But you are not a citizen, in the first place; your civic rights are gone for good, and instead of your innocence being assumed till your guilt is proved, it is the other way about. Your friend the detective is prepared, for one, to swear that to the "best of his knowledge and belief," you are the culprit; and there is commonly a number of other easy swearers hanging about the court room to support him. You have no friends; on the contrary, every eye you meet is hostile. You have no money to hire a lawyer, for that five dollars had gone before you had mustered courage to ask for the job that got you into this trouble. And above all, your spirit is cowed and prostrate from years in prison; you have known the long, sterile bitterness of penal servitude, and you have no stomach for a fight. No, you will not fight--you cannot. You will stand up in the dock and confess to something you never did, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Your friend the detective whispers to the judge--"He's an incorrigible--he ought to get the limit!" And His Honor gives you ten years. It is less than a week since you put off stripes, and went out into the world resolved to make good. If you outlive your undeserved sentence, will you ever resolve to make good again? Can such things be? Indeed they can, and they are. There is poor C. in Atlanta now, the victim of such a deal; and S., and H., and many more. C., indeed, told me, and I believe him, that he never committed any crime at all, other than to get drunk and to sleep out on the road; he was apprehended for vagrancy, then charged with a post-office robbery in another state (which he had never visited), advised by the detective who "took an interest" in him to confess, upon the promise of being let off with a light sentence; he got the limit, and will wear out his youth in jail, while the detective is complimented for his efficiency. The Government is extravagant. What is the use of spending money on a shoddy suit of clothes for each one of thousands of convicts every year, and giving each of them a five dollar bill, with the certainty that, in a large majority of cases, they will be back in their cells in a few days or weeks, or months? Look up, if you please, the statistics as to the number of convicts who are second or third offenders. Nay, the Government is itself the prime and most effective cause of their getting back, since it is government spies that provide the evidence that sends them up.