"Only those who have been face to face with the conditions of prison life, who know its revolting influences, who have daily breathed its debasing atmosphere, who have felt its contaminating touch, to whom has come the ever deepening sense of social degradation and of the repellent stigma placed indelibly upon them by their prison term can realize what the League means. They whose quickened consciences have scourged them unto the wish and the will to retrieve the sinful past, only to be hurled back into deeper disheartenment and desperation by the popular prejudice which questions their ability and almost denies them the rights to restoration, can fully appreciate the moral uplifting and incentive which this League gives. No words can express the tortures of the first awful days in prison. The isolation, the remorse, the heart-hardening power of stern discipline which regulates diet and toil, waking and sleeping and which sharply limits free-will and free-act; the dread consciousness that you are henceforth to be classed among social outcasts and forever mistrusted and distrusted are all part of an unspeakable whole. The association with the multitude of like conditioned men whose lengthened terms of confinement, and whose repeated convictions perhaps have given them a fixed sense of indifference to what happens to themselves and what they bring to pass upon others, and from whose forbidding experience you learn the awful truth of the fate which confronts you as a convicted man, and from which they insist there is no sure escape, however sincere and earnest the purpose and the striving, soon makes most prisoners hopeless, and many of them heartless. Is it any wonder? "Such was the atmosphere and such the invariable impression and effect of prison life when I was justly condemned and confined. I found men all about me longing for a fair new chance to live aright, but impregnated with the doctrine that there was now no hope for them to do so. There were men of all types and all classes of social condition. Men serving their first term and others serving their second, third--or fourth--who in the confidence and candor of our mutual misery and degradation often told me (for we do communicate readily in prison, you know) that their supreme desire was for a return to decent citizenship, that they wanted to be 'straight' but that there was no chance for them to be so for _no one would trust them_.