The Governor suggests that white men suffer under this system, and there have been recent cases where vagrant Whites were sold on the auction block for a period of months. It might perhaps be argued that the South is always more stern in its judicial punishments than the North, inasmuch as five years on a convict farm in Mississippi is worse than being decently hanged in Massachusetts. The modern and humane methods of reform, of separating the youthful first-term man from the others, of specially treating juvenile crime, are little known in the South. When a twelve-year-old black boy is sent to the chain gang by a white judge, the community suffers. With regard to all those penal institutions one might share the feelings of the good Northern lady, when told that her grandson had been sentenced to the penitentiary for ten years: "What did they do that for? why, he won't be contented there three weeks!" This sympathy with the criminal the governors of the Southern states appear to feel, as is shown by some astonishing statistics. When Governor Vardaman went out of office January 1, 1908, he pardoned 8 white men and 18 Negroes, most of them convicted of murder or manslaughter, and 11 of them life men. A Memphis paper has tabulated the state pardons for a period of twelve months, and if the results are accurate, they show 1 in Wisconsin, 22 in Massachusetts, 81 in Georgia, 168 in Alabama, and over 400 in Arkansas. Just how the Negroes get sufficient political influence to secure pardons is one of the serious questions in Southern jurisprudence. For these lavish pardons the Whites are wholly responsible, for from them spring all the governors and pardoning boards.