To-day in the cells at the police court sits a young man with the ‘hunted eyes’; he has been brought from one of Her Majesty’s prisons by two warders, where he was serving a term of imprisonment. He had been charged at this court, and committed for trial and sentenced, but now he is brought back and charged with a more serious offence. He is only twenty-eight, intelligent, and a clever workman. His young wife, soon to be a mother, is unaware of this second and more serious charge. I know him, and know that he has served seven years in a convict prison, where he made the acquaintance of my burgling bookbinder. So I ask him how he spends his time in prison, and what work has been given him during that portion of the present sentence he has served. ‘Oakum-picking in my cell for the first month, and I sit and curse myself and everybody all the day long. I wonder I am not mad; perhaps I am,’ was the reply I got from him, and I wonder too. I ask for no maudlin sympathy for these men; I do not want them ‘coddled’ or patronized. I do not ask for the abolition of severe punishment in their case, but I do ask that their punishment shall be grounded on common-sense principles, and that humanity and science shall play some part in their treatment. I have visited but few prisons; from personal observation I know little of their inner working, but of men who have been released from prison I have a large experience, and for them I have some right to speak. I have made personal friends of them; I have worked and hoped, planned and schemed, for them. I have studied them, and I have suffered for them, and I know that the convict whose letter to the press I have quoted voices the cry of all intelligent criminals, and that they join with him in the plea, ‘Give us work--work for hand and mind; work--intelligent work--or our hearts will lose all hope. Work--interesting work--or our brains will lose the last remnant of reason.’