The actual result of this crowding of more or less confirmed vice into one concentrated aggregation, is simply to intensify the evil it was intended to remedy. The convict who enters a prison cell for the first time--perhaps as the result of some sudden and overpowering temptation--a man who at heart is no better and no worse than his neighbors, and who, if by any chance he had escaped conviction, would have finished his life as an average citizen, as a friend and advocate of the law--finds himself here in an entirely new environment. Self-respect is gone. The old motive for honesty is gone. He enters the new and stifling atmosphere of concentrated crime, and with it comes the feeling that the world is all against him. It is his first offence, but it is by no means likely to be his last. Every man he sees, save the grim rifle-carrying guard who growls and swears at him, is a convicted criminal. Every object that his eyes fall upon intensifies the lesson that he is henceforth to be counted among the enemies of his race. Every breath that he breathes reeks with the malaria of crime. He is now an enlisted soldier in a warfare against right and law and social order. He is in the devil's own training school. The seven other "spirits more wicked than himself" are all around him. Whatever prison rules may say, there are certain to be clandestine meetings, secret conferences, in which the novice is initiated into the higher degrees of the freemasonry of crime. Schemes of profitable law-breaking swarm in the teeming brains of these wearers of the stripes, to be turned into actual deeds in "the good time coming," when these apt pupils of the high school of depravity shall be free again to make war upon the peace and welfare of the world. Is it any wonder that this first offender comes out of prison a confirmed criminal, and that "the last state of that man is worse than the first"? If the same business sense were used in this matter which is ordinarily given to the management of great human concerns, we should soon find some way of improving upon this discouraging condition of affairs. No merchant in his senses would discharge a dishonest clerk for a term of ninety days with the distinct understanding that he was to spend his enforced vacation in the society of thieves and cutthroats, and at the end of the time be taken back again into his old place as though nothing had happened. The railroad president who should discharge a drunken engineer, and then after six months give him hold of his old throttle again, although it was in evidence that he had spent his retirement in a whiskey saloon, studying under competent tuition the latest methods of holding up trains, would be very apt to be bundled off at the next meeting of the board of directors to manage railroads from the inside of a lunatic asylum. Courts and judges and lawyers are about the only people on the outside that do business in that way.