“We do not say our plan is perfect,” said Superintendent Talkington, “nor do we make any great claims about our ability to reform a man during the short time he is here. But we do say this is the best manner yet devised for handling them. We take a man from the gutter, and at least make it possible for him to improve. We give him health, and direction enough to get him into some employment at which he can earn his living. Although we refuse to put forth any claims about how much good we do for the man, we at least know that we do not injure him. And that is more than can be said for any jail or prison. We aren’t running any school for crime here. We do know that. _We also know that we can make this institution self-supporting and a means of revenue for the State._ What more can you ask? “The wide-open policy of freedom, I believe, has been carried to the extreme here. Although the great majority of men can be handled and trusted in absolute freedom, there are, in a population of 700 men, some who can never be given liberty. There is need for not more than 50 cells. Any farm colony ought to have them even if the cells are never used. Even so, we are getting along very nicely without them, and it shows to what great extent this policy can be carried successfully. “We never had even punishment cells until a few days ago when four were completed. We aren’t going to have to use them much, either. Confinement on bread and water is the only form of punishment permitted in this colony--no flogging, no dungeons, no ball and chain, no stripes. “We have prisoners living down on the lower end of the farm working under a prisoner-foreman. We see them only when we are making the weekly round of inspection.” One could not help but feel, in discussion with Mr. Talkington, that one was listening to a practical man who is anything but the dreamer or idealist usually found advocating so revolutionary a plan as the one on which the superintendent is working. He made no claims to super-knowledge in the handling of men. He had no illusions about the matter. He knew the faults of the plan and he knew the virtues. When he undertook the present work, his only assets were his experience as a farmer and school teacher. “I feel,” said Mr. Talkington, “that your officials, before spending more than a million dollars on the old type of prison, should see this farm and the one at Guelph, Ont. I’m confident they would change their plans. This may be a new thing in this country, but it is not untried in the old. The most famous of the European farm colonies is the one at Witzwil, Switzerland. It has solved all the problems of handling men, it pays thousands of dollars annually into the treasury of the canton Berne and there has been no trouble experienced in competition with free labor. “The farm colony has come to America to stay, and I hope Detroit won’t take any action which will postpone for perhaps half a century an improvement they are entitled to now.”