When he returned to England, Bachelor was appointed to Dartmoor. While he was abroad he could only get at the Home Office by means of a correspondence. Now he would be able to pay personal visits to the high officials in Whitehall during his holidays. No man ever made himself a greater nuisance to a Department in the sacred cause of humanity than did Bachelor. But humanity is a mere unofficial generality with which Whitehall has nothing whatever to do. He bombarded permanent officials, and he obtained introductions to successive Home Secretaries with a view of effecting some amelioration in the condition of the convict. When, by his own personal influence with the prisoners at Dartmoor, he was successful in quelling the biggest and most elaborately organized mutiny known up to that time, he became no more of a _persona grata_ than he had been before the outbreak. Officially he was merely the gaol chaplain. It was not the business of the Department to discover that they were dealing, not only with a humanitarian, but with a man who had forgotten more criminology than all the outsiders who write so glibly on the subject in journals and magazines had ever known. I at once confess that Bachelor was not attracted to me at this dinner at Verrey’s by any qualities of my own. He understood that I was on the Press, and he always endeavoured to create an interest in his views among pressmen whom he met. For some time he had urged on the Home Office the necessity there existed for supplying prisoners with a newspaper. His theory, founded upon years of intelligent observation, was that under our prison system a man becomes either abnormally ingenious or abnormally bestial. And he held that nothing except literature could successfully divert and dissipate ideas which were likely to become obsessions; and that the most interesting literature would be news—very carefully edited, of course—of the outer world. American officials are not so hidebound as the home-made article; and the idea of my friend, neglected and contemned in England, was welcomed and adopted in the United States, where the principal penitentiaries now run their own newspapers.