In contrast to some quoted comes the story of a young man who was welcomed to the same Home in Illinois after a term in Joliet. He sat rather silent at the dinner table where the newcomers had gathered around the white cloth covered with its pretty table ware and substantial fare. His companions thought he was dispirited and afterwards finding him alone in a corner of one of the parlors, one of the older inmates of the Home asked him what was the matter. "Had he had bad news?" "Oh no," he answered, "it is not that. It is this Home. Just think of the contrast! When I fell and was sent to prison I thought I had forever made myself an outcast. For years I have sat in a cell, dressed in the stripes; I have drunk my coffee and water from a tin cup and eaten my food from a tin plate. When I sat down at that table to-night, I was reminded of home and of the past and I seemed to see the possibility of some day regaining what I had lost." He was not a poor stray of the city streets but the son of a Christian home. His father was an Episcopal clergyman and his environment had been one of comfort and refinement until he had yielded to evil and started on a downward course. One of those whose return to rectitude I watched with deep interest had been a professor of mathematics. Another came from a family with whom I came in touch through correspondence, and found them honorable members of one of the courts of Europe, and many represent homes in this country very far removed from the ignorance and neglect of the slums. It should also be remembered that there is in many of our prisons a large foreign element of the illiterate, ignorant and helpless who have drifted to our country and easily joined the ranks of the lawless if indeed they have not belonged to them in their own native land. Some of these however are in prison more through ignorance than criminal intent. When we come to inquire into the cause of imprisonment, we are constantly impressed with one fact, which cannot be denied, that the curse of drunkenness has proved directly or indirectly the ruin of between eighty and ninety per cent. of all those in prison. Many a blow has been struck, many a deed committed, many a robbery perpetrated by those so under the influence of this evil spirit that when they have come to their senses in the prison cell they have asked, "Where am I, what have I done?" and have literally had no memory of the deed that brought them there. It would not of course be in accordance with common sense or justice to say that they were therefore not guilty. They are guilty; they do deserve punishment but have we not the right to believe that, if delivered from this evil habit, they might be found to be trustworthy and true-hearted men?