It is a singular coincidence that this very Legislature, whose lower house has passed this bill to punish Christian teachers for allowing their own children to recite with colored children in the class-room by putting them into the chain-gang, is by a committee investigating the State penitentiary system, pronounced by competent prison reformers to be “perhaps the vilest on earth.” There are some good people in Georgia who want to see the barbarous system exposed and abolished. On the other hand, the supporters of the system are numerous and influential. The Georgia papers do not have much to say about this subject, and probably for the same reason that Russia don’t want the civilized world to know about what is going on in Siberia. The people are afraid to have their deeds of darkness brought to the light, but they are not all silent. An Atlanta correspondent of the _New York World_, writing under date of July 22d, describes the system as follows: “The convicts of Georgia, numbering about sixteen hundred, the negroes largely predominating over the whites, are confined in no regular penitentiary. They are worked under State direction and control, but are divided into three companies, known as “Penitentiary Company No. 1,” etc. These companies take all the convicts under a twenty years’ lease, the good, bad and indifferent. The Lease Act originally prescribed certain work that these convicts should do, the intention being to so regulate their employment as to prevent them from being brought into competition with free labor. Now, however, there is no class of work that the convicts are not called upon to do. They work on railroads and in coal mines; they cut pine timber for the saw mills; they are employed about the mills in those places where skilled workmen are generally employed; they make brick; they operate iron furnaces; they constitute the labor in various manufactories; they work upon plantations, and in every possible way they compete in every industry with free labor.