However ample the provision be which men may make to inflict suffering upon other men, however well and successfully they may apply the provision, they cannot alter men's nature. That will assert itself under all circumstances. The fact that a man is restrained of his liberty by no means alters his nature. The things he liked or disliked when he was at liberty he will like or dislike when a prisoner, and he is not long in finding that "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" is just as certainly true of the seed he plants in inclosed ground as it is of what he scatters in the open field. CHAPTER XLVI. IF PAIN IS NOT AN EVIL, IT CERTAINLY IS A VERY GOOD IMITATION. The world inside of the walls has a public opinion of its own, and it is at least quite as often just as the public opinion whose sphere is not circumscribed by stone walls and iron bars. The man who accepts the situation, resolved to get his hand as easily as possible out of the tiger's mouth, soon becomes known as a sensible fellow, willing to give others no trouble and anxious to have no trouble given him. Such a man will rarely be molested. Patient, uncomplaining endurance always excites pity and sympathy. The most ignorant, the most brutal warder will scarcely oppress the man who goes quietly and unresistingly along the thorny road stretched out before him; who, not taking the thorns for roses, is not disappointed at finding few roses among the thorns. Those, however, who are determined to see the rough side of prison life may easily do so; the appliances are there and they will certainly be accommodated. An English prison is a vast machine in which a man counts for just nothing at all. He is to the establishment what a bale of merchandise is to a merchant's warehouse. The prison does not look upon him as a man at all. He is merely an object which must move in a certain rut and occupy a certain niche provided for it. There is no room for the smallest sentiment. The vast machine of which he is an item keeps undisturbed upon its course. Move with it, and all is well. Resist, and you will be crushed as inevitably as the man who plants himself on the railroad track when the express is coming. Without passion, without prejudice, but also without pity and without remorse, the machine crushes and passes on. The dead man is carried to his grave and in ten minutes is as much forgotten as though he had never existed. The plank bed, the crank, the bread-and-water diet, unauthorized but none the less effectual clubbing at the hands of warders, the cold in the punishment cells penetrating to the very marrow of the bones, weakness, sickness and unpitied death are the certain portion of the rebel.