Naturally there is quite a bond of union among these League men and it exists not between those in the one prison alone, but is a link of prayer and fellowship, and sometimes almost produces healthy rivalry between prison and prison as each Post wishes to keep the best record. The thought that has made this League a strong foundation for the work and that has proved the most rousing inspiration to the men is that the work is not ours but theirs. No philanthropist, preacher or teacher in the world can reform these men. An influence from without may prove very helpful but it is from within that the true reform movement must start. The whole key of this great question, the real solution of the problem lies within the prisons. It rests with the men themselves. We can bring them hope, can help them with our sympathy, can stimulate their ambition and effort, but they must "work out their own salvation." In the League they are made to realize this very keenly; the responsibility is rolled back upon their own shoulders. They cease to think that people must pick them out from their difficulties or that some turn of fortune's wheel must come to place them in happier circumstances, before they can become truly honest and upright. They realize that they must fight their own battle,--commence to rebuild their character, wresting from adverse circumstances every good lesson and using every chance they can gain to raise themselves from the pit into which they have fallen. Of course we lay the greatest stress on the need of Divine help. We know from repeated experiences that the "boys" must be transformed in heart and nature by the spirit of God if they are to be truly successful, but we believe that God helps the man whom He sees willing and anxious to help himself. Nowhere in the Bible do we find that people can drift lazily into the kingdom of heaven. Christian life must be an earnest warfare of watchful struggle in which every faculty of the man is sincerely engaged. Since the starting of the League we have enrolled nearly fourteen thousand men within prison walls. We have found their interest in the work intense, and as news of it has spread from prison to prison even before our coming to them, the "boys" have learned to look upon it as their special work and have longingly waited to welcome that which they have come to feel will mean the dawning of a new hope for the future. To try and convey to you something of this feeling of possession on the part of the men that have prepared our way in prison after prison, I turn back to an old diary of mine and quote from its pages the notes on the opening of our work at Dannemora--November 22d, 1896.