I owe my readers an apology for introducing this chapter, inasmuch as it does not deal chiefly with my own experiences, but with two extraordinary sentences recently given, and made public through the press; though it is fair to say that I know something of the friends in the one case and the victims in the other of the prisoners who received those sentences. I have seen nothing during my personal experiences to cause me any misgivings as to the administration of justice. I have not seen people punished for crimes they had not committed, but I have seen a large number of prisoners discharged about whose guilt there was no moral doubt. It stands to the credit of our penal system that it is much easier for a guilty man to escape than it is for an innocent man to be punished. This is a just and safe position. I would like also to say that among all the sentences that I have known imposed upon prisoners, there have been very few--indeed, scarcely any--that I have thought did not meet the justice of the case. I have, therefore, no sympathy with the organized outcries that are from time to time raised against our judges and magistrates and the police. Judges and magistrates are but human, and that they will err sometimes in their judgments is certain. We censure them sometimes because their sentences are too severe; we blame them sometimes because they have been too lenient; but it is always well to remember that judges and magistrates see and know more of the attendant circumstances of a case than the press and the public possibly can see or know. This knowledge, of course, cannot have any bearing on the question of guilt or innocence; but it can have, and ought to have, some effect upon the length of sentence imposed. Within limits, then, judges and magistrates must be allowed latitude with regard to degrees of sentence, for a cast-iron method allowing no latitude would entail a tremendous amount of injustice. Nine times out of ten, when a judge or magistrate errs in the imposition of sentence, he errs on the side of leniency, and it is right that it should be so. But an error on the side of mercy does not create a public sensation; and this speaks well for the public, for it is good to know that the community is better pleased to hear of leniency than of severity. Nevertheless, an error on the side of leniency is an error, and may be followed with results as disastrous as those that follow from an error on the side of severity; for while those results are not so quickly palpable, they may be more extensive. I want, then, in this chapter to select two sentences--one given by a judge, the other by a magistrate: the judge erring, in my opinion, on the side of severity; the magistrate erring, in my judgment, on the side of leniency. Neither of these sentences seems to have attracted public attention, though both are of recent date. Let me quote from a letter received on June 4, 1907: "DEAR SIR,