore, and so thin they looked but skin and bone. He was brought in
from the stone pile to talk with us, and his hands trembled from weakness and weariness. He told me he
really believed they meant that he should die there, and he confessed to a very strong disinclination to die
in prison. There was no thought of surrender, although we had the best of reason to believe that he would
have been released on his promise to discontinue the publication of Lucifer. At home in Chicago I have
some of the stones which he was breaking and which he gave me that day. He would not have objected
to doing a moderate amount of hard labor, for he loved outdoor work and had done more or less of it all his
life. But to take a frail man of seventy-four years of age from a desk and compel him to work long hours
at the rock pile certainly savored strongly of some motive other than a mere desire to have the work done.

When I wrote to my brother of the treatment our father was receiving, he immediately set political wheels
in motion, which resulted in a transfer to the prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. There they saw he was unfit
for hard work, and he was allowed to do anything or nothing as he chose, with the result that he came out
of the Leavenworth prison in better health than when he went from Joliet. —L. H.] “Wrath and tears.” There
were quite enough exhibitions of wrath on the part of the guards at Joliet, and some show of tears in Joliet
—as when my daughter and other friends came to see me. I confess to shedding unmanly tears, caused,
as I think, mainly by the reason that, judging from the treatment I was getting, there seemed a settled
determination that I should never get out of that place alive, and therefore I would never see my friends and
home again. In the language of one of my cellmates, they thought I “knew too much.” I felt as a rat probably
feels that is caught in a steel wire trap and then drowned in a tub of water. He is not allowed even to squeal.
The rule is that nothing is allowed to go out from the prison without inspection by the censor, and if anything
criticizing the management is written, the letter is not allowed to pass. My first two letters to my daughter
were suppressed and no reason given for such suppression. And when a visitor comes to see the prisoner,
the conversation must all be in the presence of a guard, and presumably in the hearing of the guard. Hence
my tears. “And yet the menace of the years / Finds and shall find me unafraid.” I think this fits me. Sixteen
years ago last April, Cassius G. Foster of the Kansas Federal Court gave me the menace, the threat, of five
years in the penitentiary. Three times since that Foster sentence I have been sentenced to a year in the
penitentiary by Federal judges, and yet, so far as I know, none of these sentences frightened me. These
menaces of years in prison found me unafraid. How it will be in the future I do not know.

If we are to judge by the reports in the papers, the New York Vice Society, with its chief apostle, Anthony
Comstock, has lately been endorsed more emphatically by the Federal Government than ever before.
Hence the modern Inquisition of Morals will probably “thank God and take courage,” and be more strenuous
than ever in putting moralistic heretics behind prison bars. Whether the menace of more years in the
government Bastille will find me unafraid is yet to be seen. “Looms but the horror of the shade.” In this
line I do not agree with Poet Henley. To me there is no “horror of the shade.” If death means annihilation
of the conscious individual life, then there is nothing horrible about it. Shakespeare says, “He that is
robbed and knows not of his loss is not robbed at all.” If I am to be robbed of conscious life at death,
I shall certainly not know of my loss, and therefore will not be robbed at all. I do not pretend to know
that continued conscious existence is a fact in nature, but I have an impression, founded largely upon
well-known facts, that it is a fact in nature. Therefore I am inclined, when viewing the near prospect
of death, to say with Anne Letitia Barbauld:

“Life, I know not what thou art,
But this I know, that we must part.
But when or how or where we met,
I own to me’s a secret yet.

Life! We have been long together
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather.
’Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps ’twill cost a sigh, a tear.

Then steal away, give little warning;
Take thine own time;
Say not Good night, but in some brighter clime
Bid me Good morning!”