In all those months, more than six, for my fine had to be worked out, or rather idled out, no one came to me to comfort or explain. For more than six months I was with thugs, tramps, thieves and vermin. I was a criminal immigrant, a component element of the new immigration problem. I recall all this now in no spirit of vengeance; as far as my memory is concerned, I have purged it of all hate. I recall my experience because those same conditions exist to-day in more aggravated form, while multitudes of ignorant, innocent men suffer and die in our jails and penitentiaries. Since then I have visited most of the county jails, prisons and penitentiaries in which immigrants are likely to be found. Intelligent and humane wardens, of whom there are a few, have told me that more than half the alien prisoners are suffering innocently, from transgressing laws of which they were ignorant, and that their punishment is too often much more severe than necessary. The following narration of several incidents which recently came under my observation will be pardoned, I hope, when their full import is seen. Not long ago I went to lecture in a Kansas town,--one of those irreproachable communities in which it is good to bring up children because of the moral atmosphere. The town has a New England conscience with a Kansas attachment. It boasts of having been a station in the underground railway, and it maintains a most uncompromising attitude toward certain social delinquencies, especially the sale of liquor. Upon my arrival I was cordially received by a committee, and one of its members told me that the jail was full of criminal foreigners--Greeks. What crimes they had committed he did not know. Recalling my own experience, I made inquiries and found that six Greeks were in the county jail. They had been arrested in September (it was now March) charged with the heinous crime of having gone to the unregenerate State of Nebraska, where they purchased a barrel of beer which they drank on the Sabbath day in their camp by the railroad. Possibly these Greeks were just ignorant foreigners and now harbor no sense of injustice suffered; possibly they still think this country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They may even be ready to obey its laws and reverence its institutions. I do not know how they feel, but I do know this: those Greeks were kept in prison for breaking a law of which they were ignorant, and even if they were aware of its existence and broke it knowingly, the punishment did not fit the crime. They were kept as criminals and regarded as criminals; they were unvisited and uncomforted; and they were incarcerated at a time when their country called for her native sons to do battle against the Turk.