Justice was known by the ancients to be blind; by ourselves is admitted blind; will be acclaimed blind by the tongues of our descendants. It is blind because it is depart- or rather compart-mental. The prosecutor, be he ancient Roman or Englishman of to-day, cannot gauge or control the _whole_ effect on the offender and on society of the process which he initiates. The Judge, be he Solon or Judge of the High Court, cannot know enough of the temperament and antecedents of a prisoner to adequately apportion a sentence which he cannot see being carried out. The prison official is tied to the terms of the sentence and the conditions of the system, for some system there must be. The Public, on the prisoner’s release, acts mechanically in its own defence against a marked man. All see only their own bits of the game. From this general blindness, it follows that punishment is almost always out of proportion. This is why it seemed to me worth while to make a picture of Blind Justice, and to hang it on the wall. There are some who believe that this picture will rapidly become out of date. I am not so sanguine. Short of our all becoming not only eager, but able, to see that which does not lie underneath our noses, I much fear that this picture will remain valid for some considerable time The conditions will change, but the spirit will remain—Justice is too naturally and inevitably blind. Is that any reason why we should not occasionally be reminded of the evil—one of the enduring, but perhaps diminishable, evils of human life? Even the administrators of this Justice might like now and then to glance at a picture of its blindness. One word about the cell scene. It has been called false and exaggerated. . . . Two brothers went to see this play. At the end of the cell scene the younger, who stammers, turned to his elder and said: “It’s n-not so—j-j—olly as all that!” Precisely! Prisoners do not commonly enjoy the relief of beating on their cell doors, though the incident is not unknown. But he who can project himself into the minds of others knows that prisoners, in closed cells, moping and brooding week after week, month after month, shut off from all real distraction, from all touch with the outer world and everything they care for, with the knowledge of years of imprisonment before them and of broken lives when they come out—knows that such prisoners, thousands of them, unseen by any eye, _reach a state of mind_ which would make them constantly fling themselves for relief on their cell doors, if it were not for fear. No, it is not so jolly as all that! The characteristics of all prison life, at all events in England, are silence and solitude, physical or spiritual; and this cell scene was selected to convey as nearly as the limitations of the stage permitted, these commonest characteristics of detention.