I affirm, however, that justice--which is intelligent mercy--is required nowhere so urgently as with convicts; that any punishment which aims at more than restraining convicts from practises calculated to injure their own best interests, is a crime; and that cruelty to persons imprisoned and helpless, be the plea in extenuation of it what it may, is damnable and unpardonable wickedness. Meanwhile, there is not and has never been in the United States a jail in which revengeful, malicious and unjustifiable punishments have not been inflicted, and in which cruelty does not stain the record of each year and day. There have appeared lately in the newspapers stories of enormities perpetrated in Russian prisons. Terrible barbarians, those Russians! Yet, barring one feature of them only, they can be paralleled by what is currently done in prisons here. This one feature, is the absence in the Russian infernos of all hypocritical protestations to the public of humane treatment and of aversion from severities. The Russian cannot do more than beat, torture and kill his prisoners; but we do the same. It is done at Blackwell's Island, at Sing Sing, at Auburn, at Jefferson City, at Leavenworth (until the other day at least), in San Quentin, and countless others, including my own Atlanta: only, there, the policy of suppression of news and promulgation of falsehood is perhaps carried to a more nearly perfect extreme than in most other prisons. A few years ago, but under the present régimen at Atlanta, the workers in the stone shed there were pursuing their occupation in the torrid heat of a summer day, when one of them, a young man named Ed Richmond, asked the guard on duty for leave to retire for a few moments. Such requests must of course often be made. But Richmond was a man who had not been lucky enough to win the favor of the higher officials in the prison, and this was known to the guards, who felt that they might with impunity treat him harshly. Richmond had been a good deal abused, and his mind had become somewhat unbalanced; he would sometimes talk incoherently and act oddly. It had been noticed that the stone shed guard "had it in for Ed," as the prisoners say; but nothing very serious was looked for.