But at least there is a striving to make things better. Society no longer willingly tortures its failures. It controls, punishes, but does not hate them. There are no beatings, no tortures, no close-cropped heads, even, for the convict may grow his hair as he chooses. Every man who knows no trade is taught one. There is a feeling of moral responsibility to the criminal, and a desire at least to make him NO WORSE. The prisoners are divided into two classes: those whose faces and skulls tell of evil birth and predestined failure, and those who are simply like others--average men, victims of chance, of temptation, of ability ill-balanced, of ignorance, of drink, or even of accident. In one great room the convicts are weaving--working at hand looms. The work is desperately hard. Both hands and both feet are going constantly. Human power is used, that the greatest amount of labor and least competition with the outside working world may be simultaneously achieved. At one loom sits a poor creature, a dismal human failure. His forehead is half an inch high and a bony ridge-telling of unfortunate prenatal influence--runs high along the top of his head. His small eyes are close together. His exaggerated chin protrudes; only a cunning look directed now and then toward the watchful warden tells that any thinking goes on in that miserable being. His best place, perhaps, is there. He is protected against himself, and society has no other way of taking care of him. Near him sits a young boy in his teens. His face is intelligent; he is not a born criminal. He is above the average in intelligence, and in him there are all possibilities of success and usefulness. A boyish piece of criminal foolishness brought him there--and he must now spend years degenerating into real criminality under the influences around him. There are the two extreme samples of humanity in that cage which we build to protect ourselves against ourselves. It is a dismal garden set apart for human weeds and in it many a good plant is hopelessly driven into the weed class. Of the men in that prison may truly be said what a great student of plant life--Luther Burbank-- says of the poor weeds that we despise among plants: There is not one weed or flower, wild or domesticated, which will not, sooner or later, respond liberally to good cultivation and persistent selection. * * * Weeds are weeds because they are jostled, crowded, cropped and trampled upon, scorched by fierce heat, starved, or, perhaps, suffering with cold, wet feet, tormented by insect pests or lack of nourishing food and sunshine. Most of them have no opportunity for blossoming out in luxurious beauty and abundance. * * * When a plant once wakes up to the new influences brought to bear upon it the road is opened for endless improvement in all directions. More pitiable than any weeds in a garden and more worthy of sympathy are those poor human weeds in the great prison.