Much of the above conversation occurred at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the League, to which we were invited. It was essentially a novel experience. Here sat, in the warden’s office, and without the warden or any prison official present, a round dozen of convicts, gray-suited and thoroughly in earnest. They discussed prison conditions and prison problems with all the freedom of a board of managers, and with far greater knowledge of actual conditions. Prisoners know more about a prison than does the warden, the warden than does the superintendent of prisons, the superintendent of prisons than do the inspectors, and the inspectors than does the public. Therefore, if the best efforts and the best loyalty of the prisoners can be harnessed up to a reformatory programme of the square deal for both sides, the possibilities of the future loom far larger than have reformatory possibilities in the past. So Auburn Prison is pointing the way, by an almost revolutionary experiment, to large possibilities in inmate self-government in State prisons and reformatories. As I write these lines the newspapers bring a word of a similar Saturday afternoon passed in sports for the first time in the history of Sing Sing. Within the last week the State Reformatory of New Jersey, at Rahway, has adopted tentatively a modified form of inmate self-government. Great Meadow Prison, in New York State, which has been for several years the conspicuous honor prison of the eastern part of the country, marched its six hundred men down to the baseball game on July Fourth, a half-mile from the prison, under inmate overseers. Self-government, to the limit of its possibilities, is almost a fetish with Mr. Osborne. For many years he was President of the Board of Trustees of the George Junior Republic; there he became convinced that self-government is workable not only for youngsters but for older delinquents. In the old-line prison the ever-present dread of the traditional warden was an escape. His career was judged largely by his ability to suppress escapes and frequently by his ability to suppress public knowledge of the methods he used to keep order. Today the warden is judged able or poor partly by his ability to develop men out of his prisoners, men who on going out will make good. The entire theory of the old-line prison construction was based on the principle that any prisoner would escape if he could, and use desperate means of so doing. The bars and steel-work that you see everywhere in prisons throughout the country show how ingrained the theory has been. But up at Great Meadow, where the bulk of the prisoners roam unattended by guards at their work during the day, it is almost ridiculous to see them securely caged behind several strata of tool-proof steel at night.