imagination the whole ugly, sluggish, vicious truth.

Then, only yesterday, an amiable, naive and impressionable young gentleman
underwent a week of amateur convictship in one of our jails, and came
forth tremulous with indignation and astonishment; though, obviously and
inevitably, he did not have to endure the one thing which, more than
hardship or torture, is the main evil of penal imprisonment--the feeling
of helplessness and outrage in the presence of a despotic and unrighteous
power, from which there is no appeal or escape. The convict has no rights,
no friends, and no future; the amateur may walk out whenever he pleases,
and will be received by an admiring family and friends, and extolled by
public opinion as a reformer who suffered martyrdom in the cause. Yet what
he has experienced and learned falls as far short of what convicts endure,
as the emotions of a theater-goer at a problem play (with a tango supper
awaiting him in a neighboring restaurant) fall short of the long-drawn
misery and humiliation of those who undergo in actuality what the play
pretended.

Meanwhile, scores of animated humanitarians, penologists, criminologists,
theorists and idealists have consulted, resolved, recommended, and
agitated, striking hard but in the dark, and most of their blows going
wide. Commissioners and inspectors have appeared menacingly at prison
gates, loudly heralded, equipped with plenipotentiary powers; and the
gates have been thrown wide by smiling wardens and sympathetic
guards--tender hearted, big brained, gentle mannered people, their
mouths overflowing with honeyed words and bland assurances, their clubs
and steel bracelets snugly stowed away in unobtrusive pockets--who
have personally and assiduously conducted their honored visitors
through marble corridors, clean swept cells, spacious dining saloons,
sanctimonious chapels, studious libraries and sunny yards; and have