This summer the difference is enormous and fundamental. For an hour or a little more on each week-day, and for four full hours on Sunday, the prisoners are turned out to recreation according to their bent. And coincidentally with this all-important change in the prison’s policy toward the inmates has come an all-important reduction in the number of prison guards needed to supervise the prisoners at their play. On the morning of the Fourth, for instance, an entertainment was given in the auditorium by a local theatrical company. Practically all the inmates--fourteen hundred--were present. Many of the guards sat in one little corner of the room, in the extreme rear. They had been invited by the Mutual Welfare League, the prisoners’ organization, to attend if they desired! In the afternoon there were four keepers in all in the yard, so I was informed. They were thoroughly inconspicuous. The “P. K.” (which is short for Principal Keeper) started the afternoon in uniform, but shortly changed to street clothes. “You’ll find him playing ball with the boys later today,” said one inmate to me. All the guarding at the several exits of the yard was done--apart from the few guards--by the “delegates” of the Mutual Welfare League. The Mutual Welfare League! To many prison officials, long in the service, the name undoubtedly has a very sentimental sound. I frankly confess that several of us in the little party invited by Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne to attend the League’s celebration of the Fourth of July were skeptical. We were afraid it might prove to be amateurish and mushy, even though we knew of the signal value of Mr. Osborne’s self-imposed incarceration at Auburn Prison last fall, as shown by the Nation-wide attention given to his subsequent story of the fearful and unnecessary monotony and desperation of prison life. But, as one of our party said on Sunday morning, after we had sat for several hours with the Executive Committee of the League: “I didn’t exactly come to scoff and remain to pray; but I did come with doubt, and I go away converted.” What is it, then, about this new freedom at Auburn Prison that has not only converted a cautious, conservative president of a board of reformatory managers in another State, but has led him within a week from his experience at Auburn to urge successfully the introduction of a similar league in his own institution? Two facts, principally, I think. In the first place, the Mutual Welfare League plan works. Secondly, there is a convincing air of sincerity, and even devotion, about it all.