There are ex-prisoners, thousands of them, who put off the pursuit of crime the moment a matured judgment envisaged crime to them as at once degenerate, and, in the end, futile, in so far as winning happiness out of life is concerned; but such never engage at mud-slinging following upon their paroles from prison. Like all of their prison comrades, they had their ups and downs in confinement, since a prison is, or should be, a place advisedly planned to disabuse the minds of its charges of the sporting merry-go-round idea of existence for full-grown males. But since they were set to pull up and win out on their merits, rather than pull down and practically sneak out of prison, spite of demerits therein piled against them, they do not cross educative measures in prison, and they do not take from prison any bitter pills to peddle. Much has been alleged by carping, ego-centric ex-felons, about prison "hell holes," all but a sprinkling of which has been either absolutely spurious at base, or grossly magnified purposely in order to make it marketable news for print. As a matter of fact, the worst prison régime in the United States will help a prisoner who seeks help, and the best won't reach querulous crooks obsessed with the idea of taking falls out of law and order. What is more, the great bulk of America's correctional plants do not run to overdone restrictions, but to underdone discipline, using the word "discipline" in the broad to embrace every educative process. Commonwealths do not concur as to the scope of measures of reform to be employed in their houses of correction. Some fondle the last fad in overweening desire to make use of saving methods. Others fight shy of a too large contention, and tools edged in reverse of the sum of human experience. Too often the blessed medial line is obliterated in the impossible scramble for simple solution of a complex problem; but nowhere in America is to be found the seething prison sink of iniquity which the perjured pens of mercenary ex-prisoners paint. Furthermore, laymen who encourage libel by ex-lawbreakers, are blamably ignorant, or worse. Faults there be, plenty of them, about equal as between the positive and negative; faults for which ex-prisoners of the Macdonwald stripe are primarily responsible in very appreciable degree--were all of basic truth fully brought out.