________________
FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
blood. You may place the offering in an electric chair ; yet, it is human sacrifice.
Η At the last moment, a very singular case came to my notice. Being of a different type, I must record it.
In this casc also, the crime is murder, committed by a young man who was sentenced for the offence to transportation for life. The victim was a religious mendicant. The judge had no doubt about the guilt of the accused; but he generously thought that it was a case in which justice might be tempered with mercy, hecause the crime was committed under grave provocation. The nature of the provocation makes the case interesting.
The culprit belongs to the class of wageearners. Having failed to find any employment in his home town, he went to distant parts in quest of it. But in these days of wide-spread unemployment, one place is as bad as another. Consequently, the young man (he was rather a boy, bcing still in his 'teens) wandered from place to place, becoming, like others without number, a sort of vagrant. In course of his peregrinations in search of employment, not to be found anywhere, he happened to pick up acquaintance with the mendicant.
It is a peculiarity of Indian society that, while those willing to perform productive labour for their daily bread starve in hundreds of thousands,
230
