If there is one thing a man needs most at such a time it is self-confidence. Its absence marks the weakling and is almost a sure precursor of his certain return to old habits of thought with their accompanying results. Self-confidence rests upon a self-recognition of ability, and this in turn is the outgrowth of experience which has been productive of pre-designed results. If in his prison experience he has been taught that results—all results—come through intelligent, systematic application and has learned to concentrate his efforts and apply himself and thus to realize them, he would be a strange anomaly if he lacked confidence in himself. This is education expressed in its highest term, acquired under that master preceptor—experience. To the man imbued with this spirit, society’s attitude toward him he feels is immaterial, not that he vicariously courts its hostility, but he is possessed of the sublime assurance that his character-force will carry him through. Accompanying this attitude and as vital to it for him as the sunshine to the rose, is to make of the past a dead and, so far as is possible, a forgotten existence. This I know is contrary to the theory of the value of its lessons, but the man who, like Sinbad, burdens himself with “an old man of the sea,” and thus accepts a self-imposed handicap, possesses but little of the initiative in his character. The new going out, whom I insist upon holding in view, ought to be a new spirit incarnate in a rebuilt body, born over a second time into a new life, has nothing in common with the deal self buried in the past. If he is not such, he ought not to be released. Why then embalm it in memory and forever travel in the company of a mummy! The funeral urn never pampered to anything but a sickly, morbid sentiment. A constant reviewing of failure is no inspiration to succeed. The most sanguine temperament falls a helpless victim before ravishing regret, and the man or woman, ex-prisoner, allowed to re-enter society unfortified by the philosophical truth that the past must have culminated in the present to make possible a happier, better, greater future, has been badly instructed in the ways of Providence—ever a witness to the wisdom and mercy that rejoiceth more over the lost sheep that is found than over the “Ninety and Nine.”