tired completely out. I rolled over on my back, and, with my face
looking up to the pile of dirt, eight hundred feet thick, that shut
out from me the light of day, I rested for awhile. I had done no
physical work for ten years. I was physically soft. To put me down in
the mines and set me to digging coal was wicked. It was murder. Down
in that dark pit how I suffered! There was no escape from it. There
was the medicine. I had to take it. I do not know, but it seems to me
that when a man is sent to that prison who has not been in the habit
of performing physical labor, he should not be put to work in the
mines until he becomes accustomed to manual labor. It would seem that
it would be nothing more than right to give him an easier task at
first and let him gradually become hardened to his work at coal
digging. Nothing of this kind is done. The young, the old, the middle-
aged are indiscriminately and unceremoniously thrust into the mine.
Down there are nearly five hundred prisoners. Among them are boys from
seventeen to twenty years of age, many of whom are in delicate health.
Here are to be found old men, in some cases sixty years of age. I do
not wish to be understood as casting any reflections upon the officers
of this institution. They cannot help these things. If Warden Smith
could avoid it there would not be a single man sent down to that
region of death. The mines are there and must be worked. Let this
blame fall where it belongs. I must say injustice to our common
humanity, that to work these two classes, the boys and old men, in
those coal mines is a burning shame and outrage. It is bad enough, as
the sequel will show, to put able-bodied, middle-aged men to work in
that pit. The great State of Kansas has opened those mines. Her
Legislature has decided to have them worked. It becomes the duty,
therefore, of the prison directors to work them as long as they are
instructed to do so, even if scores of human beings are maimed for
life or murdered outright each year. The blame cannot rest on the