This is not pleasant reading, yet the question with us tonight is not whether this criticism makes us as Americans pride-sore, but as to the truth of this friendly but stinging criticism. On our program this evening we have a distinguished gentleman, son of the eminent American founder of the international prison congress, who will testify that the English comments of Sir Evelyn are mild as compared with the American reality. Rome was not built in a day. As in Chicago you find still in immediate context the mansion and the hovel, we have, in our treatment of delinquents, in close juxtaposition the prison and the jail, the reformatory and the workhouse, children’s courts and lynch law, probation and short term sentences, the indeterminate sentence and industrial prison idleness, parole and definite sentences, prison hospitals for tuberculosis and jail pens for syphilis-infected tramps. Civic pride in great modern prisons exists side by side with civic indifference as to filthy lock-ups or town jails. At the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century--the century of hoped-for social justice--let us face frankly certain problems yet unsolved in the treatment of delinquents. Far from feeling that we have reached the thumb-twiddling stage of complacent satisfaction, let us see where our methods still break down. First, _the local and county jails_. Not stopping with the remark of Thomas Holmes at the international prison congress that “every jail I saw on the American trip ought to be wiped off the face of the earth,” and that nowhere in Europe do such conditions exist, we find Professor Charles R. Henderson as chairman of a special committee of the American Prison Association of Chicago in 1907, uttering a scathing arraignment of revolting and demoralizing jail conditions. We find Frederick H. Wines more recently in Maryland arraigning jail conditions in many parts of the country. We find Warren F. Spalding of Massachusetts writing in the Sage Foundation volumes on Correction and Prevention about the jail friendships that make of the novice a life long criminal, of the contamination of women prisoners, the herding of juvenile offenders with adults, the dearth of attention to physical conditions in jails, the deplorable lack of proper ventilation, the ravages of disease among jail inmates and the absence of that rigid vigilance without which the ordinary jail cannot be kept in a sanitary condition; overcrowding, night buckets, monotony, filth, poorly cooked or tainted food, unconvicted prisoners and convicted prisoners in unrestricted communication, the fee system, local inattention to the fundamental principles of penology. The case against the average jail seems proved. Has not the time come to make a general national campaign against this “school of crime?” Mr. F. G. Pettigrove of Massachusetts dissents from the above statements regarding jails as follows: